I finally got hearing aids in November of 2024. I went to Costco and had done a lot of research ahead of time and was looking to get Rexton Reach devices. Turns out that my closest Costco could not sell Rexton because they were “being used as a pilot store for another brand”.
They convinced me to get Phillips 9050s and so far i have been fairly happy with them except in one area. I am an avid singer and hymn writer and i have found that it is almost impossible to sing with these devices. The problem is that when I do the vast majority of my singing is in a church/congregational setting. No matter when mode i use (primarily GENERAL or HIFI MUSIC) the AI switches back and forth between focusing on my voice and focusing on everyone else. Usually what happens is that for the first song or so I can hear my own voice fairly well as well as everyone else. Then they will suddenly suppress my voice to the point that I can’t hear myself at all. I can switch them to another mode and then back agin and they will briefly allow me to hear myself.
Is there ANY way to build a mode in which the AI is just turned off and they are working simply as pass thru amplifiers?
I have seen that some are doing DIY programming. Is it worth the effort in a situation like this?
Welcome to the forum, sure you wouldn’t be the first to have an issue like this, but yes there’s a few things your Audiologist can do, mostly just turning the extra features off your main complaint seems to be with " AI noise reduction" set up a bit to aggressive,is the HIFI the music program, as this should have all the extras turned off. your fitter could easily make a few adjustments to help with this, but there’s no problem to DIY if your interested, you’d need to do a bit of research, read user guides etc, it’s not that hard but if course it’s not for everyone, some links to check out.
I would say yes to DIY programming for musicians and singers. You have more stringent requirements then your average individual.
Note you can spend hours fine tuning your hearing aids in real time going DIY. That isn’t something your Costco fitter can do for you, nor are you singing in a sound isolation box.
If DIY doesn’t help, then try a different brand of hearing aid.
You might also take a look at your domes. You may want to try one type of dome for singing and a different dome for when you are not singing. Perhaps, combine this with two different program settings to see if this helps any. Again, when DIY fitting you can try different combinations in real time.
My COSTCO had the Rexton Reach. I sing in choir and a couple community choruses. I find the “Live Music” setting on the Rexton works very well and does not try to compress or otherwise mess with the sound. I think they had to turn off the compression or other digital stuff in the settings for that.
You say it was your “closest” COSTCO. Perhaps you could drive to one further away? I have to set aside a whole afternoon to come and go from COSTCO because of its distance, but it was worth it.
Yes, DIY is worth it for folks like you who want to customize things for specific situations. For the issue of not being able to hear your own voice or others’ voices when singing, it’s probably best to just force the hearing aids into an omni direcitonal mode where all sounds around you can be heard without getting one prioritized over others. The screenshot below is where you can set it → select Pinna for the Directionality setting and in Pinna Mode, select OmniDirectional. Of course, make a copy of the General program and do this customization to it, then select this customized program and see if it helps.
Hi there, great your giving DIY a go, be sure to do some research and read the user guides before starting as it’s very helpful for setting up the first time.
I have the Philips 9050s also. I don’t sing or perform music. But I have noticed the noise reduction function sometimes has strange effects. Sometimes a single loud-ish noise like closing a drawer will change the noise reduction level. And the noise reduction can be directional which can be disorienting. I have programmed mine to have a modified “general” program that sets the directionality to omni (as Volusiano showed above) and has “Noise Reduction Mode” set to off. I think this would also help you.
The Oticon Real and Intent has a new feature called Sudden Sound Stabilizer. The equivalent of it in the 9040/9050 is called SoundProtect Transient Noise Reduction (see screenshot below at the bottom). If you’re a DIY’er (sounds like you are?), you can experiment with the different levels available for this feature to see if it might help make the noise reduction due to sudden sounds less distracting for you or not.
Mine in the Real 1 is default at Medium, but I set it to High, and it seems very effective for me in suppressing sudden sounds like dishes clanging, banging, door slams, etc. But if it’s set higher than your liking and seems like too much directional noise reduction kicking in, it might help to reduce the value of this setting. It actually has 5 different levels, probably because this type of sudden sound handling is very subjective depending on each person’s level of sudden sound tolerance, so they give you a wide range of selection to help you optimize its fine tuning to your taste.
Yes, I am a DIYer. The strangest effect I get with the 9050s is when there is a steady background noise, and then a sudden noise. When the sudden noise happens, the background noise is reduced and it stays reduced for several seconds before coming back. This did not happen with my old Oticons.
Another aspect of noise reduction in the 9050s I don’t like is how the noise reduction is directional. When I am outdoors and there is noise from a specific direction, the loudness changes as I turn my head. There are nulls at about the 4:00 and 8:00 positions–straight behind is louder than at these angles. So I have a program that has the Noise Reduction Mode set to off, and directionality set to omni. I leave the transient and wind noise reduction turned on.
Which old Oticon aids did did you have? Up to the More, they did have a Transient Noise Management, but it’s not supposed to be as effective as the new Sudden Sound Stabilizer that the Real and Intent have. I haven’t noticed that effect on my Real like you described, but usually the sudden sounds I’m exposed to is at home when dishes clang when being hand washed, but there’s really no loud enough steady background noise around the kitchen to make its suppression due to Sudden Sound to be noticeable. So did you get a chance to dial this SoundProtect Transient Noise Reduction feature down enough to eliminate that background noise suppression thing? Just curious if my guess was right or not that the SoundProtect is the culprit for what you observed there.
The Oticon aids don’t use as much directionality for noise reduction because of its open paradigm, but your noise reduction directionality experience seems to prove that the 9050 is NOT the same as the Oticon aids are many folks claim. It sounds like you’ve gotten quite used to the Oticon open paradigm that the directional noise reduction bothers you enough to want to turn both directonality and directional-based noise reduction off so that the 9050 sounds more like the Oticon open paradigm for you.
I had the Opn 1 for almost six years, and then got the 9050s.
I’m afraid we’ve drifted a long way from the questions our new member reindeer has. Reindeer, I hope you got at least some answers here. This discussion certainly illustrates some of the changes that can be made.
By the way, I sang in a church choir for the first couple of years I had my first hearing aids, the Oticon Opn 1 model. I did not notice any shifting/changing of the sound processing going on with them. I usually ran the aids in the music program during the whole rehearsal time, though sometimes I would switch to the general program when the director was talking to us. I have not been in a choir with the 9050s.
This is not an elegant solution but I’ve used foam ear plugs along with the hearing aids to make bass sounds come out better, and you will then hear your voice “inside your head”, the occlusion effect. The choir voices will still come through the microphones, and you voice will be much more hearable.
