I know this is an old topic but I’m sure it’s still an issue with many musicians even today. I’ve tried a lot of suggested approaches and lately I started to learn to play of riffs in Melissa I kept thinking my guitar is either out of tune or the youtube video is a least a half step out. The notes just did not sound right even with my DIY custom music program. I also have a modified hifi program for my 9030 Philips HA that I have not done much work with so this is a summary of what I found I needed to do today to get the hifi program to work with my ears. I’m posting this in the event this helps others…I hope that’s true. It would take a Costco fitter months to arrive at what I found in a matter of a half hr of iterations at home. I’m pretty happy with the results although probably still not optimal but it works for me.
Since I’ve been doing some DIY with my 9030 Philips hearing aids in regards to live guitar playing I would like to describe what I had to do today with about 4-5 adjustments to get the hifi music program to NOT sound warbling, distorted and shrill when playing very high frequency notes. Your results will probably vary but this took a lot of gain reduction to work right for me. I used the gain lowering I needed in the app to guide me in the HearSuite adjustment software.
The Hifi program has medium feedback control and I left that in for now but I probably don’t need it anymore with the reductions I’ve made. The standard hifi program really boosts low and high frequency gains a lot over the general program and for me any music, streaming or live is way too tinny and very shrill sounding with the stock hifi program.
I did turn off the soft noise and wind noise controls and all other noise features are already turned off in the std hifi program. I lowered 3k-8k by a whopping 14 dB! I didn’t do this all at once and only tried 6 dB and found 14 dB to be what was needed for my ears and electric guitar. But I still had some sourness in the very high notes (12th fret and above) so I further lowered 1.5k to 2.5 k by 3 dB. And I still had to lower the gain in the app by one step which is -2.5 dB. Of course this is not great for speech but really good for my electric guitar playing and much better than turning the hearing aids off which is like a pillow over my ears. I have a typical cookie cutter loss moderate to bordering on severe at the bottom (-65-70dB) and use the 85 receiver with bass open domes.
I have tried other recommended approaches involving starting with the speech in noise program and playing with compression ratios but this hifi program seems to work and still boost the low to mid frequencies a bit. I have hyperacusis and so I might be an outlier compared to others but this is sort of effort it takes to get HA to work well for musicians, lots of iterative efforts. Don’t give up. I’m considering Widex moments but also want to look at the new Philips 9050’s coming out. I’m not sure with my loss that the 0.5 msec of the Widex will help enough for me and the 9050 is a brand new chip. Even the 9040’s are a bit better for noise control than my 9030 and the 9050 is said to handle artifact noise caused by movement and wind much better, although the body is also a bit thicker I’m told.
