Plugging your ears with your fingers has several effects: it reduces the canal volume, changes the canal resonance and impedance. If you want a visual example of this, imagine the difference in the air pressure variation in a sea cave full of water with an opening to the outside and one where there is no opening with the same wave action. That analogy a step further, the relative difference in dome is going to be like a further constriction to the flow, albeit one that stops the wave going out rather than in.
Noise-tracker has multiple trade off’s for noise vs speech, the more aggressively it is set, the more the aid tries to eliminate noise: if it is set too high, speech can start to sound clipped.
The Directional mix is the balance between the ‘focus ear’ and the omni ear, it’s basically deciding how much forward bias is directed to either side. This technology is a bit wooly IMHO.
DFS Ultra is the feedback manager - for somebody in your boat (an experienced wearer), if you’re having difficulty with entrainment (overhang) from certain sounds, you might be better to use a more closed dome/custom tip and turn it off.
Expansion is a technique that literally ‘expands’ the speech element of the signal, relative to the rest of the sound using a bit of weird compression maths that kicks in over certain levels. Setting this too high will make the speech sound very artificial.
Input? Try a new Widex Clear for comparison. It’s a bit of a chalk and cheese difference.
I’ve fitted several Alera 5-7-9 to a few customers, the extras are excellent, they have great user acceptance for some people, not so great for others.
We changed my Noise Tracker II to Considerable (from per environment). Can’t tell you why we did that but it was during a session with the Resound rep on the speakerphone.
I think my Natural Directionality II mix is low or whatever the next setting is, and works great!
The DFS Ultra default is “mild”. DFS Ultra is the feedback removal processing, a way to eliminate feedback without lowing gain (fantastic!). I have a copy of the main program, on program 4 and the only difference is we set DFS Ultra to the next setting (moderate?) and also gave me a very little bit of low end gain (just to try), because I got the remote and if I want to monkey with the volume I do it with program 4. But, I don’t have feedback on either program no matter what I do. Keep it “mild” unless you have feedback.
I would suggest getting all your questions together, specific questions or complaints, and have a session where your pro calls their Resound rep and let the resound rep talk you guys through some things to try. We did that and made great progress quickly. But, think through what’s going on now so you can be as specific as possible. For example, instead of “it’s not clear sometimes” tell them exactly when it’s not clear, like “when playing cards and there are other tables around with noise, I can’t understand my partner across the table”.
I have had mine for a year now and very happy with them.
I thought the expansion setting had to do with sounds below the 50db level, and was basically the opposite of compression. My understanding was that turning on expansion kept lower level background types of sounds from being “pulled up” as much - causing background sounds to be less noticable? I have expansion set to moderate for that purpose and am now wondering if that is off base.
If you consider that quiet speech inputs are going to be be around 55dB, both explanations hold - expansion causes a greater range of loudness growth for moderate inputs. It’s the inverse of compression, but operated over a narrowish input band - essentially the slots either side of the desired band are compressed significantly more, which is what I was driving at above.
The unnaturalness comes from the ‘all or nothing’ delivery that it seems to give: a bit like speech break-through on a two way radio.
I see what you mean now. I asked to have it set at the moderate setting in an attempt to reduce the sounds of typing at a keyboard - which I do for most of my workday. I had hoped it would help with paper and plastic bag crumpling sounds as well but it seems those are at greater than 50db levels so it did nothing for them. I am not sure if it really helps much with the typing sounds or not.
Now that you mentioned the speech break-through, I have noticed that occasionally (like when the TV gets set below a certain volume level, or someone is talking quietly while not being close to me, etc.) the aids do not seem to be as effective - so I guess that is due to the expansion. Maybe I should get it set to the lower setting for my normal program and leave it at medium for my noisier environment program.
THanks everyone for your input. I have an appt tomorrow at costco with my audi and the Resound rep will be there. I have compiled a list of questions and descriptions of what I am not hearing that I would like to hear etc.
Thanks,
Paula
Hi Smiley and nine, since your posts are 2 years ago, can you advise me as Costco already opened their 2nd place in Sydney last year, have you try the Resound Future from Costco? How it was? I asked Costco for Resound Verso, but they said they only have Resound Future and Forza
I love my Resound future,but they are 7 years old and I want something that is close to my resound Future since resound does not make that brand anymore,what is close to it?
