Costco Kirkland Signature 6.0

@ronhowell said:

Hi All,
I am a newcomer to the hearing aid world, and to this thread. I recently picked up my KS6 HAs from our local Costco, and have been using them for about 4 weeks.
As a retired aerospace engineer, I naturally have a tendency to look into the physics behind any piece of technology many of us use in our daily lives. I am learning quite a bit in perusing these threads on the whole audiometry scene, with which I was not familiar heretofore.
While a number of questions have occurred, one of the first is to how the 4 programs (Normal, Restaurant, Traffic and Music) are created? Since the major variables that can be changed are Volume and Frequency, how are these manipulated in creating the 4 set programs initially? Also, are they tailored to the specific hearing profile of the customer? And is the setup a matter of continual refinement in concert with your Costco audiologist?
Comments would be appreciated.

FREQ. L R
250 15 15
500 35 20
1000 30 25
2000 50 55
3000 60 60
4000 55 60
6000 65 65
8000 55 60
PTA 38.3 33.3

RonHowell: Welcome to the Hearing Aid World.

1. There are about ten different programs that you can select from, but only 4 that can be programmed into your aid. Somewhere in this thread is a listing. The programs all adjust from your basic settings, but the HA professional can override any of the parameters.
2. There is more than volume and frequency in the adjustments. For example, there is the ability to directionally focus your hearing beam, and to widen or narrow the focus to your preference. The aids will automatically compensate for certain sounds; turn on a bathroom fan - after a couple seconds the repetitive sound lessens. This degree of lessening, I think it is called compression, is also adjustable.
3. Most of the Costco Hearing Aid Professionals are not audiologists; there is a license category called HA Dispenser, which most of them are. I don’t know that it makes much of a difference since they mainly are programmers of your HA computer.
4. Getting to optimum performance is an iterative, trial and error process. The initial settings are based on your audiogram, but they need to be tweaked to get best results. Recognize there is a language barrier; you have to describe verbally what you are hearing (or not hearing) to someone who has to translate that into computerese. As an engineer you have an advantage, but be prepared for a long adjustment period. Patience and persistence is required to get the best sound possible.

@hshachter said:

RonHowell: Welcome to the Hearing Aid World.

1. There are about ten different programs that you can select from, but only 4 that can be programmed into your aid. Somewhere in this thread is a listing. The programs all adjust from your basic settings, but the HA professional can override any of the parameters.
2. There is more than volume and frequency in the adjustments. For example, there is the ability to directionally focus your hearing beam, and to widen or narrow the focus to your preference. The aids will automatically compensate for certain sounds; turn on a bathroom fan - after a couple seconds the repetitive sound lessens. This degree of lessening, I think it is called compression, is also adjustable.
3. Most of the Costco Hearing Aid Professionals are not audiologists; there is a license category called HA Dispenser, which most of them are. I don’t know that it makes much of a difference since they mainly are programmers of your HA computer.
4. Getting to optimum performance is an iterative, trial and error process. The initial settings are based on your audiogram, but they need to be tweaked to get best results. Recognize there is a language barrier; you have to describe verbally what you are hearing (or not hearing) to someone who has to translate that into computerese. As an engineer you have an advantage, but be prepared for a long adjustment period. Patience and persistence is required to get the best sound possible.

Howard, thank you for your informed comments.
Yes, as i am acquainting myself with the nuances of the whole audiometry field I am becoming aware that there is a lot to learn, and that modern hearing aids cover a variety of needs.
Regarding your item 3 observation, I agree that the young Costco HA professional I have been seeing here in Cypress, CA is mainly a HA programmer. Much of what I am reading here on these threads would I suspect mean little to her. But at my age (79) perhaps I am being too judgmental!
I am intrigued by your comment “there is the ability to directionally focus your hearing beam”. What exactly do you mean by that?
Right now, with the initial settings I have, the higher frequencies which heretofore have been muted of absent without the HAs, sound “crashy”, … the only word I can think of that describes the sound. Using the iPhone Choice app on my 5s enables me to change the volume and modify the Treble or Base tones, which improves the situation.
As you say, it is an iterative process and patience is necessary.

Most Hearing Instrument Specialists know just as much about hearing aids as AuDs or Masters Audiologists. If you compare the best dispenser with the best audiologist, they will be on par as it pertains to making hearing aids work right. If you compare the worst audiologist with the worst dispenser, they will be on par as it pertains to making hearing aids work right. The difference is that most Audiologists have spent a lot more money on school and know more ABOUT disorders in the ear - but not necessarily about hearing aids. After talking to my AuD and PhD, we have simplified it this way… An Audiologist is searching for anomalies and disorders in the ear that they can treat, and see hearing aids as a last resort. A Dispenser is ruling out anomalies or disorders to justify using hearing aids.

In real world practice, what we actually DO is the same. For instance, I would bet that I provide a more comprehensive exam than MOST Audiologists.

My one experience with an audiologist left me with the impression that she knew a lot about hearing, but was not a very good technologist (programmer). Since then (14 years ago) I have dealt with technologists with good results. I don’t have anything against audiologists, it just seems that the places that I have chosen to do business with have been owned/operated by techs.

Online Tone Generator

Simply enter your desired frequency and press play to hear your tone. It's free, simple and easy to use.

Try it -see what you hear well above 10Khz…

You might want to send your dog to the other room first.

Don’t slip on the speech banana, DD.

@KenP said:

Don’t slip on the speech banana, DD.

Ken P.
What do the letters in the chart above indicate? I have similar letters in my Costco audiogram, but the lady that generated my chart never explained what they meant, or anything else on the chart for that matter!

Please help me understand. If the human speech is not much higher than 6000 Hz, what is the advantage to owning HAs that go much higher than that?

There really isn’t much at all above 8Khz unless:

A: You’re learning speech sounds for the first time and really need to differentiate between them and higher pitches of noise - so you can reproduce them properly (no lisp etc).

B: You have severe difficulty in locating sounds away from the horizontal plane - some HF signals give your pinna the ability to locate sounds above and below you.

C: You want to annoy teenagers.

D: You’re a functioning Bat.

Assuming that A is largely catered for as this site doesn’t really deal with Paediatric Fitting - most of you will notice some major HF improvement anyway - the extra ‘clicks’ and ‘lisp’ sounds are usually enough for the brain to cope with.

B is a valid use - however unless the implementation is CIC or smaller the pinna effects are totally lost - there are some implementations of the spatial hearing function on the market that try to emulate this technique - however they don’t rely on the extreme HF but the mic orientation.

C: If you wan’t to annoy teenagers try playing that signal generator to them at about 17kHz

D: ???

@doubledown said:

The issue is that the ks6 cuts off at around 7 kHz but you can hear well past 8 kHz. The lack of stimulation for your cochlear nerve cells may lead to atrophy issues. you will miss out on a lot of verbal cues especially from women and children. music will also not sound as good.

Didn’t you read what the guy wrote? He said that his hearing topped out completely at 10.2 Khz - that’s with headphones on and decent coupling to the output. So the very best he can hear is around 10Khz. Have a look at the octave scale - even assuming that the TWO (yes only TWO notes 8-16KHz is one octave Log Scale) notes above 8Khz were being put out at full tilt by the receiver - which they aren’t the level of information of them is tiny.

Please give it a rest with the frequency range/expansion/compression/transposition bollocks that you are spouting - it’s meaningless.

LOOK AT THIS OUTPUT DIAGRAM FROM KNOWLES - this is how effective a ‘broadband’ receiver is a reproducing sounds above 8KHz

@Um_bongo said:

Didn’t you read what the guy wrote? He said that his hearing topped out completely at 10.2 Khz - that’s with headphones on and decent coupling to the output. So the very best he can hear is around 10Khz. Have a look at the octave scale - even assuming that the TWO (yes only TWO notes 8-16KHz is one octave Log Scale) notes above 8Khz were being put out at full tilt by the receiver - which they aren’t the level of information of them is tiny.

Please give it a rest with the frequency range/expansion/compression/transposition bollocks that you are spouting - it’s meaningless.

LOOK AT THIS OUTPUT DIAGRAM FROM KNOWLES - this is how effective a ‘broadband’ receiver is a reproducing sounds above 8KHz

Sir, you need to read what I wrote!
I said the best I could hear was around 10.2 kHz … WITHOUT headphones! Whether that makes a difference to the rest of your remarks, I know not. But it would seem to me that wearing headphones in addition to hearing aids would certainly change what the brain perceives.
But what do I know, I’m just a retired aero engineer, familiar with Reynolds numbers and boundary layers!

Disrespecting Um bingo to take doubledown’ s post seriously… seriously?

How do the KS-6 work, or how are they programmed? Are the various frequencies just amplified to make up for the hearing loss shown in the audiogram? Or are the frequencies in the area of the loss transposed to another frequency? I can’t find any description in the manufacturer website.