My experience going from Widex to Oticon to Starkey trial

That’s frustrating for you. I tried domes with F2 Evokes and lost a lot of clarity, custom gives best hearing experience. You are right that the fit is very important. Widex have a clear fitting software set up but a lot of dispensers who do multiple aids think they can miss something off and it won’t make a difference-it does. It can make it too heavy sounding, lacking in clarity etc. When following the Widex software in selecting the exact vent/mould type, doing the feedback calibration and then the sensogram you get the proper experience and then for me a very high level of hearing. I appreciate it’s very difficult to know if this has been followed. As I have worn Widex for many years, when my hearing significantly dropped with a new fitter I knew it wasn’t right and after some research managed to get someone aligned to the set up.

I haven’t heard of an Audi making the vents bigger themselves before! If for instance the vent went from 1 to 1.5 the fitting would need to be redone on the aids. The frequencies will then automatically be adjusted to fit and match the new acoustic set up with the increased vent and those subtle changes will give best acoustic performance for speech and indeed everything. The vent size would need to be changed on the software, feedback calibration run again and sensogram performed. It can be the difference between for example 90% and 100% speech recognition. The lower and higher frequencies will be carefully adjusted by the software to give best experience. Learnt from my son’s fittings and my own over many years.

All of which can be done in house. We regularly modify the amount of venting.

It’s one of those Hearing Aids 101 skills that many people overlook. We also dabble with vent reduction with inserts and UV set acrylic.

I believe she did the sensogram after making the vent larger but I’m not 100% sure.

I’d look at cutting/adding the 500-750Hz, sometimes the out of phase signal damps the echo, however if it’s in phase it will add to the wave.

The easiest way to check if it’s a physical problem that needs a vent change is to make a low E sound yourself with the aid in, but turned off. If the resonance is there, it’s a physical problem. If the aid only makes the resonance when it’s turned on, the issue is the tuning.

Thanks so much, that makes perfect sense.

@Um_bongo I found the low E on youtube with a guitar. Haven’t had a chance to listen without HA’s but with the aids I didn’t notice any echo, just using cheap pc speakers though. But, a semi just went by the shop and I guess it was the tires maybe, that sound created a good echo/vibration.

So should I try to find a sound that for sure gives me trouble that I can duplicate and use that with the aids off? If I can get it loud enough to hear with aids off.

LOL, That shows how much I know about it. Well…what about the experiment I just posted, does that mean anything?

Might tell you if you’re getting some stray resonance on a particular harmonic of the guitar.

@tim4 said:

I just did an experiment using my tv which is connected to a Yamaha receiver and tower speakers. There’s a sport talk show I listen to every day and the guy’s voice is one I struggle with. Echo and vibration.

With the molds in, hearing aids OFF, volume turn up to a comfortable listening level, the echo/vibration is so bad I can’t understand a word. If I pull the molds out his voice clears up perfectly.

Ok, sorry, what about this @Um_bongo ?

Went back to Audi today to get the molds with new larger vents. That definitely took care of the echoing. The moments have never sounded better to me. I’m not sure if there better than OPNs with voices, but maybe just as good. Moments are definitely better with lower tone voices that I was having so much trouble with. It’s not apples to apples though because moments have custom molds, OPNs have tulip domes. We were going to put the molds on the OPNs to try but ran out of time, two hours goes by fast. She wanted to do a hearing test first to make sure nothing had changed.

@tinkyp, I know how adamant you are with the sensogram and vent size. I wish I would have thought to ask in the office if she changed the vent size to the new larger size before running the sensogram but I didn’t. I did send her an email when I got back asking that very question though. Thanks for your input on that.

I’m not going to get into comparing the two HAs because a lot of the differences good relate to the acoustic difference in the molds vs domes.

She did say she wants me to try the Starky Livio. So I will be giving the Livio’s a try in a week or two.

I am really pleased you are getting some progress and sorted the echo out. It’s these things that make such a difference to your hearing experience. Really glad you have also asked about the vent size. I didn’t realise how important it is until it was wrong and then corrected and I know you get the full Widex sound experience when this is all performed correctly. It creates what I call the spine of sound exactly as it needs to be to give maximum speech comprehension and then when the sound classes change you keep that really strong comprehension. As some fitting software doesn’t need this, dispensers can just not realise the importance. Keep us posted, I know how busy an appointment can be for remembering everything and sometimes it just needs redoing again for you to experience the technology at its best.

@tinkyp said:

As some fitting software doesn’t need this, dispensers can just not realise the importance.

I wonder which sw doesn’t take into the account vent size?
I thought all of them need that for their calculations.
Target definitely warns you that it’ll recalculate everything when you change the vent size.
But maybe fitters are lazy and don’t enter the correct value.
In that case, change the fitter, since vent size is basic thing for acoustic properties and if they don’t know that, I don’t want to know what else they don’t know.

You’re paying them for their knowledge, not the lack of it.

I had to quit on the moments, the clarity is just not there. I think it’s the custom molds but not sure. I started a separate thread about that hoping for some expert answers before I contact my audi. I don’t want to give up on Widex, especially if it’s a custom mold problem. Tried for almost three days with moments and molds but had to give up because of bad speech understanding relating to the vibration/harmonic sound in voices.