Rexton BiCore - speech comprehension issues

Hearing Aids
#1

Hi all!

I’m a new wearer of Costco’s Rexton BiCores, and although the audiologist has given me closed domes and adjusted the gain so that I’m hearing sounds so much better, my speech comprehension is still not the best. I still can’t understand my partner when he’s not facing me, or when he’s talking from the other room. When he’s facing me, I hear him fine. But even without hearing aids, I can hear him fine when he’s facing me!

And women’s voices are still hard to understand. We went to a noisy restaurant and I had to put them in “restaurant” mode so that the noises didn’t overwhelm me, and thankfully it helped so that I could hear my partner across the table perfectly. But I could only catch about 20% of what the waitress was saying sigh

I’m not sure what to ask my audiologist to adjust… any recommendations?

I feel like I need to have a recording of a woman’s soft voice playing and see if it gets better/worse while he’s making adjustments!! :joy:

#2

Share with them what you’ve shared with us. Some thoughts: 1)What are your word recognition scores and what level of gain were they done at? 2)Your loss is a little tricky because too much gain at the lower frequencies could mask (drown out) sounds at 2000 Hz which is very important for speech. Might need less low frequency gain or more at 2000 Hz. Hearing distant speakers and understanding soft voices in noisy restaurants are challenging for all of us. I believe Rexton makes a remote microphone. Might be something to consider in the future if further adjustments don’t help.

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#3

I’ll echo mdb with the remote mic. Often, not always, women’s voices are higher pitched and given your loss that would seem to fall right into that range. Also, with your partner, I know with mine I often know what she is saying because we know each other so well. When there’s a different person it’s not there of course.

Has your Audi suggested molds? It would seem for your loss it might make sense. Mine isn’t as bad but I use it and it’s great, both for comfort and sound.

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#4

If they have some kind of verification equipment (such as Verifit) they can do this! There are different types of speech/sounds that can be played out of a speaker and they can measure what your hearing aids are doing while this is running. Ideally they would have taken real ear measures at your fitting and programmed the aids according to that.

This video explains what I mean: The Most Important HEARING AID Video You Will EVER Watch! | What is Real Ear Measurement? - YouTube

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#5

It would be unusual that Dr. Cliff could be understood by a person with a hearing problem as his super fast speech could never be understood by me.

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#6

Fair point, but you can watch YouTube videos at a slower speed and turn on the captions!

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#7

I’ve had those issues too!
Except my hearing aids are a different brand.

I shared the Phonak mask program with my audiologist. He made adjustments to the automatic program and I do hear better now. He didn’t adjust gain; he did REM for me after making the adjustments, and that helped. Is there a "mask " program for the Rexton BiCores?

Suggestion: I learned abut an amazing book when someone here recommended it. It is:
HEAR & BEYONE
Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss

Shari Eberts
Gael Hannan

Frankly this book was life changing for me.

DaveL
Toronto

#8

I don’t have my test results here, but I believe my word recognition scores were about 85% for my left ear, and 30% for my right. So I would imagine that I’ll never have very good word recognition :-/

Thanks for your thoughts on the lower frequency gain, I’ll share that with my audiologist!!

#9

Custom molds will be the next step, although my audiologist seemed very reluctant to go that route. They also do not have the ear scan technology at Costco yet, and use the gooey stuff they squirt in the ears. I wonder if I could go to a different audi that could do an ear scan.

I’m currently in closed molds that are working well, so I wonder how much of an improvement that custom molds could give me?

#10

I found them more comfortable, but that’s just me. The gooey stuff was odd but not that bad.

#11

My story doesn’t matter, unless telling it helps you.

Dave
Toronto

#12

Word recognition for the right ear will likely always be a challenge. That’s assuming it was done with enough volume.

#13

I have the Bi-core from Costco. My experience with them has been great since I decide to self-fit. The Costco audi tech in my area struggled to get my voice from sounding like a broken speaker. I think I was off due to occlusion and fitting via my audiogram. My audiogram was off, I feel from my own fault. Back to your issues with directionality and not hearing people from not directly in front of you. The feature is called sound pro. If it’s more toward the speech the aids are more aggressive in filtering noise and making sure speech is a priority towards the front of you. The female voice issue also can be specifically adjusted via the fitting software using the quick setting features. It can boost the female freq range. Another suggestion is using the onboard fitting assistant in the app. In the app, there’s a question mark on the top right corner that leads you to a set of questions that lead you to an AI-assisted adjustment . The rexton assistant app records your changes and the next time it is displayed to your tech what your struggling with to further tweak them. here’s a link to the site that has more info
Rexton Assistant

sound pro

My Rexton BiCore experience