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Philips 9050 experience at Costco RSHL

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I have been trialing the Philips 9050 for 2 months with much frustration. Started with fitting done by Costco, then had a couple fitting adjustments. Although rem was done, they only used it to make sure aids were working properly and not for fitting. I eventually insisted on rem for fitting. She said, you won’t like it, and I didn’t. I also asked her to switch to dsl5. Nothing is good. Noisy or echo environments, while challenging for all, are not good. Background is noisier than close speech an if anyone nearby has a mid to high tone voice, it takes over. In all but hifi I hear a constant background crackle with frequent abrupt stopping of sound. I inquired that maybe they are defective and they said rem would catch that. Really want to make this work! The TV adapter is all that I am happy with! Help!!!

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Hi there, sorry about all your issues, if this was me I’d be going the pathway, usually with a lot of different things going on it can easier to try and sort them yourself, have a look around on the DIY section of the forum.

Hearing Aid Self-Fitting and Adjusting [DIY]

This forum is a place for consumers to discuss fitting and adjusting their own hearing aids.

@JackB said:

Background is noisier than close speech an if anyone nearby has a mid to high tone voice, it takes over. In all but hifi I hear a constant background crackle with frequent abrupt stopping of sound

I can’t say that I am experiencing anything similar to what you are hearing. I certainly don’t have background crackle or any abrupt stops. Except for occasional hair rustle, they are so quiet I often forget that they are in and while I don’t really have much exposure to noise, these seem to tame the hubbub of supermarkets, hospitals etc and let me hear who I need to hear.

I’ve recently trialed several ’s and had a similar experience as you with the 9050’s. There is more “hiss” for lack of a better word than the others. Adjustments haven’t helped much. I can reduce it by reducing the high frequency volume, but that’s where I need the boost the most.

I get it too with my 9040 hearing aids when indoors, but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t hear it at all when outdoors.

You might try going the route to see if you can get adjusted to a level where it doesn’t bother you.

I have an excellent suggestion:
Get a fitter who gives a s**t !!
The person who fitted you did not do their job.

RSHL is hard to fit. Did they fit you with custom molds or closed/power domes to help contain the amplification leaks from the low frequency amplification? What receiver size did they fit you with? I wonder if the background crackling you hear is due to the receivers not being powerful enough and gets over-amplified, causing distortion? RSHL probably requires a lot of fine tuning, which means a dedicated fitter who’s willing to listen to your feedback and keep making adjustments little by little until you’re happy with the result.

If being able to find such a fitter is not easy, I think the route might be more effective because it allows you to try many different things and be able to get feedbacks on how well those adjustments work much faster than doing it via dozens of appointments with a fitter, which can be exhausting and demoralizing because it’d just take too long to be able to get an appointment to try an adjustment or two while in a DIY setting, you can try something and within the same day or in a few hours, be able to know whether it works or not so you can follow up with more adjustments right away.

But not everyone can be DIY’er or wants to be one. But if you’re technically adept and have a knack for the DIY route, that might be the best for you. Or you can try a combination of both working with a fitter then making more adjustments at home, as long as your fitter is willing to work via this arrangement with you.

They did not give or recommend either closed or custom domes. They gave me domes with 2 openings. Most of what I researched said more open domes were better for rshl taking advantage of the good high end hearing I have. I really like the idea and may try that.

Edited

I found this old thread a few years ago from another member that also has RSHL. I participated in it a little bit with some of my posts. Another member, @Abarsanti , who actually has RSHL, has found the Oticon VAC+ helpful for RSHL He included a link that shows a video from Don Schum, who talked about how Oticon researched RSHL and determined how they could make the VAC+ fitting rationale more effective for RSHL.

I think the Philips 9050, being derived from Demant technologies, might use the Oticon VAC+ formula as well, even though they don’t call it VAC+. But that’s just my guess. Anyway, hopefully this thread and the video by Don Schum on RSHL can be helpful for you.

Why is Fitting Reverse Slope Hearing Loss Difficult?
One of the things with fitting hearing aids nowadays is that they are supplemental to your remaining natural hearing. For “traditional” sky-slop losses this is relatively easy: make a vent in the ear mold to pass through the natural sound and add the high frequencies that are needed to compensate for the high frequency loss. With a reverse slope this doesn’t work, because to boost the lower frequencies a larger contained air mass is needed in your ear canal.This prevents the use of a large (or …

12.Podcast eleven: Fitting Low Frequency Hearing Loss3

In reply to @JackB

@JackB said:

They did not give or recommend either closed or custom domes. They gave me domes with 2 openings. Most of what I researched said more open domes were better for rshl taking advantage of the good high end hearing I have. I really like the DIY idea and may try that.

You can try both types of domes and see which one is more effective for you. Make sure you change the fitting selection in the software to get the gain curves re-prescribed for the correct dome. Open domes can take advantage of letting the highs in, but in turn might cause too much low frequency amplification to leak out. The hearing aids usually are more capable of amplifying high frequencies and less capable of amplifying low frequencies as effectively, so that’s why I suggested trying both open and and see which one works better for you., especially since you complain about the background crackling, which might be indicative of distortion sounds caused by over amplifying. And with your type of hearing loss, the over amplification can only be for the low ends and not the high ends.

Look at my and you’ll see I have a version of RSHL.
They first gave me domes that were to small. All I could hear was what I call whispering. I could not hear any low frequency.
I have now.
I did complain once about occlusion.
They gave me open domes to try.
Same thing, whispering and no lows.
I have the Starkey Edge now.
I originally had the Audibel version of Starkey Muse.

In reply to @tenkan

I have been searching the section and can’t find a link for the fitting software for Philips 9050. I did just order the Noahlink 2 wireless. Also looking for a well put together user guide.

Edited

In reply to @JackB

It’s been so long that I no longer remember where I got my copy from years ago, because it just automatically keeps updating the versions for me so I’ve never had to download again after that first time. If you can’t find it in the section, go to hearingaidtalk and ask pvc to help you out. He’s also a great resource for DIY questions, with excellent documentation via his DIY School stuff.

The help guide for it is online. After you get the software installed, just pull down on the Help menu and select the online version to browse through all the sections’ descriptions. If you’re further inclined, there are also technical papers about the Philips HearLink aids to read up on if interested.

In reply to @JackB

Yeah you’ve come to the right place, everything you’ll need is right here on hearingtracker, unbiased reviews and opinions from “real” self programmer’s, yeah we don’t post the links outright but your PM is a good place to start, as mentioned the best user guides are put out by the manufacturer, both the software and user guides are extremely easy to navigate and all self explanatory.

In reply to @user990

is definitely the way I like to do things, but I’m an Apple user and all options I’ve seen are Windows based. I can run Windows on my Mac, but I don’t know if there will still be a hardware incompatibility. I’ll have to explore this.

My recollection is vague, but I thought I saw somebody said that they were able to run the Windows emulator on their Mac OK. But I’m only 50% sure.

I’m running Windows 10 on an old (2012) Intel MacBook Pro using Bootcamp. Both Phonak Target and Widex Compass GPS installed without trouble and programmed my hearing aids successfully, although slowly. I think there may be incompatibility problems with the more recent silicon Macs, the M1, M2 etc., so I didn’t attempt using an emulator on my M1 MacBook Air. I’m too cheap to buy a new Windows laptop!

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