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Problems with organ music

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Hi
I have “mild to moderate” hearing loss - mostly at the higher frequencies as you’d expect for a 75 year old! I recently got a pair of Phonak Audeo I70 and from the speech point of vie they are great.
Listening to music is generally OK if I manually switch to the music program. However I’m also an organist and I find the aids completely unusable when I am playing - I just have to take them out. The biggest problem is pure tones. Things like quiet flute stops have a nasty distortion to them.
By background, I’m an engineer, not a musician so I know about sound processing, compression, etc and it certainly sounds to me like there is some level of processing going on. Looking at all the adjustments in the app for the music setting, ‘Noise reduction’ is at zero as is ‘Dynamic’ and ‘speech Focus’. The equalizer has the effects you would expect but doesn’t do anything about the problem. Audiologist (Boots) says that’s all the control there is.
I’m new to hearing aids so I’d welcome advice. Is this a problem with all aids or should it be fixable? Currently, I can still play fine without the aids in so it’s not insurmountable at present.
I’m still in my 90 day trial so time to change my mind if necessary!
Thanks

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I’m a long retired (age 83) broadcast & audio engineer. My inner ears are broken so I don’t listen to music.
Getting back to ’s, I see very little discussion about distortion. It’s all about a reciprocal EQ of the .

@sclg said:

Things like quiet flute stops have a nasty distortion to them.

If they are quiet at around 50 , there is more gain applied, which increases the risk of entering , potentially distorting especially ‘pure’ tones (musical tones are not completely pure; they have aliquot tones). To decrease the probability of turning on feedback cancellation, you need better sealing in your acoustic coupling.

Which acoustic coupling do you have? Domes? Earmold/cShells/SlimTips? What diameter of vent they have?

Entering an to your profile settings could help to provide more accurate advice.

Compare quiet flutes with louder (at least 65 or 80 dB) to see possible differences with distortion.

If organs are very loud for most of the time, consider hearing protection.

Many musicians have used the linked guidelines below to help their audiologists try to tame some of the processing that is helpful for speech recognition but can interfere with musical tones. Generally, taming compression ratios, dialing back or reducing anti-feedback processing (which seems to recognize some notes as potential feedback and shifts frequencies away from some musical notes) and more.

How closed your HA fitting is makes a big difference in bass response, too.

Dr. Chasin’s Checklist for Optimizing Your Hearing Aids for Music • Grand...15

For musicians with hearing loss, we offer this expert-verified checklist to take to your audiologist to create a better music program on your hearing aids.

The biggest issue I think that might be going on here is the feedback manager. Also, depending on how loud the organ is, Phonak has this not so great setting of slamming down the compression particularly at high freqs when it thinks things are getting loud. Given the amount ofsound pressure/volume an organ is putting out, that might well be happening.
Get your audiologist to try turning off the feedback manager and try the organ without it. it might mean you have to change to a different type of dome, but even lowering the might help you a bit.

In reply to @Bimodal_user

I’m not very knowledgeable on the details but it looks like a dome with 2 tiny hole - c0.5mm.

dome
Hopefully a photo attached. The problem is most noticeable at lower volume levels. This is only a small parish church organ so ven full organ is not that loud!!

No you wouldn’t. That’s something your audiologist is going to have to turn off I’m afraid and just FYI turning it off will likely cause you other problems. so it’s something to explore with them. I suspect though, knowing how Phonak sounds, this is probably what is causing you to hear weird sounds. the other thing is check whistle block. your mention of a flute made me think this might be happening. I’ve noticed sometimes when whistle block is on, harmless sounds that sustain one note get cut off.

In reply to @Xonic83

@Xonic83 said:

Get your audiologist to try turning off the feedback manager and try the organ without it

It probably cannot be done, because first @sclg should change to a more occluded dome (? Even power domes) to achieve a better seal in the ear canal. Without it, the OP will experience much screeching, which defeats the purpose.

If the seal will be better, then, in the Audi office, it is worth testing the tendency to feedback. Cupping hand around ear or playing quiet recording of the flutes.

Then decreasing the WhistleBlock can be considered.

If domes wouldn’t be enough, then maybe it’s time to custom SlimTips/cShells or earmolds deep placed in ear canal and with proper vent diameter.

If feedback is an issue at all I recommend just going for molds of some sort. More comfortable, optimized venting to maximize gain. Cheap in the long run, esp when considering how much aids cost, to live with them handicapped due to physical fit is a shame.

WH

I wouldn’t normally suggest them due to the lifespan issue, but this looks like a perfect opportunity to use ActiVents.

Historically Phonak/Unitron haven’t handled music that well outside of their dedicated music mode, but that takes a few seconds to kick in once the sensor has decided it actually is music.

My vents stay open for music. I’ve never questioned if that is correct behavior. They close for speech in loud noise (now spheric) and streaming but not music. Is this not correct?

WH

Not sure, and this is possibly not the correct application, but logically it would make sense to have a program that dropped the aids into unvented mode; just to benefit from the effect of not having the feedback manager struggle against the musical notes. They might sound a bit occluded for the duration of the church service, but that’s manageable for an hour or so if they give good music reproduction at the same time.

I wonder whether with non streamed music open (like “3mm diameter vent”) state is because of the common view that music should arrive at eardrum unprocessed.

That common view is probably quite old, from the times, when quality of aound from weren’t much good.

Perhaps it doesn’t make sense now, when modern HAs are much better? I only suppose.

@Bimodal_user said:

t music should arrive at eardrum unprocessed.

I think it is more that those with good low freq hearing should hear it naturally. Assuming you aren’t trying to filter out noise, you want to hear it all, but the feedback does rear an ugly head, and if the feedback suppression gets the willies over what it hears…. It isn’t really feedback, right? It is an organ note that fakes out the feedback suppression.

Solution is probably create a program to turn down feedback for organ time?

WH

I’m also using Phonak L90s and as an (ex-) audiophile, they sound simply atrocious for music. Period. I now have two years of experience configuring them in Target and have customized my own Music program so that ALL is turned OFF. No whistle block, nothing. Thankfully I don’t need extremely high gain and for the purpose of listening to music, feedback is not an issue. I have gone so far as to set the EQ for zero compression, to see if that reduces the perceived distortion. Nope. How about smoothing the EQ curves more, attempting to reduce the Q of the individual bandpass filters? Nope. Sorry, there is some kind of latent distortion, which sounds like intermod to me, and it’s always there.

My next stop is Widex, as soon as my provider has them ready to go. Hoping for a better result on music. BTW, I still like my because speech recovery was my main objective and by golly I can in fact now understand people in most situations. Being without the aids would be a huge setback in daily life. But the music part…

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