I got Starkey Livio Edge AI’s, custom ITE’s, in late Dec. I will begin by saying that overall I am VERY happy with them. New HA’s, and a new Audi that adjusted me very differently from the previous one, has made a huge improvement in my hearing and speech understanding. Bluetooth integration has changed my life.
But there is some kind of background noise suppression system in these HA’s that doesn’t show up in or is controllable by the HA phone app. When I drive a vehicle, once the road noise reaches a certain point, I will hear the background noise shift dramatically. The HA’s really push back or suppress the road noise, but the problem is that it makes it harder for me to understand other people in the car.
The worst offender though and the reason I’m writing, is because it kicks in big time when I play the piano. I play at home a lot and for church, and the suppression makes for such a jarring, distracting hearing experience. Twice now, between fiddling with the Starkey app and the built-in iPhone controls, I have been accidentally able to temporarily “break” the suppression, where even a bomb could go off and my HA’s wouldn’t suppress anything. It was SO nice!! Yes certain sounds were much louder and the piano was as well but the hearing experience was SO much better.
Does anyone know exactly what this is called or what’s going on? And if there is a way I can disable it on demand? My current audi is pretty clueless about it and just says “oh it’s just the algorithm”. I went to another audi yesterday for a second opinion and she didn’t know at ALL what I was talking about and quickly changed subjects.