Has anyone had experience of Oticon speech rescue? Does it work pretty well? Thinking of asking audiologist to enable it on one side to see if it’s an improvement.
When it’s enabled can you toggle it off and on in the Oticon Companion app?
It depends on what you want from your hearing aids. Speech Rescue worked for me by making speech more prominent and understandable, especially in the difficult situations. But, I found that it made everything sound “unpleasant”. Nothing sounded like I thought it should, especially music. So, you should probably try it, but do it on both sides. He can set one of your four programs to have it on and another to have it off. Then you can choose in Oticon Companion yourself.
Big John
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@Volusiano has a lot of experience. I’m no expert but I would guess that it would not be beneficial for you because of your asymmetric loss. You don’t want it on your left ear and I would guess activating in your right ear would be odd, but feel free to try it.
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@MDB is right that your right hearing loss can probably use the help of Speech Rescue. But I would probably suggest that you have it enabled for both ears to make the experience more symmetrical, because it might be weird hearing the lowered sounds on one ear but not the other. You can lower the strength on the left ear so that it wouldn’t be too pronounced on the ear that you don’t need it as much. I would also suggest using the leftmost configuration (2.4) because it’ll be more in your audible range than the higher frequency configuration.
There’s no option to turn off SR on the fly with the app. What you can do is leave your default program alone, make 2 copies of it and in 1 copy, turn it on for both, and the other copy, turn it on for just the right side. Then you can now toggle between the 3 of them to see which one you like better. Then in your next visit to the HCP, just pick the best one and delete the other 2 to make room for other more permanent programs.
I personally find it sounding perfectly OK for music listening as well, but I guess everybody has their own opinion. The nice thing is that it gives you the option to leave the original high frequency amplification alone, so you can hear the real sound and only add the “lowered” sound on top of everything. And also it gives you the ability to adjust the strength of the lowered sound to be not very intrusive. Of course if you’re a DIY person, you can try and experiment with many things in many ways much more easily and quickly than having to work with an HCP through many visits. But that’s another topic of discussion altogether.
I personally have SR enables on ALL my programs, even the MyMusic program, and I don’t find it unpleasant and nothing sounds “inharmonious” to me. It might be intrusive at first for speech listening because the fricatives, especially the “s” and “sh” jump at you at first, but you have your strength volume adjustment to deal with that, and also over time, your brain accepts it as the new “normal” and it doesn’t bother you anymore. It really helps with speech, especially for the English language where the fricatives play a very important role.
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Thank you for the replies and suggestions. I will consider this when I next contact the Audiology department. Unfortunately the installation code for the NHS Oticon Engage does not add the Oticon Optim hearing aids that I have, so I can’t go down the DIY route.
My Speech Rescue only amplifies sound to 4500 htz, not sure why.
Below is chart for Speech Rescue. It shows clearly which part of the high frequency regions (the gray area, or the “source”) gets dissected into 3 sections and super-imposed onto the red “destination” region. And there are 10 different configurations to choose from to fit the destination region into the more audible area of your hearing loss. So it’s not like SR only amplifies sounds up to a certain specific frequency like 4.5 KHz, it does cover quite a range of high frequency region.
I think it’s to do with the high frequency bands being turned off which stops 5 and 6 K being amplified but could be wrong?
I consider my 5KHz and up frequencies as goner because I can’t hear them even with the highest available amplification of a 105 dB receivers. But yes, the beauty of SR is that you can have both the lowered sounds as well as the original amplification in the high end intact. So if you feel that you can hear the amplified high ends, then you should leave the High Frequency Band option to ON. With your heavy loss, though, I would make sure that you use the left most configuration 2.4 where there’s still a little bit of audibility left.
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I remember seeing it selected as 2.4 but don’t know what that means. Does that means I hear things at 2.4htz??
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It means that it moves sounds in the high frequency range (between 3.9 to 7 KHz) down to the mid frequency (1.6 to 2.4 KHz) range, which is where you have better audibility, so that you can hear those high frequency sounds better in your more audible range of hearing.
The 2.4 is just the name they give to that configuration that corresponds to the lower possible destination frequency range they can have, between 1.6 and 2.4 KHz.
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@Volusiano When configuring this, Genie suggests a default “based on the audiogram” – being fairly new to all this, how much would you go by this default?
Then, when it comes to fine-tuning, could you give a few pointers what to look for?
When it comes to Speech Rescue, I’ve seen Genie 2 suggest configuration defaults that’s way off base. For example, look at my own audiogram, my ski slope starts at 1 KHz and by the time it hits 2 KHz, my hearing loss is now in the -75 and -85 dB range → a severe loss. Yet Genie 2’s default configuration for me is the 4.0 configuration. That’s configuration #6 where the destination region is between 2.6 to 3.7 KHz, where my audibility is actually in the severe to profound loss now. I would MUCH rather be using configuration #1 (the 2.4 configuration) where the destination range is 1.6 to 2.4 KHz, where I still have better audibility in the moderate to severe range. I don’t see you post an audiogram so I can’t really suggest which configuration you should use, but I wouldn’t blindly follow the default configuration Genie 2 suggests for you without verifying to see if it makes sense first or not.
The only Fine Tuning pointer I can give you is not to touch the gain adjustment part of it unless you know what you’re doing. The only time I touch the Fine Tuning section is when I had bad whistling feedbacks initially. Then I’d go into Fine Tuning to decrease the gain a little bit where I suspected the feedback area was to see if it helps. Luckily I guessed the right area and it helped. But the other sections of the Fine Tuning like Sound Controls and Sudden Sound Stabilizer, go to town on those and experiment to see what you like the best from those settings, simply because they’re easy to put back to their default values if you stray too far and want to reset. But with the gain values, I guess you can reset as well if you stray too far, but then if you’ve done a bit of work on them, then all that work is harder to retrace to where you were because they’re not as “quantized” as the other stuff.
Thanks so much, that was really helpful! Is ‘Recalculate settings’ (with a mouse pointer pointing at the centre of two concentric circles) the reset you’re referring to? It doesn’t seem to change anything apart from the gain and MPO.
Regarding Speech Rescue, I managed to produce all sorts of sound effects from it, ranging from a metallic echo as if I’m standing in a large steel tunnel to every ‘s’ being pronounced with a lisp (including my own!) - it’s quite impressive. When I stick to the default settings, everything seems fine, but there isn’t much difference compared to having it turned off. I’ll need to do some more reading on this and also learn how to use the SPLogram properly.
That said, I’m really impressed by how much the Oticon Real1 hearing aids enhance my life. I never would have thought this was possible. I’m still experimenting with various settings, but even with the default options, they perform quite well. My hearing loss is probably neither extreme nor particularly complex, but without any solution, it’s definitely a burden.
Now that I see your audiogram, for your right ear, I would suggest that you use the leftmost configuration 2.4, because that’s where your audibility is better than your level of loss at 2 KHz and up. The 2.4 configuration has the destination range of between 1.6 to 2.4 KHz, right around where your ski slope drops down. That’s why if you stick to the default configuration (not sure what it is but very likely a much higher destination region), you don’t hear much difference.
That’s why I suggested earlier not to blindly follow Genie 2’s default recommended configuration because they tend to choose such a higher configuration where your better audible range really is.
It’s natural to hear the “s” becoming a pronounced lispy sound. You can dial down the Strength value so that it’s not so annoying. That should also reduce any other funny coloration/artifact you might notice that are due to SR. If you use SR for a while, your brain might get used to that lispy sound and it can become more normal for you. And also because your right ear high frequency loss is still only moderate to severe, you should probably leave the High Frequency Band option to ON so that you can also hear the amplified version as well, and just rely on the lowered sounds to help out, but not replace the original sounds. That’s the beauty of SR, you can hear both the original as well as the lowered sounds.
Your left ear doesn’t seem to need SR at all. But for symmetry, you might want to enable it for your left ear anyway just so that you can hear the same lowered effect in both ears so it doesn’t seem to be out of balance. Maybe be more aggressive with turning down the Strength on the left ear so that you can just hear it like your right ear does, but not allow it to be annoyingly too pronounced.
The 2 concentric circles icon is simply the “link” between the left and right side. If they are joined/linked, then whatever you change on one side will carry out the same change on the other side. If you click on it to “break” the link, then whatever you change on one side will not carry out and cause the same change on the other side. The reset I was talking about is simply to go back to the default value, which has a “power button” indicator above that default value.
I also have the Real 1, and last night I had several guests over to my house, and the conversations I have with them, as well as eavesdropping on the other conversations going on nearby, is great with the Real 1. I find the default General program plenty good enough. If I switch to the built-in Speech in Noise program, things sound louder but if I take the volume down a notch or two and it’s better, but not significantly better than the General program. I have their max Neural Noise Suppression values only 2 dBs apart anyway. So I get a feeling that the max NNS was never reached, and that’s why they sounded the same, except that the built-in SIN program has a little bit more gain. I also tried the Speech Booster in the app. I perceived a very mild improvement, but not necessarily good enough that I’d want to resort to it frequently, unless I was really struggling somewhere with speech.