Thank you for the comments. I am going to give these closed sleeves a try for a while and see what happens. Second day with the sleeves and they are not too bad. Second day with the sleeves and they are not too bad. The custom molds may be next if these do not work out.
I’ve found a paradox of having a more occlusive fitting and being able to turn up gain while wearing your HA’s is that it’s easier to have the HA’s generate feedback on their own when you take them out. While they’re in your ears, sound generated by the receivers looping back to the external mics is very well blocked by tight-fitting molds having little or no venting, so the gain can really be cranked up and the feedback management algorithm made very mild.
However, when I take the HA’s out and the receivers come near some reflective surface and there’s nothing to block the sound from the receivers traveling through the open air to the external mics, it’s like, “Wow! Look out!” Since I have moderately strong to severe high frequency loss, it’s hard for me to hear that feedback is occurring with the HA’s out of my ears. I now turn the amplification off (but not the HA’s) in the smartphone app before I remove my HA’s (and an odd Resound Quattro behavior is that if you then turn one HA completely off via its switch, the amplification of the other HA gets turned back on (crazy!) - so I use the app again to turn off the amplification before shutting the last HA down as otherwise the receiver waving around in my hands can generate feedback as I go to operate the HA body On/Off switch). Just worried I’ll damage my receivers by too much really out-of-control feedback if I’m not careful.
Further note on the walking sound: it only happens on a very hard surface like an asphalt road. Don’t notice it at the gym walking on the much softer, more pliant belt surface of a treadmill. And it does have something to do with the headphone frame as I can increase or decrease the footpad sound by the way that I angle the headphone headband on my head, tilting the headband forward or back relative to the position of the earcups lessens the mild thumping sound relative to having the headband straight over the earcups.
Streaming via my Phone Clip+ directly to the Quattro’s eliminates the headphone footpadding problem but I don’t get the benefits of noise-cancellation/noise-blocking that I do for other bothersome really loud noises when I wear my over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones and stream to them instead of directly to the HA’S. Perhaps I should try streaming to my HA’s via the PC+ while wearing the noise-cancelling headphones and see what happens to the footpadding sound on hard asphalt…
Edit_Update: Streaming directly to my HA’s while wearing the headphones or gun muffs to block out extraneous loud noise (e.g, 10 motorcycles in a “gang” zooming up a nearby major street!) doesn’t work to block out frame vibrations from any over-the-ear device I’ve tried. If I hold part of the frame of the over-the-ear noise blocking device while I walk, that reduces the footpadding sound on hard asphalt that shows up as a result of my occluded fit. So either changing vent inserts for a walk to something less occluding or finding an over-the-ear frame that doesn’t have springiness or rattle from walking is likely to be required to solve my walking on hard surfaces with a Closed Fit problem. Or just not resume streaming until all the motorcycles, helicopter, or whatever has passed by and not wearing any over-the-ear device while streaming directly to my HA’s might do it, too.
This has been an interesting feed I am a newbie
I only have one ear due to birth defect and my hearing in my ear is bad I use a RIC with earmold and reading about the pressure is interesting…other day was running late and just grabbed my aid and put it in. All day my ear felt strange clogged could not clear that evening took aid out and noticed that my vent was clogged on my mold with wax Cleaned out and put back in everything felt great and normal again
Hey Sierra. Did you ever get you Occlusion issue solved?
It seems like I have been around the merry-go-round a few times. I had to go back and read the old posts to refresh my memory.
Occlusion with the sleeves never became much of an issue, or perhaps I got used to it. I had two issues that at one point I thought might be the same issue. One was obvious feedback in my left ear, and the other was the sound going into a distortion mode in my left ear once I exceeded a certain input sound level. Both KS8 hearing aids were returned at one point, and supposedly replaced. The loaner hearing aids basically did the same thing. I also tried some ReSound trial aids and they did the same thing.
I finally decided to go with molds in both ears - which the Rexton rep recommended. After three tries to get a “good fit”, I gave them a serious go for about 2 months. But, one in particular irritated my ear, and both made tons of noise when I was eating food. The noise was there whether or not the aids were muted. It seemed to be real noise generating in the ear by mold movement as I was chewing, that I could hear without aids. It was so bad, that I would have to stop chewing to hear anybody else talking. I finally gave up on them and took them back to Costco to get my money back. I don’t recall any significant occlusion with the molds, but at some point I had the Own Voice Processing setting to be turned up to Max.
I asked for the closed sleeves in both ears again, and basically asked to have the gain turned down in my left ear in the 3 kHz range until the distortion noise issue went away. I would hear it during the REM testing. That is where I am now. I know I am not getting ideal gain in my left ear, but I have given up on doing any better. I have concluded that this is not a hearing aid problem, but an ear problem. My fitter suggested I may want to see an ENT to determine if there is some physical problem. I have not bothered.
I guess the good news is that I can hear pretty well. My right ear aid works very well, and makes up a lot for what I am not getting in my left.
About the only thing I miss from the molds was that they definitely killed the real feedback. And they also attenuated noise, so when the aid went in to noise reducing mode, especially in a vehicle, it got eerily quiet. They also worked like very effective ear plugs by simply muting them. That killed the noise best when flying on an airplane.
Yes. Very worth it. ABE sold me one for $5 shipped. Much to chew; halfway in a month.
I learned Critical Distance (Dc) in public address sound system theory. If you have rooms and mikes to play with it is fun to verify the theory.
In a living room Dc is 3 or 4 feet. In a 600-seat concert hall, around 11 feet. It will be shorter in a hard room, longer in a super plush room.
In simple PA work, you can expect “good” sound from Dc to 3 * Dc (out to 11 feet in a livingroom). Closer to source than Dc the level rises (and we typically want the level the same all over the crowd). Further than Dc you have to face the raw reverberation of the room. Then you have to estimate Rt (Reverberation time). With good ears, clap LOUD and listen till sound dies. Under 1.6 seconds is considered “good” for lecture-hall speech. Living rooms run a part-second and are normally intelligible to the corners. Vast spaces go over 1.6sec and intelligibility goes to heck very quickly at 3 * Dc.
That assumes talker and listener have excellent intelligibility inside Dc. We here have less hearing intelligibility. We may need the higher levels, and we may need less reverberation, to hear clearly.
Directional mikes have an advantage for far-work in reverberant spaces, but are not magic. With the 1st-order directional mikes you can go about 1.5 times further away for similar direct-to-reverberant balance. (Assuming you point accurately…) This can be a useful alternative to moving the mike (the HA and you) a little closer.
Source directionality counts also. A talker throws more highs to the front. If the talker is facing away from the listener, there’s maybe a 1.5x loss of useful distance. (On top of lip-reading clues.)
I was at a wedding when using the molds and found it quite difficult to understand some of the speeches. The sound system was that of the DJ doing the music for the dance, and was not great. However what I found was that male voices were very difficult to understand, while the lady that said the grace for dinner was perfectly understandable. Noise level was also way down when she was speaking too, so that probably helped.
My KS8 (Rexton Signia) aids have a Reverb Reducer program that possibly could have helped. I have since had it installed, but have had no good opportunity to use it. A Signia study claims that it does work in the majority of users.
Wedding halls and wedding DJs… don’t get me started.
You want to be ON-axis to a loudspeaker and not even halfway across the room. The clearest speech may be on the dance floor (surprise), not the far tables. But awkward to take your chair on the dance floor.
Fortunately most of the remarks are inconsequential. But if something funny comes along it is good to know what everybody is laughing at.
The maxim in the music biz is: you can always reduce reverb but you can’t remove it.
But there are helpful techniques. Many rooms boom around 250Hz and this masks higher tones. As 250 does little for speech, a stiff bass-cut and some top-boost can bring consonants out of the mud. It may not be “natural” but it may be more articulate.
Echo suppression is a thing in DSPs and conceptually a program can sort-out the first arrival of a sound and suppress later arrivals of the same sound. Except both tasks are computationally expensive, especially in a 3-D room, and prone to mess-up. I could see it happening on a large desktop PC with a lot of tweak-knobs, maybe not even real-time. (I used to do noise-reduction which took an hour to clean 5 minutes of music.) So good for Historic Recordings, not happening for wedding speech. But likely a combination of EQ and some time cancelling is a good thing to have in a HA.