Hey everyone, I have switched to new hearing aids, the Oticon Opn Play. It’s been a difficult adjustment needless to say. I have noticed something that is really bothering me. When I am in a quiet space, there is no problem. But when am in even a semi-loud environment such as running on the treadmill, in the laundry room, in a cafeteria, driving down the road I hear background noise. Extra background noise that isn’t supposed to be there. How do I know it’s not supposed to be there? In the iPhone settings, if I go under accessibility, audio/visual, background noise, and turn it ON and set it to zero, that noise goes away. Or if I stream from YouTube/ Podcasts to my phone that extra background noise turns off. If I leave the phone behind or close YouTube, the noise comes back. In the iPhone settings, if I turn the background noise on and set it to “balanced white noise” that’s exactly the sound I hear. So I think my hearing aid is playing white noise in loud environments only. Why though? I don’t think it’s tinnitus support because 1) I would hear it only in quiet envionments and 2) I don’t think we turned that on. My old hearing aids never played any extra noise.
Last time I told her about it before I knew about being able to turn it off, she was stumped. I’m hoping now that I can explain it better that she can fix it. So I need to know before I see my audiologist, is this normal? It can’t possibly be because it makes it HARDER to hear in loud environments. Has anyone else had this problem, and what settings can my audiologist change?
First you need to share your , preferably on your profile avatar so it’s always accessible and not buried in a obscure post nobody knows where to find. It’s important to know what kind of hearing loss you have, so see if your natural hearing can pick up low frequency noise or not. Secondly, please share what hearing aids you had before you switched to the OPN Play. This may matter because the open paradigm may be new to you if you used to wear a different brand aid model.
In order to debug effectively, you need to isolate the contributing factors instead of compounding it. Here, you’re combining things like doing things on your iPhone and jump into conclusion that it’s the hearing aids’ fault if you did something on your iPhone. You need to first maybe even unpair/forget your OPN Play from your iPhone so remove any effect due to the iPhone completely, to see if you still hear the white noise without having anything to do with the iPhone at all. By trying to turn on/off the background noise and its volume, and the white noise selection, etc. using your iPhone, you’re just muddying the water and it becomes almost impossible to pinpoint to where the real cause is because you’re combining things instead of isolating them.
Now let’s say that you still hear the white noise after the Play has been unpaired with your iPhone, then you will have just proven that this is an issue from the Play and not from the iPhone. Whether you can use an iPhone hack as a workaround to stop this noise is irrelevant in the context of trying to figure out where this noise comes from.
I know that you said the tinnitus feature is not turned ON, but has your actually verified this on Genie 2 for sure, or you just think so? Assuming that it’s been verified to be OFF, the next thing to verify is whether your General program, which I presume to be what you use when you have this issue, has the Directionality Setting set to Open Automatic or Full Directional. Usually it should be set to Open Automatic.
But if it’s set to Full Directional, it will cause roll-off in the low frequency range, and the hearing aid will try to compensate for this roll-off by boosting the low frequency range amplification, thereby also boosting up the floor noise, which can be heard by people whose hearing loss is only in the highs and they still have good hearing in the low frequency range where the boosting happens. This is why it’s important to share your audiogram in your profile avatar so people can see what kind of audibility your have in the low frequency range. But if this is the case, you would hear it as well in a quiet place, which you say you don’t, so I’m not sure if this hypothesis applies to your issue or not.
If it’s set to Open Automatic and you still hear the noise, it may just be real background noise and not the white noise that you hear. The Oticon open paradigm allows almost all the environmental sounds to come through, so if you don’t hear anything in a quiet place, but start to hear things in semi noisy places, it may very well be just that, the environmental sounds that are being let in by the OPN Play. This is why it’s important to know what your previous hearing aids’ brand/model is. If it’s not Oticon, you may be used to the aggressive noise blocking by your previous hearing aids and now can hear more than you want to hear.
Now if you had unpaired your OPN Play from the iPhone and experience no more white noise issue at all, then it can probably concluded that your white noise issue comes from the phone when your Play aids are paired with it. That would be a debugging process to take up with Apple support next.
Thank you for your thorough reply, I will post my as soon as I get access to it but I can address some of the other stuff you said. Firstly, I have better hearing loss in lower frequencies but worse in the higher frequencies. I still hear the extra background noise even when I am not connected to the phone, so it’s not a phone issue, it’s something with the aid. Before I had these hearing aids, I had Oticon Sensei Pro hearing aids. I wore those for 7 years, so I was quite used to and happy with them.
I am in the “general program” so there is no tinnitus playing. Lastly, I’m not sure wether it is set for Open Automatic or Full Directional, I will have to ask my audiologist.
I am in the “general program” so there is no tinnitus playing. Lastly, I’m not sure wether it is set for Open Automatic or Full Directional, I will have to ask my audiologist.
Yeah, the idea is not to have the Tinnitus feature enabled in the General program, but in another program instead only for when you want to use it. But it doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed to never can be accidentally turned on in the General program, so that’s why it’s worth making a quick check next time you see your audi.
Now that you said your hearing loss is not bad at all in the low frequencies, this implies that this might be the amplified floor noise that you’re hearing due to the Directionality Setting being in Full Directional. It would kind of sound like the white noise you hear in the iPhone background white noise selection when you had it turned on, but it’s actually the real floor noise, not an artificially generated one from the Tinnitus feature or from the iPhone background white noise selection (which is basically the iPhone’s equivalent of the Oticon Tinnitus feature in Genie 2).
Below is the screenshot in Genie 2 for the OpenSound Navigator menu. Look at the lower right corner and make sure that the Directionality Settings is set to Open Automatic and not Full Directional. If Open Automatic still gives you the floor noise, try setting it to Pinna Omni to see if it goes away. The Open Automatic sometimes might go in and out of Full Directional, but Pinna Omni will for sure never go into Full Directional at any point. I’m not suggesting that you permanently set it to Pinna Omni, even if you find that it can remove the floor noise altogether. It’s just an experiment to isolate and debug the issue. But if you find that Open Automatic still gives you the floor noise sometimes because it might go into Full Directional sometimes (while Pinna Omni never does), at least you will have been able to pinpoint the source of the issue to be due to the Full Directional mode, or due the Open Automatic going in and out of Full Directional too often, more than to your liking.
A reason why Open Automatic might go into Full Directional too often could be because you set the Open Sound Transition help to High or Very High, basically telling the software to give you help with the auditory focus sooner than you really want or need it. You can try to switch that Open Sound Transition help to Low or Medium to see if Open Automatic would go into Full Directional less often or not.
Lastly, the Oticon OPN is the first model to begin with the open paradigm. I don’t see the Oticon Sensei Pro being on the list of Oticon aids in Genie 2, so I doubt that it subscribes to the open paradigm like the OPN or OPN Play. So if all of the above testing fail, there’s a possibility that what you hear are simple more of the environmental sounds that now are being let in due to the open paradigm, and that’s why in a quiet place, you don’t hear the “noise”, but in semi noisy places, you actually hear the real noises now, although it wouldn’t be a constant white noise or floor noise, though.
