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Outer Ear Plugs With Oticon Intent For Noise Isolation

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I’ve had my Oticon Intents for almost a year; they are my first hearing aids and I love them.

However, when I listen to music streamed directly to them, for instance when my wife is watching TV or I’m on the London Underground or, more importantly, when I’m on a plane they are pretty useless even with the volme up full and with mute enabled. However, if I loosely place fingers in my ears the music immediately becomes crystal clear and I can turn the volume down to about 50%.

I assume that this is due to leakage through and/or past the open domes I use. I’ve had two pairs of hard molds made, but both were useless and wouldn’t even fit into my ears let alone stay there, so I gave up with those - at least my audiologist didn’t charge for them.

Does anyone else have this issue and if so has anyone come up with a good solution for it? I don’t want to resort to removing my aids everytime I want to stream music from my phone. Maybe soft silicone ear plugs that could just be lightly pushed into the outer ear when required?

Historically, when we were trying to get ’s to work with a live piano, one of the first attempts reported on the net was a lady who used rubber erasers. She rounded them, sliced them from the side to the middle and put them behind the dome on the thin flextube to close it up, when playing piano.

Another approach could be to use vented or power domes. Domes are quite easily switched. So even if open domes make understanding speech much easier, you could switch them. I am a little lazy, so I would probably stick to the vented domes.

If you really want to hear those bass sounds, you can also ask your audicien to boost those in you streaming program. However, you could also switch to power domes. Those have no vents and there are 2 consecutive domes to really seal the ear canal.

Last but not least, you could put on over the ear headphones. They also really seal off the ears. My mother even habitually listens to headphones with her aids set to the normal program. No good idea why, though. Probably habit, she’s 85 and likes them.

In the end I purchased some cheap soft silicone ear plugs and tried them on two recent flights. They cut out about 90% of the external noise and then when muted the speaker in the app as well they were perfect. A good, cheap solution for me.

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