Resound M&RIE and noise reduction

Hearing Aids
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#1

I think this may be a silly question, as I am unsure how else it would work.

Does anyone know if when using Resound M&RIE, the body mics still sample the background noise? That is, they are active for the purposes of filtering the background noise signal from the speech signal entering the in-ear mic.

My set up is:

All Around - 360 All Around
Outdoors - M&RIE
Hear In Noise - Front Focus
Music - M&RIE

I find when using the in-ear microphone, I get a touch more volume and clarity than the body mics provide.

Now I was tinkering in SmartFit and thought perhaps, if I switch the Hear In Noise program to M&RIE, I will get the best direction and the best noise filtering. I really do struggle with the Front Focus mode as I seem to be able to hear everything else better than the person in front of me.

I also find All Around a bit scatty. I can be sat in my home office with the window open, a car goes by, everything changes and there’s a few seconds of everything sounding wrong.

Appreciate the collective advice and wisdom in advance. :slight_smile:

#2

No, the M&RIE mics are not used for Hear-in-Noise (Front Focus with my Omnias). The mics on each body are used in beam-forming to favor sound coming from in front of you. I don’t know the technical details. But even in 360 All Around mode, as the noise level rises, input from the M&RIE mics on the receiver will drop out, and input from the body mics will take over.

I trust you’ve saved your original settings in Smart Fit so you can restore them if your tinkering goes too far. You can save a whole series of backups at different dates and enter session notes as to what adjustments you made as you went along (or at least keep a separate log).

The car going by the window may be a noise suppression thing. ~All HAs vary noise suppression according to what they hear in the environment. The noise of the car may have triggered some heavy noise suppression. ReSound has a slow onset and recovery from programmed mode changes. They’ve remarked that they don’t want their users to experience rapid swings in sound processing. Phonak used to have much faster swings in processing but has recently eased up on the time constant so processing changes are more gradual.

I once had a noise experience at my gym walking in from a noisy parking lot with truck engines and motorcycles. I was suddenly in a very quiet lobby and couldn’t understand the first few words the guy at the front desk spoke to me because my Quattros were ~slowly recovering from the heavy suppression of parking lot noise. When I was trialing the Omnias vs. the Lumitys, my wife was off to the side talking to me when I turned on my faucet tap. The Lumitys didn’t like the rush of aerated water right in front of me and turned on noise suppression so suddenly that my wife’s voice immediately slipped into incomprehensibility. The Omnias react similarly to aerated water but much more slowly and not as severely. So, in any future hearing aids I trial, likely to be ones with DNN brains when my insurance premium rolls over in 2026, I’ll have to try the aerated water in front vs. soft speaker by my side test to see if future generations of HAs process the environment any better (remove the noise but leave the speaker). The most natural option would be to hear the speaker clearly while still hearing a natural sound for running water at a more moderate relative level.

1 Like
#3

Thanks Jim.

In SmartFit under Speech I just noticed that you could change the mic in the Hear In Noise programme to M&RIE. Not all modes are available for all programmes so got me wondering. I like the sound in the other programmes.

Unfortunately the body mics turn out to be busted and I have just sent them for repair/replacement. Not sure how long they have been like that as the M&RIE were used mostly. I did notice a few quirks in All Around though when it was switching. Tested with omnidirectional and original receivers and all I had was hissing. Increasing the gain/volume increased the hissing, but nothing else was being amplified.

Back to everything sounding dull for a while as these were my first and only pair :sob: