Clicking noise with Resound Preza

I get a clicking noise in my right aid when playing music in the car too loudly and in the All Around program. My fitter turned Impulse Noise Reduction to off in that program, and it doesn’t occur as much. You might want to give that a try.

Like you, in the Music program I don’t hear the clicking.

Usually loud inputs noises are treated in 2 different ways by hearing aids:

1. Compression: if the input level is louder than the A2D converter (analog to digital converter) can handle, the hearing aid will compress the loud sound in order to translate the magnitude of the louder analog signal to a lower equivalent digital signal that’s within the range of the max digital number for the volume the system can represent. Usually it’s because this A2D converter is based on a lower # of bits and therefore the number representation is of lower resolution. Some system may use some kind of compression to avoid clipping (clipping means just have the higher volume sounds be represented by the highest number it can handle). Other system may try to be smarter and compress down the curve but retain some kind of a resemblance of the original curve. The first screenshot below shows an example of this.

How you hear this depends on how smart the system handles it. If it’s just a flat clipping, it’ll probably sound less natural and more distorted than a smarter compression approach. Whether it sounds like a click or not, I don’t really know. It’s also possible that at this point, the receiver may also gets overdriven as well and starts making a mechanical buzzing noise that signifies an overdriven saturation. Maybe if the duration of the peak is short enough, it may sound like a click. It’s hard to say.

But the fact that you don’t hear it in the Music mode is usually an indication that it’s a product of compression, because compression is usually minimized in the Music mode.

2. Another possibility is that there’s some kind of Transient Noise Management feature being turned on and it gets activated when sudden loud transient sounds hit the mic. This is supposed to be suppressed to keep the loud transient sounds from producing uncomfortably loud sounds (and also possible saturate the overdriven receiver as well) so that the wearer can feel more comfortable with loud sounds. There can be a few different levels of how this TNM can be aggressive. I don’t know about the Resound, but on my Oticon OPN, with TNM set to High, when I play tennis and hit the ball, I no longer hear the loud pop of the ball, but instead I hear a much more muted and suppressed sound. But I don’t hear a “click”. Nevertheless, @MisTrae, you can check with your HCP at Costco to see if perhaps the Preza has a TNM feature and if yes, if it’s turned on or not. If ON, maybe it can be turned down or turned off to see if that helps.

If it’s not issue 2, and there’s nothing you can try to solve this problem by turning off something else on the hearing aid, and you don’t always want to be in Music mode all the times as a workaround, you may want to ask the Costco HIS to look up and see what the input dynamic range spec for the Preza is. Maybe it’s on the lower side (like around 85-90 dB SPL) and that’s just a limitation of that model. Maybe they have some other brands/models that has a higher input dynamic range (like >110 dB SPL) to try out that may solve this problem for you.

But keep in mind that your own voice spoken in a normal tone and not yelling shouldn’t be much louder than the 85-90 dB SPL anyway, unless you have to speak much louder because you’re a teacher in a noisy or big classroom.

These clicking noises are almost certainly caused by clipping and I suggest increasing the MPO level (which is a setting in the fitting software). It will be a very transitory increase above your maximum comfortable level and less objectionable than the clicking sound.

MPO is maximum output power by the way.

Best

David