Hearing aids for music listening

Volusiano,

Thanks for your response.
I have a new audiologist.
I fired my old one. I haven’t heard cymbals in years!

@bernard.danino said:

I got me some sample bass domes today. I will try them. I discussed the subject with my audio while picking them up. She is certain I don’t need the 100 (maybe a hassle to exchange now?). And told me that the culprit is in the MPO values (what I thought on my own at first). She said to experiment with the MPO but couldn’t spare me more time. I have the feeling I toyed too much with the gains. Can you have a look at my screenshots and tell me what you think? Yesterday I watched a movie, using the music mode. I had to set the volume to -1 using the phone app because it was uncomfortable , and yet the limiting phenomenon occurred at least twice.

When looking at your screenshot on the gain, I’m a little surprised to see that you have A LOT of analyzed feedback margin (the shaded red and blue area above the gain curves). But then I remember that you wear open domes, which explains why you have very little gain headroom left due to the feedback margin.

As long as you still have room in the MPO to go up more at the frequencies you want, then yeah, you can adjust the MPO up some more to see if this removes the limiting phenomenon. If it’s compression limiting, then raising the MPO can probably delay it from occurring too soon. If it’s a physical saturation of the receiver, then raising the MPO probably can’t fix that. Only going to the next size receiver can.

The 85 dB receiver is adequate for you overall like I said. But for wearing open domes, you do have a couple of spots in your audiogram that are outside of the open dome range as can be seen in the data sheets. I think the bass domes would work out well to extend this to cover those 2 spots. I’d try the bass dome first before resorting to upsizing the receiver. Just remember to change your Selection → Acoustics fitting to the bass dome from the open dome to have Genie 2 re-prescribe to the new fitting.

Your audi may need to rerun REM again after you change your fitting like that though. That’d be a question for her. I notice that your simulated gain curves are higher than your target gain curves. I assume that this is due to the REM adjustments.

I am copying here a comment I made on the Phonac Lyric. I haven’t come across anyone who had tried something similar. But it sure has worked for me.

I’ve been using Lyric for around 6 mos. Big “pro” is no longer having to worry about ripping my hearing aid apart when taking off a face mask. In general, for speech, it works well. BUT My problem was music. I love music. But I found that the low frequencies/bass that gives music its punch and thunder is blocked by the hearing aid. As an experiment, I went without the lyric in one ear and found that I could now hear “well enough” out the the lyric ear and could experience the wonder full fullness of the bass/lower sounds out of the “empty” ear. The difference is like going from listening to music from an cheap radio vs hearing it via a good stereo sound system. I was so taken with the difference that I have opted to keep only one lyric in one ear and leave the other ear “free”. The difference is liking music vs loving music. I believe the lyric does faithfully reproduce the music that it allows to pass through–it just drops the low frequencies I’m looking for.

Perhaps when face masking goes away (2022?), I’ll look into changing to a type of hearing aid I’ve heard about which leaves the ear passage way open so as to not block low frequency to the eardrum.

Hello cecramer. Absolutely resonate with what you say. Yes, I love music and particularly organ, down to 16Hz! No hearing aid can manage that - in fact you’re lucky to get down to 100 Hz and mostly our ears get tested only down to 250. That’s about three bass octaves ignored, not to mention a chunk of male tones.

One common solution is to request vents that let the lows through to your natural hearing, though this can lead to whistles when the gain is raised for quiet conversation. Another is to partially dislodge earmould or in-ear transducer, if the design allows. Many musicians resort to that.

How well the mixed approach works will depend on how much delay there is in the hearing aid processing - in this respect your one-eared method might be subjectively preferable.
In my day work, which is recording, I monitor with high-quality open backed headphones: one side aided to keep the high frequencies up, and the other left natural so I can properly assess musical and vocal timbre.
Above all, we do need to remind our audiologists of how important music is, whether that’s for work or a cheerful state of mind!

Agree with that. the real point I have been trying to make, over and over, is that if you are really serious about music, hearing aids still aren’t there. Maybe someday but not yet.

If you can’t work with your audiologist, then self-programming helps.