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The best hearing aid for very high frequency loss

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My high frequency hearing has rolled off over the last 20-years. I can no longer hear crickets, birds or change in my pocket. If I put the coins up to my ear, I can hear them normally. If I put on a pair of Bose ear buds I can hear the brushes on the symbols like I did in my younger years. According to hearing tests, my hearing hasn’t changed much in the 15-years that I have been wearing hearing aids but they only test up to 6 kHz or so. All of the detail in sound is in the high frequencies. Doesn’t anybody manufacture a hearing aid with a high frequency response up to 15 kHz? From what I understand, my type of hearing loss is not unusual. My Oticon Agil aids are 5-years old and starting to fail. This time around I want something better.

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Five years later, anything should be better.

As to HF, you are dealing with small speakers. Your wall of speakers can claim for sending highs and some actually can. But, even with speaker advances, size matters.

You can be dubious about some of the claims that this aid or that goes higher. But consider higher = faint, faint whisper.

Better now will be directionality help and better noise suppression.

Several members are EE(audio) specialist and may give you more or better suggestions. There are also a number of musicians that share their views here.

In reply to @KenP

Thanks for your reply Ken. I understand that speech comprehension is considered the most important. When you can’t hear, you stop listening.

My Oticons do a good job with noise control. They are supposed to have a high end of 8 kHz, better than standard AM radio.

One day while sitting with my reading glasses propped behind my ear, the lens reflected high frequencies into the rear microphone opening of my hearing aid and I could discern the difference between an S and an F. This leads me to believe that the square cut openings would probably do a much better job of picking up high frequencies if they had a curvilinear shaped openings.

It seems like audiologists dismiss high frequencies as unimportant. If they would design a hearing aid to take care of music, the human voice would take care of itself.

@High_Fidelity said:

It seems like audiologists dismiss high frequencies as unimportant. If they would design a hearing aid to take care of music, the human voice would take care of itself.

Most Audiologists appreciate that there isn’t much human speech above 6KHz, much less above 8KHz. Though there are hearing aids operating out to 10KHz, but the amount of output there is minimal.

And if you think the extra four keys on your piano are going to make a huge difference to your hearing, best of luck to you.

Signia claims up to 12K, but I don’t know realistic that is. Another thing to consider is . Most manufacturers have some variation on this and there are several different approaches,

Why don’t you post your so we can see how much high frequency loss you’re talking about here. Based on that, it’s easier to see why you’re so keen about being able to hear up to 15kHz if you can’t even hear crickets in the first place.

It’s not that audiologist dismiss high frequencies as unimportant. It’s more like the high frequency loss of many people are usually pretty severe that it’s far long gone and it doesn’t make practical sense to spend considerable amount of effort in trying to amplify sounds up to 15KHz where the ROI in that frequency range is negligible compared to the ROI of trying to address frequency loss up to 8KHz only.

When you said all of the details in the sound are in the high frequencies, that’s a meaningless generalization because the high frequency range is so vast and can be anywhere from 4KHz up to 20KHz. Unless there’s some way to quantify how much details is say between 4-6 KHz, 6-8 KHz, 8-10 KHz, and beyond that in order to clarify and substantiate your statement a bit more.

Anyway, rather than trying to focus on amplifying the highs for people with severe loss in the highs with little ROI, what the mfgs are doing is a more practical approach, trying to lower those HF sounds into the lower frequency spectrum so that the patients can hear those sounds in the range that’s more audible to people where they can still hear better there. For example, I’m wearing the Oticon OPN and it has a technology and I can hear the “s” and “sh” sounds and even cricket sounds very clearly because those sounds have been lowered to the 2KHz range where my hearing there is still adequate and not too far long gone like my hearing at 4KHz and beyond.

Anyway, so if you’re looking for something better and wanting to be able to hear the details of the HF sounds that you can’t hear anymore, don’t waste your time trying to find new HAs that can amplify up to 15KHz (because there are probably none). Instead focus on finding new HAs that has frequency lowering technology and try those out.

In reply to @Um_bongo

Not so much on a piano but a huge difference on a triangle tap, sleigh bells, sticks or brushes sliding on the symbols, maracas and the like. It’s not just the basic frequency. There are a lot of high frequency harmonics in vocal sibilance as well.

Here’s a link to an interesting device for birders that lets you lower frequencies by different ratios. There’s a simulator on the web page that lets you hear different bird songs at different ratios.

http://hearbirdsagain.com/168

In reply to @MDB

Thanks for your reply. The Oticon Agil seems to do the same thing but it changes the sound so that it is no longer recognizable. It makes many different things sound the same. The microwave beeps and I think the land line is ringing.

I would suggest trying analogue K-amp from the states which will give you ultra high frequencies. The compression used by the new Starkey muse chip has given me very good results for a couple of musicians who were really struggling with twin reed instruments. A lot of other aids will “hear” this frequency and then suppress it jut as quick thinking its feedback. On some lesser tech aids I have had some success by changing the domes and then switching off the feedback manager

In reply to @Volusiano

I know that my complaint seems rather trivial to those of you with profound hearing loss. I have worked with high fidelity audio equipment for over 50 years. I’m familiar with audio generators, oscilloscopes and Fletcher-Munson loudness curves. I know that I could hear up to 18 kHz in my younger years. My loss is not total. I can hear high frequency just fine with a $400 pair of Bose ear buds. I can put my naked ear next to the high frequency tweeter speaker in a 50-year old hi-fi phonograph and hear the triangle strikes on Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme. It’s frustrating that a hearing aid can’t do as well as a half century old record player.

What’s the highest frequency you can actually hear at now then?

What sort of power do you think you would need to drive a diaphragm in opposite directions at 12,000 times a second when you have 1.2Volts at your disposal?

Engineers design and make hearing aids BTW. Audiologists fit them.

A question prompted by this. I’ve noted that less powerful receivers (for milder losses) often claim up to 10k, but more powerful receivers often only go to 5 or 6k. Is there a simple explanation for this?

@MDB : Bigger speaker means lower frequency (a viola gives lower frequencies than a violin).

As for the very high frequencies: Usually, with high frequency loss, the loss gets worse the higher the frequency.

So, to make overtones at, say, 12 kHz audible, you would need a ridicoulus amount of gain at that frequency, which would result in distortion, clipping, feedback.

My advice: Use an aid that states “up to 10 kHz”, then this aid will be able to give real gain at 8 kHz, and with that, music will sound very much better than without the aids.

To get more performance, use headphones / earbuds in conjunction with a good equalizer. Try to reproduce the gain-curve of your aid (try not to equalize your loss, this will blow your ears!!!), this will give a sound not to far away from what you are used from your aids, but with better fidelity.

I really had those thoughts, too (what about 10 kHz and above?) but I must embrace the fact that I hear so much more with the aids in , even though they have no real gain above 8kHz, that this is still a large improvement!!!

Edited

In reply to @High_Fidelity

@High_Fidelity said:

I know that I could hear up to 18 kHz in my younger years. My loss is not total. I can hear high frequency just fine with a $400 pair of Bose ear buds. I can put my naked ear next to the high frequency tweeter speaker in a 50-year old hi-fi phonograph and hear the triangle strikes on Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme. It’s frustrating that a hearing aid can’t do as well as a half century old record player.

Can you fit your $400 Bose ear buds or your tweeter inside your ear canal the way a tiny hearing aid receiver fits inside your ear canal? You may know a lot about hifi audio equipment but it looks like you don’t know much about the law of physics then.

There’s only so much a tiny receiver can do and trying to optimize it for HF amplification beyond 8KHz, even if possible, and likely not, is just not a priority or even practical for the masses of people who need to wear hearing aids and their HF loss is almost total. So your complaint is to the wrong product and the wrong audience.

I think if your HF loss is not total and you want products that can deliver HF beyond 8KHz, you should be looking at (Personal Sound Amplification Products) instead. You can probably wear them around but they’ll be sticking out of your ears quite a bit. But you can just use them when listening to music only and for normal daily routines, you can wear HAs.

In reply to @MDB

@MDB said:

A question prompted by this. I’ve noted that less powerful receivers (for milder losses) often claim up to 10k, but more powerful receivers often only go to 5 or 6k. Is there a simple explanation for this?

Yes. In one word ‘resonance’.

You can make a reed (think a ruler over the edge of a desk) fatter or longer give more ‘waggle’, but in doing so you lose the ability of that beam to vibrate freely at pitches outside of the higher harmonics of the original resonance.

@MDB said:

A question prompted by this. I’ve noted that less powerful receivers (for milder losses) often claim up to 10k, but more powerful receivers often only go to 5 or 6k. Is there a simple explanation for this?

@Um_bongo said:

Yes. In one word ‘resonance’.

You can make a reed (think a ruler over the edge of a desk) fatter or longer give more ‘waggle’, but in doing so you lose the ability of that beam to vibrate freely at pitches outside of the higher harmonics of the original resonance.

And that’s why in the speaker world they have subwoofer and woofer and mid and tweeter to handle different ranges. They can’t make one thing that can deliver in all ranges from low to high.

Try the Oticon OPN devices, set up properly they have the best sound I have heard in over 55 years. And, a good provider should allow at least 30 no-cost trial period. Some allow 60 days.

In reply to @Volusiano

Thanks. This is helping but it’s still a little fuzzy. A typical tweeter is still a heck of a lot bigger than even the most powerful hearing aid receiver. Does it take more electrical power to drive high frequencies than lower ones?

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