I am considering getting new HAs. They will probably be either Oticon Real or Phonak Lumity. I currently have Oticon More. I’ve read some posts, especially from @Volusiano , about frequency lowering.
Phonak’s Sound Recover feature apparently has the potential of setting the target frequency much lower than Oticon’s Speech Rescue feature. I know that frequency lowering is mostly for those who have high frequency loss. I have more of a cookie-bite loss. But, looking at my audiogram, it seems like it could be beneficial to move some mid-range frequencies to the lowest target frequency that Sound Recover allows.
Does anyone here have any insight or opinion about this idea? Would it sound weird and unnatural? Could it possibly improve my speech recognition scores? My left ear has a (treated) acoustic neuroma and my hearing in that ear is weak and a little distorted. Would that affect the effectiveness of Sound Recover? Thank you.
My take: I don’t think you’re a good candidate for frequency lowering. I think you can get audibility for most frequencies with properly adjusted hearing aids without introducing the possible distortion of frequency lowering. I doubt you’d find many providers that were very enthusiastic about using frequency lowering with you.
@ziploc → I concur with @MDB 's opinion here. Like he said, your high frequency hearing loss is still quite treatable with hearing aids amplification because it’s not severe or profound yet.
But even more importantly than that, your hearing loss between 1 to 2 KHz is actually either the same or actually even worse than the loss at the higher frequencies above that range. So there’s no point into moving the higher frequency sounds to a lower destination range if that lower destination range does not have any better audibility, and actually even worse audibility. The whole point of frequency lowering is based on 2 criteria
The high frequency loss is severe to profound such that amplification is most likely insufficient → your moderate hearing loss at the high frequencies doesn’t fit this criteria.
The frequency destination region (where the high sounds get lowered to) must have better audibility than the source region (where the high sounds originate), meaning you only want move sounds from where you cannot hear well at all to where you can hear better (comparatively speaking). Your hearing loss profile doesn’t fit this criteria either because your loss is the same or worse (but not better) at the destination region.
Yes, the Phonak SoundRecover 2 can go as low as 700 or 800 Hz, but still, even at this range, your audibility is barely any better than at the higher range at all, so it’s not worth suffering the distortion that is a side effect of frequency lowering just to gain little if anything at all from doing that.
I concur with the comments presented to you by @Volusiano and @MDB.
SOME BACKGROUND:
I’m using SoundRecover on my P90’s and the difference is amazing “for me” since my loss is only in the High Frequencies with basically perfect Lows.
Prior to SoundRecover my hearing aids were incredibly loud and over amplified in the highs…that’s what they did back in the day. It helped with speech understanding - but the boosted highs made my mid and lower frequencies almost unintelligible.
I’m not an expert, but “I” believe SoundRecover and other frequency lowering systems are a wonderful advancement when one has adequate low frequency hearing.
Thank you @MDB , @Volusiano and @berettadm1 . I kind of had a feeling that Sound Recover was not going to help, but I thought I’d ask anyway. I really appreciate the three of you explaining just why it wouldn’t help.
This is an interesting topic, @ziploc. Perhaps my audiogram would suggest I’d be a good candidate for using SoundRecover on my Lumities. However, I have never got on with it with these, or my previous Marvel M90 aids.
I found that the sound was very distorted and sibilant, and if I made alterations (clarity/distinction etc), it made no difference at all.
Reading @berettadm1 's post, maybe I should give it another go, but having said that, my audiogram is pretty flat.
I wouldn’t think you’d be a great candidate because you really don’t have great places to shift the higher frequencies to. That said, since you were able to get a distorted sibilant sound, you might have success by making the settings less strong. My basic approach when setting mine up is to start with the default settings and then do a s-sh discrimination test. If I have trouble, I make the settings weaker. I haven’t tended to make use of the clarity/distinction settings, just the number settings.
Thanks for your response!
I looked at your audiogram, then looked at my own.
My previous audiologist for 8 years had only one response. Can’t hear? Turn up the gain. It was like I was listening to a stereo system. Their hearing aids were loud, and word recognition was pathetic.
Thanks for this, @MDB. I am still struggling with the basic concept of SoundRecover and other forms of frequency lowering. If there’s a sound at, say, 2kHz that my hearing loss does not allow me to hear, then freq lowering moves that sound to an area I can hear (say 750Hz). But then either I still can’t hear it, or I can hear it but it’s at 750Hz, in which case it is a completely different sound. So a bird song at 2kHz will sound nothing like a bird song. Or is it just meant for speech?
You’ve got the basic concept. Yes, bird songs will be at a lower frequency. I don’t know if you have a musical background but it would be similar to transposing a song into a different key. I believe 800 Hz is the lowest Sound Recover 2 allows one to shift the sound, but I doubt you’d want to try shifting yours that low. You might find this article useful. https://www.phonakpro.com/content/dam/phonakpro/gc_pl/en/resources/evidence/field_studies/documents/fsn_soundrecover2_high_frequency_sounds.pdf There’s also a ton of stuff available on frequency lowering, but I really question how much benefit you would receive. Depending on your word recognition scores, you might consider a cochlear implant eval.
Anecdotally, I recently has a doctoral student try frequency lowering on me. She was going by the book I guess. My loss drops like a rock after 4000 and pretty much flat lines at 100 db down. So it seemed reasonable. Not for me. I found that what few nuances were lost in the upper range were sorely missed. And I raced back to revert to my old program a week later. So, for me at least, it is a bit too soon. I was also referred out for CI evaluation. Another clue. The bottom line is try it. You might like it. Or not, it is easily reversed.
A bird song should still sound like a bird song, albeit at a lower pitch, and will not sound the same, but will sound different to you. But I bet that you will still be able to recognize that it’s a bird song.
It’s also depends on how the frequency lowering is done. With Phonak SoundRecover 2, it’s done by compressing the whole band of high frequency range down to the lower band. An analogy would be let’s say if you have a picture printed on a accordion type canvas (like the type of sunshade for your car windshield where you stretch it out to cover the windshield and fold it up when not needed). Let’s say if there’s an obstruction to this picture and you can’t see 3/4 of the right side. One way to be able to see this 3/4 on the right is to squish the accordion toward the 1/4 left so you can see the whole picture. Now you can probably still guess what is on it, but the pic is all squished up, or distorted, to look real skinny now.
With Oticon, they don’t use frequency compression like Phonak. They use transposition and composition. So using the same analogy, Oticon doesn’t squish the 3/4 on the right to the 1/4 on the left, but instead they cut the 3/4 part up into 3 equal sections, then they take each 1/4 section on the right and move it on top of the 1/4 on the left. That’s transposition. And the stack the 3 sections cut up on the right on top of each other in this 1/4 area on the left. So you’ll see the original 1/4 of the left at the bottom, and the 3 1/4 sections of the right on top of it. So you’ll be able to see the whole picture, not squished up like with the Phonak frequency compression, so more clearly, but now you’d have to “piece” together all 4 sections of the picture from bottom to top.
In terms of whether frequency lowering is just for speech only or not, the answer is yes, if you look at the banana curve on the frequency map below, the speech components in the high ends are mostly the fricative sounds, including the “s” and “sh”, etc. So if you lower these sounds by any of the methods below, they will sound different, but they still retain enough of their characteristics to recognize them even though they now sound different. And that’s how it still helps with speech despite the “distortion”.
As for the question whether frequency lowering is good for music or not. In theory you don’t want to introduce any distortion to music, and frequency lowering is by definition sound distortion. But, while I don’t have any experience with the Phonak SoundRecover 2 frequency compression to comment on that, I do have personal experience with the Oticon Speech Rescue frequency transposition and composition to tell you that music sounds fine to me using Speech Rescue and I don’t sense anything excessively odd that would not make me not enjoy listening to music with it on. That’s probably because the high frequency sounds in music that got lowered don’t alter the melodic tune of the music that much (which exists more in the lows and mid frequencies), so its distortion effect on music is negligible to me and I’d rather hear it in a different form than miss it altogether, although a more musically discerning pair of ears may disagree with me. But I’m not a tone deaf person by the way, I’ve played music all my life, and I can hold my tune while singing.
Very well said here. I totally agree with this. It really doesn’t hurt to try and if you don’t, then you’ll always be left to wonder. But to save time, you still should do some basic, minimal qualification first (as outlined in one of my earlier posts in this thread) to see if it’s even worth trying, especially if you still depend on your HCP to do it for you and the time to make an appointment and drive there and back is significant for you. But for DIY type people who can do it at home, for sure it doesn’t cost much to try it.
Either way, DIY or not, you can have it enabled in a separate program so you can do A/B comparison. If it doesn’t work out, then you can just stick with A until next time your HCP can remove B for you.
Thanks @MDB and @Volusiano for this input. It has helped my understanding a lot. I don’t have a huge problem with discerning speech, unless there’s high background noise (and I assume SoundRecover wouldn’t help in that respect).
Music and voice streaming is remarkably good without SoundRecover; I can listen to a podcast or audiobook with relatively few problems. I still have issues with Roger ON, but I self-programme, so it’s a question of experimentation.
So thank you again. And apologies to OP @ziploc if your topic has been taken over, but I hope a lot of this will be of help to you too.
