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Assessing your HAs: DIY subjective REM with warble tones

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As a human-factors psychologist, I always say, along with Protagoras that “people are the measure of all things”. That’s especially true with the perception of sound and intelligibility.

Here is a method of assessing just what your are doing, at least about gains in audiology bands.

There is a website that presents the familiar audiology frequencies as warble tones by loudness steps. (Almost any audibility test that uses pure sine waves is naive.) See link below.

The procedure needs loudspeakers with good tweeters; headphones can’t be used because they may project their output in funny directions relative to your ears and hearing aids.

Likely just working with both ears will give you a sufficient big picture. But using an earplug in one ear, you can plot the ears individually. Begin by sitting facing the loudspeakers and hold your laptop on your lap.

In the first step, you plot your unassisted hearing. That nice website charts it for you and you just print it out.

In the next step, you wear your HAs and plot again and print it out.

Then you mark on the first plot how the HAs differ from the unaided first plot.

The plot will directly show what gain you are getting and at what bands.

That’s it. Or you can tweak your settings and do another run.

It doesn’t matter if your loudspeakers and room setting have an irregular frequency curve or a weak treble because your interest is only in seeing what the HAs are adding in each band.

https://hearingtest.online/8

@Bentoronto said:

The procedure needs loudspeakers with good tweeters; headphones can’t be used because they may project their output in funny directions relative to your ears and hearing aids.

If this is true, why use headphones or inserts (earbuds) when performing hearing tests?

In reply to @Bentoronto

The use of warble tones for aided testing isn't recommended as modern digital signal processing can alter the perceived loudness of this type of stimulus, depending on the position of filterbank crossover frequencies and the type(s) of being used. Pre-recorded frequency-specific speech-like stimuli are recommended for this type of testing.

In reply to @OcramSagev

Not sure where to begin to reply.

I have pretty fancy over-the-ear headphones. But their large cushions just smother my . In the assessment I've described, you wouldn't be getting any kind of fair comparison with those headphones. Likewise for any system of presentation (even for just sitting in your chair, you shouldn't twist your head or the sound in your room will change).

Tests (and all research) always must depict how conducted. That's just part of the definition. So you might say, "When tested by in-ear loudspeakers (AKA receivers, a very confusing ancient telephone term)...."

But even in that rather pure test closer to the ear drum like , manufacturers of fancy in-ear speakers sometimes tweak their devices with allowances for resonances inside the ear canal (around 4K if I recall correctly).

in fact, all but the purest lab systems (like the Bell Labs anechoic chamber where I did some testing 60 years ago), have various odds and ends of peaks and valleys of loudness. Which is why you should try to use warble tones and not to use pure tones lest you pick a pure tone which is peekish (or maybe valleyish). A fine-detailed frequency spectrum of a loudspeaker, room, or maybe ear, looks like a mountain range, not a smooth curve. The warble varies the frequency.

In reply to @Hearing_Potential

Yes, wise to use complex and very relevant test stimuli like speech rather than pure tones.

While in the abstract you can equalize any narrow or pure signal to a fare-thee-well, it is just a losing game to try to nail down a frequency response with theoretical EQ. The resonances and twists and turns will still be there even if the input has been EQ'ed. And if you blink, they may shift around a bit.

Thanks for postings a link to this discussion

I’m happy I have new hearing aids now. My last two sets of receiver in canal hearing aids plain didn’t work.

There have been many many times I’ve said there’s no darn way these are medical equipment. And, they sell hearing aids the way cars are sold. Ship them to a specialist. Ask them to set them up so they can be used.

I’ve tried to find better information.

I’ve had lots of help here. However, I feel sometimes we talk in code.

As an engineer I’ve cursed the darn little that Phonak provided in my Paradise hearing aids. They came in a circular disc. And cursed the domes that hid them.

How can a device that costs a few cents to make destroy our hearing aids performance?

Do they ask old hearing impaired people like me to try them before they decide?

I lost my hearing working for 3M Canada in a 110 environment. 1971. There was no hearing protection provided.

Thanks for your post

DaveL

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