Sound recover 2

Hearing Aids
#1

I have Phonak Bolero B SP BTE …Prior to having sound recover 2 fully activated I had no feedback issues what so ever, but struggled badly with word recognition still. Now that sound recover 2 has been fully activated I’m experiencing a huge amount of feedback. Particularly made worse if I’m in the same room with any other electronic TV, computer, microwave when they are working. The feedback is quiet bad to the extent I can’t distinguish what the person is saying.

Without the electronic TV etc going I don’t have the feedback issues at all.

Is anyone on here able to explain why as my Aud is at a loss. He’s set an other program for TV etc but it’s not really helping.

#2

Can you describe the feedback you are getting without using the word feedback? It might be something else. Technically there shouldn’t be an increase in true feedback because the acoustic pathway of the device hasn’t changed since your aud last ran the FB manager (right?) and Phonak does not allow you to excede the FB measure like some other manufacturers do. But you might be hearing something new that you are interpretting as feedback.

(For example, this past week I have had the following sound perceptions referred to as feedback: a harsh/hissy /s/ sound, an echo on the patient’s own voice, a tonal sound occurring between syllables, distortion occurring when the patient vocalized an “ahhh” sound. Each instance of “feedback” had a different solution.)

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#3

@Neville it doesn’t happen when I talk. When I talk I get the sh & ch sharp sounds now whereas before I didn’t. Which is an easy fix.

When it first started I thought it sounded like an electronic voice repeating what the news reader on the TV was saying, one word behind the reader. As time went on it now sounds more of an echo of a jumble of unintelligible words. Which makes trying to distinguish the word recognition difficult.

It’s got to the stage that when I want to watch TV and start preparing a meal I remove my HA’s. And turn up the volume, and hope I don’t get a phone call.

#4

If you use domes…perhaps a custom ear mold for your receiver??? You get feedback when the sound OUT of the receiver gets into the microphone. Then it cycles…gets worse each cycle…until you hear it. Too much feedback suppression in software can defeat the very things you are looking to gain.

#5

@efigalaxie I already have molds and have done for some time. All I want is to be able to hear and understand what people are saying. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

#6

Maybe it’s a T-coil activated mistakenly?

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#7

@Lostdeaf the t-coil was turned off yesterday and I’m still having the problems.

#8

@Neville I’m sitting her watching TV now. You asked if I could explain better what I’m hearing.

Have you ever had a pet bird that mumbles a whole lot of words but they are not quiet distinguishable. Well that’s what it “feedback” sounds like.

#9

I don’t use Phonak although I do use a different frequency lowering technology with my OPN. So I don’t know much about Sound Recover 2. But my understanding of it is that there are two adjustable parameters for Audibility and Distinction, with Sound Quality being automatically set based on the two parameters above.

I wonder maybe in your case with a sharp slope of loss at 1 KHz, your provider might have had to max out the Audibility at the expense of Distinction. Maybe playing around with these two parameters some more and easing back on Audibility to improve Distinction may help?

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#10

SoundRecover2 is like the freqency lowering features of other hearing aids. They just love to give them funny names to make it sould special. Maybe its special, but the idea is the same.

The Phonak aids have a Audibility <-> Distinction slider and a Clarity <-> Comfort slider.

The help text says:
image
image

The top slider is the Audibility <-> Distinction slider.

It is adjustable, and it can also be changed for individual programs outside of Autosense OS, however all Autosense will have the same settings for SoundRecover2.

Hope this helps a bit :slight_smile:

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#11

Odd that you hear it on other’s voices and not your own. Or is that incorrect? And this effect toggles on and off when you turn the sound recover on and off? If so, then that narrows you down to two possible adjustments on the SR2 feature, and some adjustments with the high frequency gain probably around and into your worse areas of hearing. If your provider doesn’t have the option of verifying 65 dB /s/ audibility with REM then you’re down to playing a sort of forced choice hot-and-cold game to try to narrow down the exact culprit. It would help if you can bring something that reliably triggers the effect into your Aud’s office.

#12

@Neville SR2 is on all the time. I don’t have the IT skills to alter it myself. And yes I don’t have any “echo or garbled mumbles” when I’m speaking. Weird I know.

#13

I’d assumed that your Aud had tried toggling it on and off and that that is what created the effect. I’m not sure how I got there.

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