Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

How about an equalizer in the Phonak app?

3 replies175 viewsLast reply

Link to this topic
Reply

Hi, everyone;

New member, first post, so hello. :smiley: :waving_hand:

I’ve owned my Phonak Infinio Audéo aids for about a year now, and I’m very happy with them. I suffer from a couple of hearing issues, including tinnitus. After using these for a while, I wondered about a feature I’d love Phonak to add to the app, and wanted some additional opinions.

In setting up customized listening environments. I try the built-in equalizer pre-sets, and if I don’t like them, I try the custom settings. The problem I have is with the lack of different frequencies offered by the app. “Low,” “medium” and “high” tonal adjustments are fine if you’re tweaking the sound on a 1970s-vintage all-in-one record player kit for a party in your backyard. But I would think modern hearing aids could have the capability of making adjustments across a wider range of frequencies.

My tinnitus, for example, is manifested in high-frequency hissing, 24/7. When I remove my aids at night, the hissing pretty much overwhelms everything I hear, along with other issues. Having the ability to adjust multiple frequencies across a wider spectrum would be a great help for me when wearing my aids. I have specific environments where other frequency adjustments would be every useful.

I can’t believe this would a particularly difficult feature to implement in the Phonak app. I have a couple of music apps (Symfonium and Poweramp) that have built in equalizers. In Symfonium, you can activate an equalizer with as many as 31 frequencies. I would not expect that many in a hearing aid app, but 10 or 12 (or options for different numbers of frequencies) would be extremely useful.

I’m curious if there’s any agreement on this from other Phonak users, and what the chances are of this being implemented in the future. Or ever.

You are absolutely right. Any 10$ pair of earbuds comes with better frequencies control. The app is just very rudimentary, I almost never use it. My Phonaks only came to life when I got to control them myself. This requires a Noahlink wireless I or II, but is worth the money. With this you can set the gain with extreme frequency precision, at three different ambient noise levels.

I’ve considered the route, but my insurance provides pretty good coverage for audiologist updates, so I generally do it that way. In fact, my last visit two weeks ago made a lot of needed changes.

But what I’m asking is for something convenient, in the app. Having the link hardware and the Target software would be great, but somewhat inconvenient. I want something that can be adjusted in the moment on the fly.

I generally like the app and I use it a lot. My audiologist also pointed out how the usage data collected from my aids are sent to Phonak so she can download it to Target to help adjust them internally. This made a major improvement after my last visit. This is one area where I don’t have an issue with someone collecting data about me.

And Target only runs on Windows. Windows is not allowed in my house for all eternity. Call me what a Linux version is available.

I personally have never seen the need for and equalizer as my aids are so find ly adjusted for my hearing loss to make it possible to understand speech.

Related discussions