Use Closed Fitting in One Ear or Two?

Thank you for the comments. I am going to give these closed sleeves a try for a while and see what happens. Second day with the sleeves and they are not too bad. Second day with the sleeves and they are not too bad. The custom molds may be next if these do not work out.

I’ve found a paradox of having a more occlusive fitting and being able to turn up gain while wearing your HA’s is that it’s easier to have the HA’s generate feedback on their own when you take them out. While they’re in your ears, sound generated by the receivers looping back to the external mics is very well blocked by tight-fitting molds having little or no venting, so the gain can really be cranked up and the feedback management algorithm made very mild.

However, when I take the HA’s out and the receivers come near some reflective surface and there’s nothing to block the sound from the receivers traveling through the open air to the external mics, it’s like, “Wow! Look out!” Since I have moderately strong to severe high frequency loss, it’s hard for me to hear that feedback is occurring with the HA’s out of my ears. I now turn the amplification off (but not the HA’s) in the smartphone app before I remove my HA’s (and an odd Resound Quattro behavior is that if you then turn one HA completely off via its switch, the amplification of the other HA gets turned back on (crazy!) - so I use the app again to turn off the amplification before shutting the last HA down as otherwise the receiver waving around in my hands can generate feedback as I go to operate the HA body On/Off switch). Just worried I’ll damage my receivers by too much really out-of-control feedback if I’m not careful.

@jim_lewis said:

For walking, I only notice any foot sound if I am wearing over-the-ear headphones but not at all otherwise.

Further note on the walking sound: it only happens on a very hard surface like an asphalt road. Don’t notice it at the gym walking on the much softer, more pliant belt surface of a treadmill. And it does have something to do with the headphone frame as I can increase or decrease the footpad sound by the way that I angle the headphone headband on my head, tilting the headband forward or back relative to the position of the earcups lessens the mild thumping sound relative to having the headband straight over the earcups.

Streaming via my Phone Clip+ directly to the Quattro’s eliminates the headphone footpadding problem but I don’t get the benefits of noise-cancellation/noise-blocking that I do for other bothersome really loud noises when I wear my over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones and stream to them instead of directly to the HA’S. Perhaps I should try streaming to my HA’s via the PC+ while wearing the noise-cancelling headphones and see what happens to the footpadding sound on hard asphalt…

Edit_Update: Streaming directly to my HA’s while wearing the headphones or gun muffs to block out extraneous loud noise (e.g, 10 motorcycles in a “gang” zooming up a nearby major street!) doesn’t work to block out frame vibrations from any over-the-ear device I’ve tried. If I hold part of the frame of the over-the-ear noise blocking device while I walk, that reduces the footpadding sound on hard asphalt that shows up as a result of my occluded fit. So either changing vent inserts for a walk to something less occluding or finding an over-the-ear frame that doesn’t have springiness or rattle from walking is likely to be required to solve my walking on hard surfaces with a Closed Fit problem. Or just not resume streaming until all the motorcycles, helicopter, or whatever has passed by and not wearing any over-the-ear device while streaming directly to my HA’s might do it, too.

This has been an interesting feed I am a newbie
I only have one ear due to birth defect and my hearing in my ear is bad I use a RIC with earmold and reading about the pressure is interesting…other day was running late and just grabbed my aid and put it in. All day my ear felt strange clogged could not clear that evening took aid out and noticed that my vent was clogged on my mold with wax Cleaned out and put back in everything felt great and normal again

Hey Sierra. Did you ever get you Occlusion issue solved?

I was at a wedding when using the molds and found it quite difficult to understand some of the speeches. The sound system was that of the DJ doing the music for the dance, and was not great. However what I found was that male voices were very difficult to understand, while the lady that said the grace for dinner was perfectly understandable. Noise level was also way down when she was speaking too, so that probably helped.

My KS8 (Rexton Signia) aids have a Reverb Reducer program that possibly could have helped. I have since had it installed, but have had no good opportunity to use it. A Signia study claims that it does work in the majority of users.

@Sierra said:

I was at a wedding …quite difficult to understand some of the speeches.

Wedding halls and wedding DJs… don’t get me started.

You want to be ON-axis to a loudspeaker and not even halfway across the room. The clearest speech may be on the dance floor (surprise), not the far tables. But awkward to take your chair on the dance floor.

Fortunately most of the remarks are inconsequential. But if something funny comes along it is good to know what everybody is laughing at.

@Sierra said:

a Reverb Reducer program

The maxim in the music biz is: you can always reduce reverb but you can’t remove it.

But there are helpful techniques. Many rooms boom around 250Hz and this masks higher tones. As 250 does little for speech, a stiff bass-cut and some top-boost can bring consonants out of the mud. It may not be “natural” but it may be more articulate.

Echo suppression is a thing in DSPs and conceptually a program can sort-out the first arrival of a sound and suppress later arrivals of the same sound. Except both tasks are computationally expensive, especially in a 3-D room, and prone to mess-up. I could see it happening on a large desktop PC with a lot of tweak-knobs, maybe not even real-time. (I used to do noise-reduction which took an hour to clean 5 minutes of music.) So good for Historic Recordings, not happening for wedding speech. But likely a combination of EQ and some time cancelling is a good thing to have in a HA.

@jim_lewis said:

The main reason that I see to remain with some venting is air pressure equalization

Oh, I have just wondered about a situation in which inserting a non-vented earmold creates negative pressure that could hamper eardrum vibrations. You don’t have that problem with recent occluded fitting with Spheres?

I ask because I also have no problem with occlusion, and I am a bit undecided between the no-vent and minimal-vent options.

No vent:

Pros

1. Excellent soud control (denoising, directionality, Spheric mode, streaming, high feedback threshold - achieving more target prescription gains, etc.)

2. More space for RIC receiver, which therefore could be placed deeper in ear canal —》better sound quality

Cons of no vent:

1. Hindering eardrum vibration?
2. Bodily sounds, like the humming of blood flow, do you experience any of them?