Should I be able to hear a cat's purr with hearing aids?

I had a client with a similar audiogram to you. This is a part of her review on Google : “I can finally after years of not hearing I can hear things, like my cat purring the dishwasher makes a wonderful sound when it’s running. My list of new found sounds will go on and on”. She wears Resound One 9. You should be able to hear your cat with Phonak. Your hearing aids are not adjusted. Ask your practitioner to perform a real ear measurement test.

The brain forgets speech sounds and it takes time to re- learn it, not the sound of cat.

I have Resound One 9’s and cant hear my cat purr unless i put my ear against her. But most importantly, i can understand most speech pretty darn good, which, for me, is almost a miracle. Just dont tell my cat…

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It all depends on your hearing loss, how well your aids are fitted to your needs. It also in some degree depends on your capacity to listen. Your capacity to listen can to some degree be improved with therapy and concentrate. I had to have therapy to be able to understand conversations again after going way to long with out the aids I needed. The therapy I had was the same as is given to children with learning disabilities and concentration issues.

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Maybe I don’t understand but forgetting sound from hearing loss is any sound, not just speech.

Most of us that could hear and lost our hearing will always remember what things sound like in our brain. This can be a huge plus to relearn the sounds of life, including speech when get hearing aids or even CI. When all the forgotten sounds are returned the brain has to sypher these new sounds to put them into place. Figure out what they are. This includes birds, smoke alarms, crickets, cats putting and also speech.

These new sounds are registered in the brain but not understood. They have to be relearned.

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With strong signal input from CI, I always say to my hearing family member, what is that noise that i am not familiar with. it is still going on to this day since almost 5 years ago since i was implanted… I am amazed to see how I wasn’t hearing things except for speech itself as my brain is really trained to extract speech from my hearing loss…

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Thanks. Luckily two things fixed this for me:

  1. My aids didn’t have my BC thresholds set up.

  2. I now have Lumity 90RL and the bass reproduction is much improved over Paradise.

I can now hear a cat purring as well as every fan and household appliance in my neighborhood!

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Good for you.
I think that I’m fine with not hearing cat purr. After my previous posts, I had my cat on my chest and she was close to my ears and I heard the purrs. It was soothing.
The problem with hearing very low level sounds is increasing noise which may interfere with speech perception.
I’m happy with my fitting considering that I’m a CI candidate
I now can hear better than my old hearing aids.
I feel UP vs SP difference

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Hearing aids aren’t really designed to amplify a cat’s purr.
The emphasis is on a mids (speech banana freqs) not low frequency purr sounds. Aids should sound comfortable. If you can hear every fan and motor in your neighborhood, that sounds (pun intended) overwhelming. There should be a fair balance to sounds. I’m very much willing to not hear my cat purr if I can hear most people talk, and without being overwhelmed by every other environmental sound in the area. But thats the way i like them. We all have different likes and needs. I just think its silly to say that because one person wears aids and can hear a certain sound, that everyone must hear that sound or their aids are not correctly adjusted.

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I’m a bit odd like that. I prefer the overwhelming nature of hearing everything. I find all of the noise cancelling and voice amplification annoying as it sounds unnatural to me so I normally disable it. I also weirdly don’t have much of a problem with speech in noise and actually prefer hearing the background noise in a restaurant or pub along with a conversation.

I’m hit with a wall of sound when I put my aids on in the morning but I adjust quite quickly.
I’m in my mid-forties and have had reasonable hearing in one of my ears until recently so I think that my brain is still hungry for the auditory stimulation.

I wear fully occluded domes and Lumity does seem to have very good low frequency response. Listening to music through Bluetooth is no different to using earbuds for me in terms of quality.

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When you still have decent hearing I totally agree with you.

But when a person’s hearing gets worse, speech becomes more and more important. All the sounds around you are less important. You just want to be able to talk to the person in front of you.

This forum has so many people with different hearing losses. It’s tuff to tell another how it is or should be.

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If you account for my BC thresholds which are 10-20dB then you’ll get a better idea of my loss.
I’ve been told that my type of hearing loss has some weird attributes: one being not having problems with speech in noise or background noise.

Without my aids I really am deaf as a post, it is just that my loss is unusual in some respects.
I completely understand that others have much greater losses and difficulties than I have: I was just reporting my unusual experiences, it wasn’t meant to be a boast in any way.

I’ve lost 30dB just in the past ten years so I think that it’s bound to get a lot worse but for now my hearing aids really are a magic bullet which I understand is highly unusual.

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@BeLo. If you’re a DIY’er, most fitting software comes with sample sounds of all sorts. Both ReSound Smart Fit and Phonak Target have a rich library of sounds and the Target software is fantastic for the variety of sounds it offers. You can play the sounds from within the fitting software directly to your hearing aids or computer speakers or outside the fitting software via a media player through computer speakers. I think Target even allows playing the sounds in surround sound mode, didn’t find out whether it allows true spatial audio. Some Target sounds: whistle, crickets, birds, keys jangling, clock ticking (maybe like a cat purring?!), distant thunder, wind noise, car noise, flowing water, etc.

Unfortunately, no cat purring sound! But the library playback allows you to test what you can hear vs. what a normal hearing person in your household can hear.

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I do use Phonak Target and have set it up with a sound meter to use the built in library of sounds. I do find it useful but mainly for fine tuning SoundRecover 2 as the suggested settings are really lispy for me.

The one sound that I just can’t hear in that library is ‘Female S’, just not there for me unless I really crank the levels up.

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I can’t hear the Target ‘Female S,’ either. Might be because I’m trialing the Lumitys with a relatively open fit and the high-frequencies aren’t amplified as much as they might be due to feedback control. So, when I have a more occlusive fit and have implemented something like NAL-NL2, I’ll see how I do.

Same here. I pick up the cat and hold him against my ear to hear him purr. That said, some cats are louder than others. :black_cat:

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I googled cat pur frequency.
It said 50-150 hertz. That’s pretty low but most hearing aids with the correct aucoustics should generate that sound properly.
A quick look at your audiogram shows cat purrs should be in your potential with proper hearing aid fitting.
Just talking from a layman standpoint.

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Looking at the gain of most of the actual fittings we do; many of the ‘open’ fittings apply no or nearly no gain below 500 hz.

If you can’t hear the purr directly through the venting, it’s unlikely that for the majority of mild/moderate losses you’d get usable gain for the purr.

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Thanks,
Appreciate your help and experience.
I looked up Phonak receiver frequency ranges and it showed down to 100 hertz so I assumed a cat purr would be available to the the wearer.
Maybe I misunderstood it.

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I just did a very quick and unscientific test with my Lumity 90s on the ‘Music’ setting and a tone generator on my phone.
I wear medium receivers with power domes so fully occluded, with a sine wave tone I could just about hear it to 65Hz on full volume.

Weirdly when connected with Bluetooth I could hear down to below what was being reported as 10Hz. I’m pretty sure that there must have been some frequency shifting/compression going on for that to be possible.