The best hearing aid for very high frequency loss

Hearing Aids
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#7

Why don’t you post your audiogram so we can see how much high frequency loss you’re talking about here. Based on that, it’s easier to see why you’re so keen about being able to hear up to 15kHz if you can’t even hear crickets in the first place.

It’s not that audiologist dismiss high frequencies as unimportant. It’s more like the high frequency loss of many people are usually pretty severe that it’s far long gone and it doesn’t make practical sense to spend considerable amount of effort in trying to amplify sounds up to 15KHz where the ROI in that frequency range is negligible compared to the ROI of trying to address frequency loss up to 8KHz only.

When you said all of the details in the sound are in the high frequencies, that’s a meaningless generalization because the high frequency range is so vast and can be anywhere from 4KHz up to 20KHz. Unless there’s some way to quantify how much details is say between 4-6 KHz, 6-8 KHz, 8-10 KHz, and beyond that in order to clarify and substantiate your statement a bit more.

Anyway, rather than trying to focus on amplifying the highs for people with severe loss in the highs with little ROI, what the HA mfgs are doing is a more practical approach, trying to lower those HF sounds into the lower frequency spectrum so that the patients can hear those sounds in the range that’s more audible to people where they can still hear better there. For example, I’m wearing the Oticon OPN and it has a frequency lowering technology and I can hear the “s” and “sh” sounds and even cricket sounds very clearly because those sounds have been lowered to the 2KHz range where my hearing there is still adequate and not too far long gone like my hearing at 4KHz and beyond.

Anyway, so if you’re looking for something better and wanting to be able to hear the details of the HF sounds that you can’t hear anymore, don’t waste your time trying to find new HAs that can amplify up to 15KHz (because there are probably none). Instead focus on finding new HAs that has frequency lowering technology and try those out.

#8

Not so much on a piano but a huge difference on a triangle tap, sleigh bells, sticks or brushes sliding on the symbols, maracas and the like. It’s not just the basic frequency. There are a lot of high frequency harmonics in vocal sibilance as well.

#9

Here’s a link to an interesting device for birders that lets you lower frequencies by different ratios. There’s a simulator on the web page that lets you hear different bird songs at different ratios.

http://hearbirdsagain.com/

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#10

Thanks for your reply. The Oticon Agil seems to do the same thing but it changes the sound so that it is no longer recognizable. It makes many different things sound the same. The microwave beeps and I think the land line is ringing.

#11

I would suggest trying analogue K-amp from the states which will give you ultra high frequencies. The compression used by the new Starkey muse chip has given me very good results for a couple of musicians who were really struggling with twin reed instruments. A lot of other aids will “hear” this frequency and then suppress it jut as quick thinking its feedback. On some lesser tech aids I have had some success by changing the domes and then switching off the feedback manager

#12

I know that my complaint seems rather trivial to those of you with profound hearing loss. I have worked with high fidelity audio equipment for over 50 years. I’m familiar with audio generators, oscilloscopes and Fletcher-Munson loudness curves. I know that I could hear up to 18 kHz in my younger years. My loss is not total. I can hear high frequency just fine with a $400 pair of Bose ear buds. I can put my naked ear next to the high frequency tweeter speaker in a 50-year old hi-fi phonograph and hear the triangle strikes on Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme. It’s frustrating that a hearing aid can’t do as well as a half century old record player.

#13

What’s the highest frequency you can actually hear at now then?

What sort of power do you think you would need to drive a diaphragm in opposite directions at 12,000 times a second when you have 1.2Volts at your disposal?

Engineers design and make hearing aids BTW. Audiologists fit them.

#14

A question prompted by this. I’ve noted that less powerful receivers (for milder losses) often claim up to 10k, but more powerful receivers often only go to 5 or 6k. Is there a simple explanation for this?

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#15

@MDB : Bigger speaker means lower frequency (a viola gives lower frequencies than a violin).

As for the very high frequencies: Usually, with high frequency loss, the loss gets worse the higher the frequency.

So, to make overtones at, say, 12 kHz audible, you would need a ridicoulus amount of gain at that frequency, which would result in distortion, clipping, feedback.

My advice: Use an aid that states “up to 10 kHz”, then this aid will be able to give real gain at 8 kHz, and with that, music will sound very much better than without the aids.

To get more performance, use headphones / earbuds in conjunction with a good equalizer. Try to reproduce the gain-curve of your aid (try not to equalize your loss, this will blow your ears!!!), this will give a sound not to far away from what you are used from your aids, but with better fidelity.

I really had those thoughts, too (what about 10 kHz and above?) but I must embrace the fact that I hear so much more with the aids in , even though they have no real gain above 8kHz, that this is still a large improvement!!!

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#16

Can you fit your $400 Bose ear buds or your tweeter inside your ear canal the way a tiny hearing aid receiver fits inside your ear canal? You may know a lot about hifi audio equipment but it looks like you don’t know much about the law of physics then.

There’s only so much a tiny HA receiver can do and trying to optimize it for HF amplification beyond 8KHz, even if possible, and likely not, is just not a priority or even practical for the masses of people who need to wear hearing aids and their HF loss is almost total. So your complaint is to the wrong product and the wrong audience.

I think if your HF loss is not total and you want products that can deliver HF beyond 8KHz, you should be looking at PSAP (Personal Sound Amplification Products) instead. You can probably wear them around but they’ll be sticking out of your ears quite a bit. But you can just use them when listening to music only and for normal daily routines, you can wear HAs.

#17

Yes. In one word ‘resonance’.

You can make a reed (think a ruler over the edge of a desk) fatter or longer give more ‘waggle’, but in doing so you lose the ability of that beam to vibrate freely at pitches outside of the higher harmonics of the original resonance.

#18

And that’s why in the speaker world they have subwoofer and woofer and mid and tweeter to handle different ranges. They can’t make one thing that can deliver in all ranges from low to high.

#19

Try the Oticon OPN devices, set up properly they have the best sound I have heard in over 55 years. And, a good provider should allow at least 30 no-cost trial period. Some allow 60 days.

#20

Thanks. This is helping but it’s still a little fuzzy. A typical tweeter is still a heck of a lot bigger than even the most powerful hearing aid receiver. Does it take more electrical power to drive high frequencies than lower ones?

#21

It actually takes more energy to drive a subwoofer than to drive a tweeter. You need a pretty powerful amplifier to deliver the thumping sound the subwoofer can generate. But you need hardly much to drive a tweeter.

I’m not sure what you’re fuzzy about, though. Yes, a tweeter is bigger then the most powerful receiver, but the tweeter can also deliver a lot more sound intensity (or sound energy). The sound intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so the closer the source is placed to your ear, the less energy it needs to produce the sound with enough pressure/volume for you to hear. That’s why the receiver can be small, use much less energy, but still able to deliver the kind of volume you need to hear -> because it’s right inside your ear canal.

#22

Not necessarily, but if you make a transducer that ‘wants’ to resonate at 12000 Hz, the stiffness of the beam is going to be unable to reproduce 250Hz at a decent level.

So you have to choose where you deliver the response. Through clever damping and a few electro-mechanical cheats you can get about 200-10,000Hz with a peak resonance around 2-3KHz or roughly where your ear-canal resonates.

#23

And as you make receivers capable of generating more gain, the beam becomes more stiff, it’s ability to resonate at distances further from the peak will decrease. I think the Signia S receiver can do 100-10500, but the HP only 250-5200. Higher power (stiffer beam) means that it can’t generate as low or as high as frequencies as a thinner beam? Is that a reasonable semblance?

#24

The engineers are not audiologists in the first degree? Sarcasm over. The first hearing aid I had 15-yars ago claimed 6-kHz. 5-years later 8-kHz was the claim. 5-years after that it was 10-kHz but the highest adjustment their software package would allow was at 8-kHz. Obviously the engineers are working on high frequency improvement. I see a trend here and they have be begging for more.

High frequencies take much less power to amplify. The transducer excursion is microscopic. Low frequency requires much more power to move the air that transmits sound to the ear. The transducer excursion is much greater. High frequency is directional, low frequency is not. That brings up another point. I have very little sense of direction with the hearing aids I have owned. As far as bandwidth, I’m talking flat response from about 6 to at least 12-kHz, not something that starts rolling off and is down 20-db at 12-kHz.

Audio without high frequency is like a photo without focus. The details are lost.

#25

I get the same feeling when I talk to my audiologist, like my complaint is falling on deaf ears. He doesn’t wear hearing aids.

#26

Dramatically less power to amplify high frequencies.