5 Things I Did to Get My Hearing Aids Over 95% Effective

Here are a few things I’ve done to improve my hearing aids to between 95% and 97% of the best they can be for me. Maybe some of these ideas will help a few people, and maybe they won’t. Some will “disagree”, which is fine. This isn’t a debate. It’s just a description of what I did and the results I got.

1. My hearing is now close to severe from 2K up. I’ve been wearing hearing aids for 10 to 12 years. My first hearing test was the one where after asking “what” fifteen times in five minutes, I noticed my wife looked like she was ready to kill me. That test didn’t have an audiogram, but it confirmed my need for hearing aids.

My hearing had been declining for a few years prior to failing the kill-me hearing test. And by the time I accepted it and did a real hearing test, my natural hearing was gone, and it wasn’t ever coming back.

Because of my education (engineering, medicine and business), I knew that there wasn’t a piece of electronics that would restore my hearing due to the sound processing complexity of the human ear and brain. Electronic amplification could make the sound louder, which meant hearing it without straining, but my processing of sound was broken, and increasing the volume would not make up for that.

The bottom line is too many hearing aid users, regardless of their experience, expect hearing aids to do things they never will.

Of course, hearing aid technology is improving, but those improvements are more about removing amplification issues that annoy the crap out of us instead of returning our hearing to normal.

I’m not going to discuss my views on the current, or future, hearing aid technology because that’s not the issue. What I am doing is resisting the temptation to chase a hearing dream that will never come true. In other words, I know that I can’t adjust my hearing aids in a way that restores what I’ve lost. And trying to would be a huge mistake. Knowing when good is good enough is challenging.

After managing the design of nearly 200 scientific instruments, I’ve learned one lesson that I posted about before, which is trying to maximize or minimize anything often breaks it. Remembering that helps avoid carnage. After reading lots of posts on this forum, I’ve come across many people that have poorly performing hearing aids, which is often the consequence of chasing the dream. Don’t.

2. Another thing I try to remember is that everything has both positive and negative consequences. There’s a lot of wind where I live. Wind is often annoying. Hearing aid companies use features like ours are optimized for music, or tinnitus resolution, or noise control to promote their hearing aids. But all of these come at a cost.

For Phonak, a high wind block setting dampens the wind noise but makes Aunt Sally’s voice sound like she’s still hoarse from last week’s case of the flu. Well, I want the wind block, so I’ll ask the audi to fix Aunt Sally’s voice. The fix is to turn up the gain across the high frequencies. Okay, now I can hear Aunt Sally better, but she sounds like she’s a walking, talking tin can, and when I stroll through a warehouse store, the sound of a bad fan bearing feels like it’s drilling a hole in the side of my head. Back to the audi!

In my case, I turn the preprogrammed wind block off, but still keep the wind noise under control without making Aunt Sally’s voice a problem. More on that later.

3. Words matter. Trying to define sounds using words is very difficult, and often not very accurate. Tinny, shrill, high-pitched, irritating, sharp, and hollow are words that I’ve heard describe voices, especially female voices. What the hell does that stuff mean? How can a fitter possibly know what I am hearing? I improved my fitting process by finding an example of a female tinny voice, recording it, and playing it back after the adjustment. That way I could tell what changed after the adjustment. Still tinny! Did the clarity get better or worse? If the clarity is worse, then I know things are headed in the wrong direction.

What’s more important: a voice sounding more natural or simply understanding every word that was said? Adjustments are not made in isolation. Even turning the volume up has positive and negative consequences. A television converts a digital sound stream to an analog wave to transmit the sound to the viewer. This simple conversion introduces artifacts. Artifacts are unwanted sounds, noise or distortions picked up during the conversion process or along the way to my ear. The louder the volume, the more artifacts I’m going to hear.

Even digital to digital streaming to my hearing aids picks up artifacts. Distortions from compression algorithms, broken bits, sample rate issues, and the final analog sound wave in my ear canal introduce unwanted sounds. In addition, sound leaks around my domes due to the higher volume can loop around to the microphones and cause feedback. Yuck, who wants that?

I’m willing to accept a balance that gives me less than perfect hearing because perfect ain’t possible, and I know if I keep pushing toward perfect, I might just break my fitting and wind up with worse hearing problems. This is true for people who work with an audi, do remote fittings or DIY their hearing aids until the HAs are begging for mercy.

4. Hearing aids are really expensive, and hearing well is really important. Just ask my wife how well she expects me to hear, and you’ll get a clear picture of the potential train wreck ahead. Before I spend thousands of dollars on a hearing aid, I do my homework. (Gee, that makes sense.)

I’m not talking about reading HA reviews. Reviews are good, but there’s more information available than ever before.

For the Sphere i90’s, I used AI to collect all the data on the i90s it could find, including reviews, relevant forum information, and technical issues. Then I set up an initial list of questions about fitting the i90s to understand my options in the Target software, the tradeoffs of each adjustment method, and my alternatives. The response to those 20, or so, questions generated a new list of questions. In addition, I asked some of the same questions over again using different wording. About a third of the time, the wording difference changed the answers.

After compiling and reviewing all the information, I felt the i90s would work well for me and would be worth the additional cost of around $800 more than Costco’s Sennheiser Rise or the other Infinio models. And I knew what fitting parameters I wanted going into the initial fitting.

Then I had to decide who to buy them from. That was more homework. While the internet promotes price competition, there’s more to buying an HA than price. In my case, I only considered authorized dealers, and the i90s had to come with a standard Phonak warranty with service provided by Phonak, L&D insurance, the state-mandated trial period, and remote fittings.

I found prices ranging from $2327 to over $7000 a pair. The low price was from Genesis-Hearing-Healthcare and the highest price came from a couple of local audi’s. Genesis is an eBay seller. That alone made me cautious. Their original list price was $2450 a pair. I checked the heart symbol to add the aids to my watch list. About half of eBay sellers offer a 5% discount on watched listed items, trying to induce a sale. And Genesis made that offer. That was step one. Next I had to find out who Genesis was.

They had both an eBay store and an online store, and each one had almost perfect reviews numbering in the thousands. However, behind almost every online dealer, there’s a parent company. In this case, it was Hear-Wise in Colorado. I checked everything about Hear-Wise. They were an authorized Phonak dealer, they had been in business over 20 years under one owner, their reviews were excellent, and they hadn’t moved all over town and changed their name. They were stable, legit and appeared to be very honest and well liked. Genesis offered remote fitting without any mention of limits. Before buying the Phonaks, I asked them for a quote on c-shells, which came back at $150 a pair. Outside of Costco’s $100 a pair, that was the lowest price I had found.

It doesn’t matter who you buy your hearing aids from; find the answers to the questions I had about Genesis before you send them lots of money.

If you want to use a local audi, ask them questions. How many pairs of X hearing aids did you fit in the last 6 months? What version of X fitting software do you use? How many times a year do you visit with the X rep? Do you have REM fitting available, and is it included in the price? It’s a mine field out there, so check everything.

5. I only have two programs available on my i90s. Calm Situation and Spheric Speech in Noise. That’s it. I have one button programmed to mute, and then there’s the long press for media streaming–mostly TV. I bypassed Autosense 7. Some people really love Autosense and some don’t. I don’t need a computer chip figuring out my environment and what changes it thinks I need in order to hear better. I’m there. I get it.

I’ve done a lot of experiments with Calm and Spheric Speech. If I’m in the car by myself and wind, or the road noise, is bothering me, I’ll either buy a better car or turn down the volume on Calm. If I’m in Calm and my wife is talking to me in the car, then buying a better car won’t help with that, so once again I turn the volume down. Turning the volume down often helps me understand speech better because of the reduction in noise, and if it doesn’t, then I turn on Spheric Speech, and that takes care of the problem. If there’s too much background noise in a TV show, then I turn on the Spheric Speech to filter it out. I use Spheric Noise in Speech for many situations, even when I’m not talking to anyone because using it makes my hearing aid experience better at that time.

When I’m streaming TV, if there’s an issue with competing noise or other interference like my 1200 cfm exhaust fan, then I turn off streaming, turn on the regular TV sound, and switch to Spheric Speech. It’s not perfect, but it works. Autosense 7 did not have a setting for a 1200 cfm exhaust fan. Maybe it will be available in Autosense 8

If Autosense makes your life 10% better, then keep it, or make some of the programs in it custom and just rotate through them. Whatever helps you hear best is what you should use.

When programming your HAs, consider my three rules of simple: simple is always the best, simple is the most overlooked solution and simple is the least understood by focused problem solvers. Keep things simple. Your HAs will work better. Mine do.

@platypus said:

Making one change at a time

I’m saying my aids are 95% as good as they’re going to get “for me.”

I used AI for defining the options for specific adjustments in the Target software. As a DIY, you know there are multiple ways to adjust for the same issue, and AI helped me figure what was possible and the cost of using each method. It saved me a lot of time.

As you mentioned, changing one variable at a time is the only way to understand the results of the change. After each adjustment I tested the hearing aids in real situations, and then I would make the same change using a different method and test that one also. I saved the best option. Doing it that way took more time but achieved better results.

@gdparker said:

My complaint is with autostreaming to bluetooth. If I turn on TV and start a show it switches to bluetooth and I have an echo from the natural tv sound.

You’re experiencing lag effect.

I use a Zvox AccuVoice soundbar connected to my TV with an optical cable. This eliminates the lag. The Zvox is designed to reduce background noise and raise the volume of speech a bit. It works pretty well.

With the Zvox, I can listen to TV using the Calm program or Spheric Speech. When the volume on each one is properly balanced, both work okay. However, when I want the best-sounding voices, etc. I switch to streaming and mute the Zvox. The only time I leave the Zvox on while I’m streaming is if there’s something I can’t understand and need more input. That’s rare.

For the best streaming sound, standard TV speakers should be muted. That too gets rid of the lag and removes the unwanted artifacts created by the digital-to-analogue sound conversion by the TV speakers. In general, almost all TV speakers are terrible. Audio and video are mostly delivered in separate tracks and then recombined by the TV. If they get out of sync, the dialog doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths. Some TVs have an adjustment to shift the tracks to bring them back into sync. That can get rid of the echo when both streaming and the TV speakers are on at the same time. In my experience, that is a so-so adjustment.

I have my Bluetooth TV and media streaming set to only turn on when I press the bottom button on my aids. When it was set to automatic streaming, every time someone turned on the TV it would stream to my hearing aids while I was in the shop, in the yard or in the basement. That didn’t work well for me. There are a lot of shows on Lifetime and Hallmark I definitely don’t want to listen to.

I not sure what you mean by AI ( chat GTP or HA AI internally) . I have been in HA Since before the pandemic ) I have had Costco K10 and now Jaba pro 10 with fear molds. They have been glitches along the way but Costco audiology services sent my current one back for replacement 3 times last year are gave me the newest Pro 50 to go on vacation with.

I have created DYI programs for daily, TV , and restaurant (the toughest one of all) I make adjustments based upon location of table and try to pick a corner where loud group is not in my hearing range.

I have started using AI like Gemini and Chat GTP to help me sort out some of my woodworking problems and landscape design. I never considered using it for adjustments to HA. How would that work?