I’m so frustrated. I purchased my Phonak Audeo hearing aids last May. Almost one year and at least 12 adjustment appointments, and I am still unhappy with their performance. Everything seems so LOUD, but I can’t HEAR anything, if that makes sense. I am still having to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times and often I am still not clearly sure what they are saying.
My provider is very nice and has done her best to meet my needs—I do believe we have finally found the correct tips—it is the other adjustments… I just don’t know where to turn to next. Do I have to accept a less than good experience (after paying lots of money!) because “that’s just the way it is”? Could my provider, who is really lovely, not know what she is doing? Do I need to accept that hearing aids will never be as good as “natural hearing”? Is this a common experience, that the hearing aid experience is not meeting expectations?
Welcome to the forum, ok for sure it’s pointless going on about all these questions, because for you I see only one way forward to get things back on track, a project, this is one way you can get things sounding the way you like things to sound, a little bit of research and you’ll see how easy it is, of course it’s not for everyone, but if your handy with your PC and software you’ll be able to do it, save money and time.
Do I need to accept that hearing aids will never be as good as “natural hearing”?
Unfortunately yes, The key word in hearing aid is “aid”. Once the hairs in our canal are damaged or die, there is no way to replace them. So the solution is to come up with a combination of noise reduction and emphasis on the parts we can hear so that it makes sense. Hearing but not understanding is a common complaint. A good audiologist can utilize the hearing that we do have to enable us to understand speech and to appreciate the other sounds we want to hear to the best extent possible. As tenkan noted, many of us lean to adjust our own hearing aids. The benefit of that is that we can make a hundred adjustments without a hundred trips to the audiology clinic. Of course, a trained audiologist should be able to make meaningful adjustments in less time than it takes us to learn. Actually, doing it yourself is pretty easy with a little patience and persistence.
Hey tenkan I plan on buying a NoahLink 2. I have a Phonak Audeo Lumity hearing aid as well as the Oticon Intent. Can you send me the links to both Phonak Target and Oticon Genie 2? Thank you.
Hi there, great your giving a go, be sure to do some research and read the user guides before starting as it’s very helpful for setting up the first time.
I’m so frustrated. I purchased my Phonak Audeo hearing aids last May. Almost one year and at least 12 adjustment appointments, and I am still unhappy with their performance. Everything seems so LOUD, but I can’t HEAR anything, if that makes sense. I am still having to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times and often I am still not clearly sure what they are saying.
I had exactly this when I got UK (NHS) Marvel M70 aids. Even with full moulds, I was disappointing results hearing quiet talkers. I went private, and bought Paradise P90 and had them properly programmed, and what a difference! Since then, I went , which opened the Ebay market for me, to keep costs down. The other advantage to DIY is you can make changes anytime.
I agree totally with @tenkan in that DIY is probably your best way forward. This is why.
In my experience, the default “first fit” isn’t good, and Phonak’s “Autosense” isn’t for everyone. The good thing us that Phonak really are superb for fine tuning each element of Autosense, so you can tweak each element without affecting the others. If this isn’t for you, it would be worth adding a couple of the elements as additional programmes. I stated this by adding “Music” and “Speech in noise”. There are similar programmes in the App, but I don’t mean those.
When you’re in a “Speech in noise” situation, use the app, and make notes of any changes you make with improve speech recognition. Personally, I found that noise reduction settings actually reduced the clarity of those I was trying to hear! So, I’ve reduced the noise reduction, but focused on the sounds directly ahead of me. This reduces sounds from the sides and behind, which “can” make all the difference.
When in “Music”, think of this as an “all in” programme. You’ll hear 360⁰ with vitually zero noise reduction. What helped me here is to increase the gain on the soft sounds (G50) from 1khz upwards.
There are a choice of fitting programmes. I find Adaptive Phonak Digital better for me than . I found NAL-NL2, that everything was really loud. seems to have more compression, and loud sounds don’t seem as harsh. This can all be dependant on your loss (and would help). I’d suggest your Audiologist tries another fitting formula.
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