I have an Oticon Exceed 1 SP that I’ve been struggling with for almost a year now. After half a dozen visits with the audiologist I kind of just gave up and dealt with it for half a year, but I’ve now acquired a Noahlink Wireless and I’m giving self-programming a go.
I have two main issues:
- What I call the “rolling R” problem.
- Everything falls apart in noisy situations.
The Rolling R’s
When someone speaks, I frequently hear what I call a “rolling R” - like the rolling R in Spanish. I don’t know if it’s actually the R sounds that trigger it, but the concept is that for a micro-split second, there’s a repeating of a word or fraction of a word that someone says. To me it sounds exactly like a Spanish rolling R. I only hear it in speech, and sometimes I can go a day without hearing it, sometimes I’ll hear it multiple times a minute, it all seems to be situational on the speaker and the environment.
Everything falls apart in noise
As currently programmed, this hearing aid is significantly worse in noisy environments compared to my previous Oticon (whatever equivalent model came before the Exceed). It’s fine in quiet one-on-one speech, it’s fine at home watching TV. But as soon as there’s even a little bit of environmental noise, speech clarity and speech isolation just falls apart. Noises further away are amplified to the same levels as the speech nearby. There seems to be NO directionality - all noise is amplified equally. My previous aid was much better at zeroing in on the speaker directly in front of me. I know the audiologist has played around with some directional settings to try to solve this, but with no luck.
There are a few other things, but those are the highlights. In general it feels like the clarity just isn’t there. In fact, I could say it feels like it has a blown speaker driver that becomes evident once there is more than a single sound to reproduce – is that a thing with hearing aids?
Any thoughts on programming hints that might address these issues?