I would like to know if there is a noticable quality difference in sound / speech between Oticon More Tier 1 and Tier 3?
Anyone with an idea / experience between the two will be appreciated.
Well appreciated - There is a major difference as shown in the diagram.
Recently bought More 3âs for my mum because the more 1âs are beyond our budget - however she only has moderate hearing loss so I hope that it will still make a major difference to her hearing loss especially in listening to speech.
To put it in simple language, the comes down to tough hearing situations versus easy hearing situations. If you are in tough hearing situations often, it may be worth it to go with higher capability HAs (regardless of brand) and if you are a stay at home person not in tough hearing situations, then the lower tier models will save you money you will rarely miss.
The higher tier HAs have features for noise and special situations the lower ones donât have. The lower tier units can almost always be fit to the hearing loss, but may not help you as much if you are in a noisy restaurant or party. Those situations may still be tough, even with premium HAs.
WH
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That puts things into perspective, appreciated @WhiteHat
Many people cannot tell the difference. For listening in quiet situations there should be no difference in how they sound.
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Yes but as the environments change and become more challenging the lesser tier aids donât normally fair as well as the higher tier aids.
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Try reading this:
Just click on the blue title text.
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I think this issue is often over-simplified. It depends on the users requirements in noise. In my clinic, we always do a QSiN (speech in noise test). This tells us how much separation a person needs between the volume of background noise relative to speech in order to hear speech reasonably well. We then match their score to the most suitable device/technology level. The more advanced the technology, the more background noise suppression applied, thereby creating greater separation between speech and noise. Someone who doesnât need much support in noise probably wonât notice much difference between the MORE 3 and More 1. Someone who does need a lot of the support is more likely to notice an improvement with higher technology levels.
Do you know if your mumâs audiologist performed QSiN? If so, let me know her score and we might be able to provide a more insightful response that is more specific to your mumâs hearing abilities.
Hope that helps
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This is the first time I hear about this QSiN test from a provider, so Iâd really like to see more details on what it entails. And I wonder why not too many HCPs have mentioned about it at all. Usually some of them really harp on REM (rightfully so, of course), but nobody seems to ever mention QSiN (at least from my perspective) until now.
By the way, I just want to add that even if a person doesnât do well in the QSiN test, as long as the noisy situations donât happen very often in their daily life and most of the times theyâre in more quiet environments, and they can live with the occasional rare noisy environment if it means big saving for a lower tier model because they canât afford a higher tier model, then it may still be OK to go for a lower tier model for the money saving.
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At the VA clinics that I have used the speech understanding in noise is the most important test that I get. At least my experience is that white noise is piped into one ear by way of headphones while the word recognition test is piped to the other ear. I have also had word recognition test done without the white noise just for a comparison.
I know when I am placed in the sound proof room my tinnitus goes nuts, and that aids to my issues of hearing the peeps for the tone check. They always say if you even think it is to peep respond, I have taken to point of only responding if I know I hear the tone, it has made a world d difference in how my aids are adjusted and how I can now hear in noisy environments. My advice is stop guessing and only respond to what you truly hear.
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I wonder what you mean by white noise here. If itâs just artificially created mechanical noise, thatâs hardly representative at all of the babbles of speech and myriad of other sounds including background music that you typically find in a restaurant. Or constant traffic noise and road noise when youâre in a car.
The other thing that doesnât sound right in this test you mentioned is that piping the noise into one ear via headphones then piping single words into the other ear also hardly simulates properly what you actually hear in a noisy environment. First of all, both the noise and the speech should be fed to both ears simultaneously in order to simulate anything close enough to the real world. Secondly, the single words they feed you one at a time for recognition is far from complete full sentences youâd hear from human speeches in real life.
So even if it does measure and give you some degree of speech over noise separation, what you described above is far from accurately simulating a real life environment which would require your brain to do speech over noise separation in a different way. Iâd take that test you describe above with a grain of salt and I wouldnât consider it important for myself because it just doesnât sound like a realistic simulation at all.
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Exactly, Mr V ⌠Exactly!
Oh agreed but it is much better than just using the sound proof room. And my results since having that test is that my speech understanding in noisy environments has been improved greatly. While not proof it is much better than no noise test at all.
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They do use full sentences asking you to repeat a certain word. Again much better than not testing at all.
The tone test alone is useless in my opinion. The word recognition test is where my audiologist concentrates in testing my hearing loss and it has made a world of difference.
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@cvkemp: How do they get you to do this, Chuck?
Not sure what you mean. They say sentence that ask you to say a word they want you to reply with. It is a standard test that I have ever time my hearing is tested. My Audiologist is in one side of the sound proof room I am on the other side we are separated by a glass wall.
I agree that having some kind of a noise test, no matter how unrealistic it is, is better than having no noise test at all.
In terms of getting some kind of good result out of the test, I guess it depends on what actionable item they would take to tweak the settings on your hearing aids to improve your score if they did the test again after whatever tweak(s) they did to your settings. If they did the test just to show you how well (or badly) you score, but didnât take any actionable item, then you simply would just know what the result is without having the result improved.
If they did some tweaking then test you again after the tweaks to look for better results, then I wonder what theyâd do other than cranking up the Neural Noise Suppression value to a higher (or the highest value). It seems like youâd want to avoid tweaking the gain curves too much in the Fine Tuning section because even if it may help with noisy situations, it may adversely affect your experience in normal or quiet situations when thereâs no noise. So the most logical and easiest tweak with minimal adverse effects is simply to turn up the Neural Noise Suppression value so that itâd help when itâs noisy, but it doesnât mess things up when itâs not noisy.
For this, you donât really need a speech in noise test, youâd just do it (increase the NNS values) and send the patient out to the real world to see if it helps then report back to you. OK, doing an in-office white noise over word recognition to measure for a better result or not is better than nothing. But what Iâm trying to say is that even if you get better results from that hokey âpipe noise in one ear, pipe words in the other earâ test, it doesnât necessarily guarantee that youâd get the same better result in real life.
So I really hope that the QSiN test that @Louie mentioned is much more than the white noise test that @cvkemp described at the VA office.
I assume what you mean here by saying a full sentence and ask you to repeat the word is like âSay the word âmanââ, "Say the word âtruckâ, etc. Thatâs basically the Word Recognition Test, and the fact that they use full sentences to ask you to repeat a word doesnât make it any different or better because itâs still just single word recognition.
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Also true. But at least it isnât like some places placing you in a room with a computer peeping tones at you and your response is the only test you get. That is so ridiculous and useless. I went with my neighbor to her audiologist appointment and that is what was done. From that simple test the person was advised to get hearing aids that I never heard of at a cost of almost $10,000. I advised her to just leave. I called my VA audiologist and asked his advice on a clinic for her. She got a real test and real aids that were really adjusted.
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