Oticon Speech Rescue LX

@Volusiano has a lot of experience. I’m no expert but I would guess that it would not be beneficial for you because of your asymmetric loss. You don’t want it on your left ear and I would guess activating in your right ear would be odd, but feel free to try it.

@MDB is right that your right hearing loss can probably use the help of Speech Rescue. But I would probably suggest that you have it enabled for both ears to make the experience more symmetrical, because it might be weird hearing the lowered sounds on one ear but not the other. You can lower the strength on the left ear so that it wouldn’t be too pronounced on the ear that you don’t need it as much. I would also suggest using the leftmost configuration (2.4) because it’ll be more in your audible range than the higher frequency configuration.

There’s no option to turn off SR on the fly with the app. What you can do is leave your default program alone, make 2 copies of it and in 1 copy, turn it on for both, and the other copy, turn it on for just the right side. Then you can now toggle between the 3 of them to see which one you like better. Then in your next visit to the HCP, just pick the best one and delete the other 2 to make room for other more permanent programs.

I personally find it sounding perfectly OK for music listening as well, but I guess everybody has their own opinion. The nice thing is that it gives you the option to leave the original high frequency amplification alone, so you can hear the real sound and only add the “lowered” sound on top of everything. And also it gives you the ability to adjust the strength of the lowered sound to be not very intrusive. Of course if you’re a DIY person, you can try and experiment with many things in many ways much more easily and quickly than having to work with an HCP through many visits. But that’s another topic of discussion altogether.

I personally have SR enables on ALL my programs, even the MyMusic program, and I don’t find it unpleasant and nothing sounds “inharmonious” to me. It might be intrusive at first for speech listening because the fricatives, especially the “s” and “sh” jump at you at first, but you have your strength volume adjustment to deal with that, and also over time, your brain accepts it as the new “normal” and it doesn’t bother you anymore. It really helps with speech, especially for the English language where the fricatives play a very important role.

Below is chart for Speech Rescue. It shows clearly which part of the high frequency regions (the gray area, or the “source”) gets dissected into 3 sections and super-imposed onto the red “destination” region. And there are 10 different configurations to choose from to fit the destination region into the more audible area of your hearing loss. So it’s not like SR only amplifies sounds up to a certain specific frequency like 4.5 KHz, it does cover quite a range of high frequency region.

I think it’s to do with the high frequency bands being turned off which stops 5 and 6 K being amplified but could be wrong?

I consider my 5KHz and up frequencies as goner because I can’t hear them even with the highest available amplification of a 105 dB receivers. But yes, the beauty of SR is that you can have both the lowered sounds as well as the original amplification in the high end intact. So if you feel that you can hear the amplified high ends, then you should leave the High Frequency Band option to ON. With your heavy loss, though, I would make sure that you use the left most configuration 2.4 where there’s still a little bit of audibility left.

@Volusiano When configuring this, Genie suggests a default “based on the audiogram” – being fairly new to all this, how much would you go by this default?
Then, when it comes to fine-tuning, could you give a few pointers what to look for?

When it comes to Speech Rescue, I’ve seen Genie 2 suggest configuration defaults that’s way off base. For example, look at my own audiogram, my ski slope starts at 1 KHz and by the time it hits 2 KHz, my hearing loss is now in the -75 and -85 dB range → a severe loss. Yet Genie 2’s default configuration for me is the 4.0 configuration. That’s configuration #6 where the destination region is between 2.6 to 3.7 KHz, where my audibility is actually in the severe to profound loss now. I would MUCH rather be using configuration #1 (the 2.4 configuration) where the destination range is 1.6 to 2.4 KHz, where I still have better audibility in the moderate to severe range. I don’t see you post an audiogram so I can’t really suggest which configuration you should use, but I wouldn’t blindly follow the default configuration Genie 2 suggests for you without verifying to see if it makes sense first or not.

The only Fine Tuning pointer I can give you is not to touch the gain adjustment part of it unless you know what you’re doing. The only time I touch the Fine Tuning section is when I had bad whistling feedbacks initially. Then I’d go into Fine Tuning to decrease the gain a little bit where I suspected the feedback area was to see if it helps. Luckily I guessed the right area and it helped. But the other sections of the Fine Tuning like Sound Controls and Sudden Sound Stabilizer, go to town on those and experiment to see what you like the best from those settings, simply because they’re easy to put back to their default values if you stray too far and want to reset. But with the gain values, I guess you can reset as well if you stray too far, but then if you’ve done a bit of work on them, then all that work is harder to retrace to where you were because they’re not as “quantized” as the other stuff.

Thanks so much, that was really helpful! Is ‘Recalculate settings’ (with a mouse pointer pointing at the centre of two concentric circles) the reset you’re referring to? It doesn’t seem to change anything apart from the gain and MPO.
Regarding Speech Rescue, I managed to produce all sorts of sound effects from it, ranging from a metallic echo as if I’m standing in a large steel tunnel to every ‘s’ being pronounced with a lisp (including my own!) - it’s quite impressive. When I stick to the default settings, everything seems fine, but there isn’t much difference compared to having it turned off. I’ll need to do some more reading on this and also learn how to use the SPLogram properly.
That said, I’m really impressed by how much the Oticon Real1 hearing aids enhance my life. I never would have thought this was possible. I’m still experimenting with various settings, but even with the default options, they perform quite well. My hearing loss is probably neither extreme nor particularly complex, but without any solution, it’s definitely a burden.

Oh, that. I rarely use is, but if you hover your mouse over it, it’ll say Recalculate. If you click on it, it’ll show you all your current programs, and give you an option to have Genie 2 recalculate the selected program(s) to the initial target gain. I guess this is like a reset button which lets you reset to the original target gain curve if you happened to stray too far away from it and want to go back to what it was like originally.