Reduce focus on 's' in Phonak Naida Paradise

[Sanaya]

I’m working with an experienced audiologist to fine-tune the settings on my new Phonak Naida Paradise P70 UP hearing aids. I have been deaf since birth, with a severe loss in my right ear and a profound loss in my left ear.

I am quite happy with the current settings. The issue is that in my right ear the hearing aid shifts focus to the ‘s’ sounds - overpowering other sounds in that sentence, or focusing on noises like a high pitch brake squeal, high pitch machine whine, jewellery jingling, high pitched cymbals in a drum set - sounds very unpleasant.

We tried to reduce the gain in higher frequencies to address this, but the ‘s’ is still over-emphasised. We have turned off SoundRecover 2 on my right ear, since I prefer the sound and it is not needed at my level of loss in the right ear.

Attaching screenshots of my audiogram and right ear settings below. Any suggestions welcome!

[Um_bongo]

There’s too much gain for your loss all through the (most of the chart, but mainly the) upper frequencies and you’re getting the downward spread of masking going on.

Just looking at the G65 at 3.6Khz, you need about half that figure or even slightly less. The software is way out.

I’m not sure how you’ve ended up with such a high prescription. It could be some form of L/R balancing factor, but normally given a 60dB sensorineural loss you’d expect approximately 20dB of gain to be applied.

[Sanaya]

Realised I’d uploaded the wrong fitting table (2cc insertion) when it should be the real ear insertion figures - correct table below

[Um_bongo]

It’s still way over. G65 at 4KHz should be around 20 dB.

Now, you might have big canals and I can’t tell if those figures have been accurately REM’d, but just looking at that data in the raw and assuming normal residual canal volume: those gain figures are still way over what they should be.

The 3.6KHz is still way out.

[david.hendon]

There is another factor probably affecting things here. My own experience as an electronics engineer user who does DIY is that if you have a significant cochlear-related loss, then the response to pure tones can be quite non-linear, especially at higher frequencies. So if you take the threshold level at say 4 kHz, then an increase in sound level of say 10dB will sound much louder than it should.

So what I do is take the recommended fit for my measured threshold and then back each gain handle off by enough that speech and/or music sounds like I think it should sound. This can mean taking quite a lot of gain out, especially in my case at about 2kHz which, left as the fitting software suggests, sounds quite shrieky to me.

[Sanaya]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions @Um_bongo and @david.hendon!

I usually set the overall gain much higher than the prescribed fitting, since I spent my childhood with analog hearing aids - I find the prescribed digital aid fit too soft for my comfort (have done this for 4 pairs over 20 years…). Will try reducing the gain in the higher frequencies slightly and see if this resolves the issue!