Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

New Phonak hearing aids not as clear

This topic is closed.

39 replies14.4k viewsLast reply

Jump
Link to this topic

Can’t the audiologist copy the setting from your old aid and duplicate them as a second program. The first program always stays automatic to some degree.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do realize that program 1 is automatic, but this is also the case with my old aids. I used the old aids almost exclusively in program 1. I do recall some minor adjustments were made to program 1 initially with the old aids – mainly because the volume would go down in certain situations (e.g., riding in the car with loud road noise). After the initial adjustments, that problem went away.

i have been wearing my new aids exclusively for the last few weeks. Today, I tried the old aids again and found them to be much better than the new ones in most situations. Back to the audiologist – hope we can figure it out.

Thanks,
Isosceles

In reply to @Musician_72

My V90’s usually help my speech understanding a great deal, and the blue tooth (voice and music) is simply outstanding. HOWEVER, I swear that sometimes* the automatic program “goes stupid,” and results in voices as least as muffled as with the out! (I remember thinking that if I had paid full price for them I’d be right pissed.)

*in a noisy garage etc.

I don’t have the Phonak but understand what you mean. It is quite rare for me. But a REALLY LOUD room can do it. I’ve always thought the aids were picking up way more noise than speech and weren’t picking out a talker well enough to recognize them. Usually it is in a room with no acoustics – a real barn.

I have the V90s also. In a noisy environment if there is no speech in the immediate vicinity they go into comfort in noise which mutes down all the noise. If anyone speaks nearby they switch to speech in noise or speech in loud noise and I can hear the speaker but also the background noise. If you have the automatic learning feature of the aid turned on then you can turn the volume up and this should increase speech and slightly reduce all other noise. Noise reduction is a fine art as it can impact on speech and each manufacturer has their version.

If you have not tried a reset and start again approach I would really recommend it. When I was trialing the Resound it really helped to reset to ensure I did not get too far away from the prescribed settings. The audiologist’s can only guess at what you are hearing based on how you describe it so sometimes the tweaks don’t address the real problem. I also believe real ear measurements are essential. The V90s also have the direct option to test via the HAs to set them up and it works well.

All the high end digital aids require experienced programming to get the best results. The programmer really makes the difference so you could try asking for the Phonak rep to be present to reprogram them.
If you had good results with the old Phonak’s then you should be able to achieve even better results with the V90s. Good luck and keep us posted.

@Psocoptera said:

If you have not tried a reset and start again approach I would really recommend it.

Good solid information. Thanks. Does “reset” mean power off/on or a trip to the audiologist? And if off/on, do both need to be rebooted or just one?

@USN_retired said:

Good solid information. Thanks. Does “reset” mean power off/on or a trip to the audiologist? And if off/on, do both HA need to be rebooted or just one?

The reset I refer to is a reprogramming from scratch by the audiologist. It takes the setting back to the beginning so that any unuseful tweaks are no longer there but also any useful ones. If there have been a lot of programming tweaks you may get too far from prescribed target gains and lose the useful amplification you need.

If you have a minor temporary issue with the being in a particular program then opening and closing the doors on the aids puts them back into their start-up program and let’s them do their thing and analyse the environment/choose the best automatic program etc. This can be useful if you have changed program manually and just want to get back to automatic for example. There are other ways to do this also depending on how your HAs are set up.

@doubledown said:

the answer that people probably don’t wanna hear is that there are better aids for hearing others in noise. for USN_retired the signia primax line would have been best. rexton trax 42\siemens binax\rexton emerald 4c are the older version of this line.

I have seen no trials which directly compare these aids to prove your repeated claims that one is better than the other. In fact I have not even seen a post yet by anyone wearing Signia Primax aids. You need to be very careful making claims you cannot prove and advising people based on your reading of manufacturers claims and “white papers”. These are not peer reviewed journal articles and are often little more than advertising. You write in a manner which may confuse new members into thinking you are a trained professional giving advise based on qualifications. I do not believe that is in anyone’s best interest.

In reply to @KenP

@KenP said:

I don’t have the Phonak but understand what you mean. It is quite rare for me. But a REALLY LOUD room can do it. I’ve always thought the aids were picking up way more noise than speech and weren’t picking out a talker well enough to recognize them. Usually it is in a room with no acoustics – a real barn.

The first time it happened was in a cavernous big box store. I believe my Audiologist boosted the priority(?) of “speech in noise” and that seemed to fix the problem in barn-like situations. This last time was in a loud echoey/noisy garage with a lot of banging and transients. I could not understand the mechanic who was no more than 4-5 ft from me. I had better hearing with my out!

For the record I’m new to , but I do understand multiband acoustic processing, steered cartioids, and frequency translation and compression.

I suspect that a future advance in hearing aids will be sliding digital filters. (instead of fixed width bands, you can program them to narrow/bunch up where the slope of the is steep and widen a band out where the audiogram is flat)

In reply to @Psocoptera

@Psocoptera said:

The reset I refer to is a reprogramming from scratch by the audiologist. It takes the setting back to the beginning so that any unuseful tweaks are no longer there but also any useful ones. If there have been a lot of programming tweaks you may get too far from prescribed target gains and lose the useful amplification you need.

If you have a minor temporary issue with the HAs being in a particular program then opening and closing the doors on the aids puts them back into their start-up program and let’s them do their thing and analyse the environment/choose the best automatic program etc. This can be useful if you have changed program manually and just want to get back to automatic for example. There are other ways to do this also depending on how your HAs are set up.

I have not had many tweaks so I may first ask for another boost to “speech in noise” or perhaps a decrease in one of the comfort settings to keep things centered. I believe that my controls are programmed > button is my “home program,” and my toggle adjusts for volume. (to me gain=directionality)

But if I have to nuke the current setup from orbit I will (it’s the only way to be sure) I’ll ask for the Phonak rep to be there to start from scratch.

Thanks for all the good information.

Here is an update on my Phonaks. The new hearing aids have been adjusted twice since I last posted, but I’m still having problems. The audiologist raised the knee-point and set the algorithm to “semi-linear.” She said that the algorithm of my old aids (Spice) was more linear than that of the new aids (Venture), and that the knee-point for the old aids was quite a bit higher. I’m not an audiologist, but my understanding is that sounds below the knee-point are all amplified by a fixed amount of gain; and that sounds above the knee-point are compressed (please correct or clarify if I’m mistaken). I believe speech in loud noise has been disabled in the main program and made a separate program. I don’t think any of the other programs have been disabled.

The result of these changes has been that background noises - paper rattling, door shutting, etc. - are too loud, and speech is not loud (or clear) enough. consonant sounds (t, s, ch, sh, etc.) are difficult to distinguish. I believe that they were better before the knee point was raised and process switched to semi-linear (but still not as clear as the old aids). There are some differences depending on the environment (restaurant, large room, outdoors, etc.), but even in a quiet room speaking to one or two people, speech is easier with the old aids.

Any advice is very much appreciated and welcome. I am inclined to take the earlier advice about re-starting with the default program and starting over (sigh…).

Thanks,
Isosceles

Post your so we can check it out. Unless your old devices were programmed pretty unusually, the Ventures should sound much better, regardless of the linearity. In my experience, with the release of the Quest platform, the Phonak rationale seemed like it became MORE linear, with more gain being applied to loud and moderate inputs than in the previous Spice platforms. Venture looks very similar to Quest in that regard. At least theoretically. Post your Audiogram and we can look at it in more depth.

My values are shown below. Pretty little residual hearing left following my 20 year battle with Meniere’s. However, as I said, the old aids make it possible for me to communicate, work, listen to music, etc. These threshold values fluctuate +/- 5dB in sequential tests (obviously some subjectivity in an audiogram), but overall relatively stable for the past few years (and not nearly as much fluctuation as at the beginning of the Meniere’s). My unaided speech discrimination hovers around 80% in both ears.

With both the new aids (V90) and the old aids (Audeo Smart I), I am able to get a fairly flat audiogram, and speech discrimination is 100%. But listening to a near-perfect studio speaker in a soundproof chamber is very different from listening to real people in the real world.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. I have my next appointment next week, but I don’t know enough about the complex programming to ask the right questions or make any suggestions. I do know that the latest settings have made my new V90’s almost impossible to wear.

      250     500     1000     2000     4000     8000  (Hz)

L 50 50 50 65 70 70 ()

R 75 80 75 70 75 90 (dB)

Again, thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Isosceles.

What about the suggestion that Um Bongo made some weeks ago? Your audi should make real ear measurements for both the old and the new aid, then you can see clearly what´s going on.

Yes, that is a good idea. I wasn’t familiar with the Real Ear protocol/method so I just read some info online. Seems like it might offer some insight into what’s going on. Hopefully my audiologist will have the capability to take and interpret the measurements.

Thanks,
Isosceles.

Edited

Hi Did you solve the problem?

I am having a similar experience transitioning from Virto B 90’s to Audeo L 90’s everything I have done with and without audiologist leaves me with worse speech comprehension on new aids. They are better in noise. But I need them to be better in quiet.

Related discussions