Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

Hearing aid experience from a wind musician's vantage point

5 replies2.3k viewsLast reply

Link to this topic
Reply

I am a musician who has used hearing aids for 26 years. I have come to realize that the ha industry is focused on speech recognition and music is not a primary concern. That’s reality and why most folks get hearings aids.

That being said I’ve had hearing aids manufactured by Ensoniq, Phonak, and now Widex. I am a woodwind player (clarinet, saxophone, flute) and have found that in order to play my instruments and not get severe distortion of the sound the feedback manager needs to be turned off. This was true of my Phonak hearing aids. The feedback manager was either on for all programs or off for all programs. I was forced to have the fb manager turned off because of music performance. I believe that wind instrumentalist pose a particular problem for audiologist because of the bone conduction from the teeth and proximity of the embouchure to the oral cavity.

When it was time for a new set (I’ve had 3 phonak sets over thew years) my audiologist suggested I give some various manufacturers a try. I recently demoed 3 different manufactures high end products. I first tried Starkey as they have spent some serious $$$s on research for music listening. The great part was that I could have the feedback manager turned off on only those programs I was going to use for music performance and teaching while the other programs still had the fb manager on. This allowed me to perform and teach without the trilling distortion. However, the sound of my instruments was a little “brassy and bright”. I could get used to it. I also noticed every speaker seemed to have developed a lisp. Maybe due to the emphasis on high frequencies. So while the speech hearing was good it seemed a little unnatural as did the timbre of my instruments.

The next set I demoed was the Oticon OPN hearing aids. Voice sound and word recognition were great but I couldn’t use them as the distortion when performing music couldn’t be eliminated.

My last trial was of the Widex Beyond 440. With these hearing aids I was able to leave on the feedback manager for all programs, even those I used for music performance and experienced no distortion. The sound quality of my instruments (to me) was like the “good old days” and very natural.
.
The Starkey option was a good one but the Widex won out because of the sound quality of both the speech and especially music.

I still wish I had my ears of 30+ years ago but the Widex Beyond 440 are the next best thing for me.

I’d like to encourage musicians who need hearing aids to not be afraid to admit you need help. You need to be patient to find the right product for you.

I am extremely fortunate to have a wonderful audiologist who has infinite patience and is willing to spend how ever long it takes to fit and adjust my hearing aids.

Edited

I think your audi must not have known the OPN Genie 2 programming software well enough. It DOES allow you to choose which of the 4 programs you have to either have the feedback shield feature enabled or not individually.

If you look at the screen shot below, you’ll see the Feedback Analyzer window at the bottom and the Feedback Shield selection at the bottom right. It’s greyed out in my screen simply because I didn’t bother to connect my OPNs to the software. If you had them connected it would not be grayed out. Anyway, you can see clearly that I have 4 programs and I selected to have Feedback Shield enabled for my programs P1, P2, P3, but not for P4, which happens to be the default Music program designed for the OPN (with noise reduction and all processing disabled).

So ask your audi to go to this spot and selectively disable the Feedback Shield for the specific program that you want.

image

When I was demoing the OPN we actually spoke to a tech audiologist at Oticon about the distortion problem when performing music on wind instruments. She made some adjustments but the distortion still remained. Her suggestion was for me to live with it and that I’d get use to it. At that point I continued my demoing of other solutions and found the Widex worked without any changing of the feedback manager.

Believe it or not, I’ve been less than impressed with Oticon technical support before. When my audi was making adjustments for me, she’s had to call Oticon support for help and almost every question she had, they’ve had to put her on hold to go ask their own technical experts for an answer. So it’s not surprising to me that they didn’t know how to fix the problem for you and blow it off by telling you to learn to live with it.

Although an old topic I would like to add my experience. I am a Cellist. I have tried all sorts of modern hearings aids (but not the widex beyond 440), they are all a desaster (whatever my very experienced audiologist tried to program). But I found a solution: The vintage Resound Alera or Vento or the even older Beltone Marq 9 with everything switched off, so that it is just a linear amplifier with equalizer work great. One can find these ha’s used here and there. If you play music or listen to classical music, this might be a good solution. I am using modern ha’s for language. But it is a compromise since also language is music and distorted by modern ha’s.

Related discussions