Should I be able to hear a cat's purr with hearing aids?

Never heard a cat purring in over 30 years, can feel it though, when handling a cat… Strangely enough, I can hear the battery operated kitchen clock, ticking away, from about 10 feet away, never heard this before, unless I was a few inches away, I got a pair of Naida BTE M70 SP’s via the NHS, REM was done, and I was swapped over to the NAL NL2 fitting formula, and I could now hear that clock clearly! As a DIY’er, I thought, I wonder if I can transfer all the settings in the Naida M70’s, over to my, Naida P90 UP’s, turns out, this is a very simple option in Target, with the import/export function, took me approximately 10 minutes to figure it out, and 10 minutes later, hello new Naida P90’s I could now hear the kitchen clock with both sets of aids, and no further adjustments deemed necessary… As I write this, I have my other set of hearing aids in, sitting at the kitchen table, it’s quiet, with my non-rechargeable Phonak RIC M90’s, with custom moulds, and 105db receivers, I can hear absolutely zilch from the clock… so I am thinking, REM does make a massive difference, I may try to transfer all the settings from the M70’s again, into the M90 RIC’s, and see how that Pans out… Cheers Kev

Edit… I did the import/export approximately 11 months ago, and apart from installing (Type 02) Roger X receivers in M70’s & P90’s, I have left them with no other tweaking necessary…

@BeLo said:

Weirdly when connected with Bluetooth I could hear down to below what was being reported as 10Hz. I’m pretty sure that there must have been some frequency shifting/compression going on for that to be possible.

it is actually lossy compression artifact, youtube/SBC codec (bluetooth classic’s base codec) generates that.

edit: wow, SBC is over almost 20 years old, (May 2003)… LC3 is a much better codec and i can see no hearing aid manufacture want to support such a 20 year old codec… I really hate how the g722 codec (which is llke 30 years old (1988) ) from Android’s ASHA protocol sound like… Resound’s tv streamer codec sound way better than that…

I just upgraded to the Phonak Lumity (L90) from Paradise (P90). I have noticed that I can now sometimes hear our cat purr from several feet away! Before upgrading, I did not hear her unless I was very close. It actually concerned me enough to ask my spouse if the cat sometimes purrs loudly, and he confirmed that she does both – sometimes loud, sometimes soft. It makes me wonder what other sounds I’m missing. Unless my spouse mentions a sound, I have no way of knowing. I do know that I was not hearing nearby barred owls before upgrading, so I am hoping I will be able to hear them now.

What I’m hearing aren’t artefacts. I can clearly hear and discern the different frequencies produced by the frequency generator below 100Hz with a sine wave when connected with Bluetooth.
I’ve never really worked much with SBC but since it seems to be based on MP2 I’d assumed that it used a psychoacoustic model that would ignore such low frequencies, upon first inspection it doesn’t seem that way.

There are some quite noticeable artefacts created with sawtooth and square waves which appear to be predominantly encoding artefacts as they seem to be related to the sampling frequency.
It sounds as if these artefact frequencies are spread out but they do converge and disappear at about 120Hz. The sine wave reproduction by comparison seems to be pretty good.

There are a lot of anecdotal reports now of improved low frequency hearing with Lumity, including me now being able to hear our cat purr and being able to clearly hear all four drumsticks in Led Zepp’s ‘Four Sticks’. I’ve no idea why but having spent a morning with some Marvel 90s (same fitting and coupling) the other day, the Lumity 90s just sound much warmer with better low frequency reproduction.

I’m not an audiophile but I’m happy enough with the sound reproduction that I can’t imagine ever wanting to own a pair of headphones or similar ever again (if my hearing doesn’t deteriorate and BT 5.x is picked up by HA manufacturers).

@auntpie That sounds like a good improvement for you. I can hear lots of fans and appliances now, but I suppose most people without hearing loss do too.

Yes, of course, which is what I was referring to with my original comment, sorry if I didn’t expand on that:

I’m pretty sure that there must have been some frequency shifting/compression going on for that to be possible.

True enough, with so many speech-focused aids constrained to give almost no gain below 200, then a cat’s purr fundamental - the deep sound you may hear with your ear pressed to their body - cannot get through.
If you can switch to a Music option, and have a very understanding audiologist, a good aid could give you live sound down to 40. My quite old Phonak Naidas do, if I block the vents. Nice for live music! Still not deep enough for cat-rumble.
But there’s hope: There’s quite a lot of energy in mid-range and up to the breathy highs, so those are more likely to be heard if the aid is well-conformed to the hearing.
Something worth a visit: the audio spectrum analyser which is standard on iPhone. Thanks to the fine microphone/s, it is very good: registers from under 20 Hz to 20 kHz and down to whisper quiet. Therefore you can see in real time exactly what you can or cannot hear, naked-eared or aided. It can reveal low/high background sounds that your aids might prefer not to have to process, and I suggest it can even be a kind of added sense: we can see the robin sing even if we cannot all hear the squeaky little blighter!
Oh, but then keep the cat away!

It depends on how your hearing aids are programmed. You might have All Around with reduced background noise option. Switch to a MUSIC program and try to listen to your cat. However, be sure your cat is purring.