The OWN1’s impulse suppression uses a hard gate that cuts off the attack of almost any sound with a fast rise time. This is also embarrasingly bad and reminiscent of circa 2000 Unitron. I had the audi reduce this without making the impulse too painful.
The OWN1’s slaughter noise. So fans and road noise become blenders. The opposite effect of what one expects. Hearing speech over a blender is impossible.
Sounds like these are the 2 key points where you deem the Oticon OWN to be terrible. I’ll address these 2 points below:
- The “cut off of the attack”, as you call it, is most likely the wide dynamic range compression () at work. Probably all mfgs employ WDRC in one form or another. My opinion is that this is an adjustment issue that a good would know how to address and fix for you.
The only time I hear people complaining about compression is when they listen to music and too much compression kinda ruins their music listening experience and they want to minimize the compression in their music program. But it sounds like maybe you have the opposite experience because you’re complaining that the impulse suppression makes your hearing painful → not enough compression on loud sound levels to make the hearing more comfortable instead of painful??? I think you’re on the flip side of compression because some people want to minimize compression but you’re complaining about painful impulse, as if maybe you have some kind of hyperacusis condition?
You don’t post your by your avatar like most people on this forum do, so it’s hard to know where you’re coming from without knowing your kind of hearing loss. I suggest you make your audiogram available, which can be very helpful in many aspects of various discussions.
- The Own slaughters the noise by blending fan noise and road noise together, making hearing speech impossible (assumably why driving? since you mention road noise) → My personal opinion is that perhaps you’re used to the traditional beam forming noise reduction approach from your Starkey Muse that when you switch to the Oticon OWN, which is essentially a paradigm shift to the “open” soundscape now, where noise is no longer aggressively suppressed by beam forming anymore, but rather left to be heard (on purpose), and the focus is on cleaning up and enhancing the speech clarity, so that you can understand the speech better while still being able to hear the noise, because people who subscribe to the Oticon open paradigm tend to want to hear everything, noise included.
Anyway, if my guess is right, I’d suggest that you give it enough time to get acclimated to the Oticon open paradigm, until your own brain hearing gets used to hearing a lot more sounds (noise included) and starts learning to sort out what’s speech and what’s noise and how to focus on speech and ignore noise. It may take as long as 3 months of experiencing noisy situations on a regular basis for your brain hearing to start adapting. That’s how long it took me personally to get used to the open paradigm. Before that, I didn’t understand the difference and also thought that the OPN were terrible compared to my Costco Rextons I had before. But once I understood the difference between the 2 paradigms and give it a positive attitude to try to get used to it in earnest, things started turning around and my brain hearing started to not mind the noise so much anymore, as long as I could understand speech better.
Yet certain folks just simply can’t adapt to it and they prefer to go back to the traditional beam forming noise suppression approach. Again, without seeing your audiogram, it’s hard to see if perhaps your hearing loss is or is not suitable to being able to handle too much noise.
You’re ignoring this member’s posts.
Oticonian/Disposablyte
Hot Springs Village, Arkansas
ME, offended by YOU, Mr V? Never, in a million years! Just funnin’, V … only funnin’!
in the original post, for context?