Audiophile hearing aids

@seymourjbrown said:

What I wish is that some enterprising audiologist would do audiophile testing of HAs and publish them.

Hi, some measurements are available for Widex Moments. This was done not by an audiologist but by an audiophile magazine contributor. See the following link:
https://audioxpress.com/article/fresh-from-the-bench-widex-moment-mric-rd-hearing-aid60
It convinced me not to expect audio quality from my Widex Moments.

Paul, thank you for sharing… good to great latency when compared to an unknown OTC HA and not exactly a resounding endorsement overall. However, they might be the best hearing aids for music. We just don’t have other results to compare to. Was pleasantly surprised with their extended frequency response capabilities. Thanks again.

I have the Philips 9050 and was a professional musician for many years. The Philips work fine for me on the “HIFI” setting as programmed by the Costco folks. I have the “double bass” dome with two small pin hole openings and one in the middle which should give better bass sounds, But, When I want to hear the low frequencies much better I put foam rubber ear plugs in the ears with the hearing aids to seal the ears, much like noise reducing ear buds would do. There is the occlusion effect of course where your own voice sounds like it’s in your head, but the lowest frequencies in the music come through much better. I also use the Philips TV adapter to hear TV and works well, again putting in the foam rubber ear plugs for better sound. As noted before the 9050s are capable of going to 10khz but Costco’s programming only goes to 8khz. I suspect manufacturing hearing aids to amplify higher frequencies would be a large problem with most wearers have huge losses at those high frequencies amplification would be subject to huge distortion and the hearer couldn’t hear those frequencies anyway.

@Don_B said:

When I want to hear the low frequencies much better I put foam rubber ear plugs in the ears with the hearing aids to seal the ears, much like noise reducing ear buds would do.

This is what I used to do, and also stuffed small cotton balls in.
I do morning walks on fairly noisy streets, and decided just for sh*t & giggle to put my IEMs in w/out my aids, and WOW! Since they’re deep in the ear canal, they really pass a lot of bass, and I can hear up to 9KHz, so it’s a whole new ballgame.
I had to upgrade my phone, and no HP Jack, so I got a bluetooth Dac/Amp, and it works great.

@Don_B said:

. I suspect manufacturing hearing aids to amplify higher frequencies would be a large problem with most wearers have huge losses at those high frequencies amplification would be subject to huge distortion and the hearer couldn’t hear those frequencies anyway.

Good point, it just sounds like distortion when you try to push to high.
You don’t post your audiogram, so it’s hard to know how your loss is, but if you look at mine, you’ll see I’m pretty limited at the high end.

If you click on your avatar at the top right, and scroll to your profile, you can enter your audiogram there.

@paul.cleary.nz said:

Fresh From the Bench: Widex Moment mRIC RD Hearing Aid | audioXpress

Hi Andy, i am 100% agree with you. i was much happier with my old semi analog Phonak naida III with the 675 battery. the sound is good and so the speech. the connection was with the chest unit. the 675 last for few weeks. speech in nosy Enviromint was out of question. hope the digital new ones make some improvement hre

1. how can we use rechargable? we must have the hA all day long. another thing is that if a battery fail you cannot repalce it youeself and need ot send for service, so you mudt have back up adis.
2. most HA using the same algorithm. so they are all sound the same. i think only starkey or resound use their own algorithm, but from what i see people are not happy with the sound with these 2
   i am using HA for about 40 years, i am severe, i have the software and noah link/ compilot and i do the programing myself, which i recommending to anyone who can do it. the system of going back and forward to audi can work as you need to do it 10 - 30 times to get a reasonable result

i am using now old Phonak with 675 battery, i just now try the Signia - with charger for 36 hours. it sound ok but not better than the Phonak.
the Signia charger is with contact - not wireless so expect problems, the Bluetooth connection of the signia is vary good with iPhone.
phonal bluetooth is not stable

@LarryM said:

Phonak Lumity 90s

Interesting - I’ve had just the opposite experience with my Rexton Reach - super super tinny and hollow sounding - compared to my 5-year-old Kirkland 9’s.

Of course I realize hearing aids will never sound as good as “headphones” as they are only designed to reproduce mids and esp highs - but man I am quite dissapointed - I figured 5-year-newer HA’s would AT LEAST be as good - but they are actually a big step down.

I am going back for a tuneup in a few days, and I’ll mention the extreme tinnyness - maybe an adjustment can be made.

It’s baffling how variable people’s experience with HAs is. Before I took the plunge myself, I was nervous about getting them because I’d read about and heard so any people disappointed with theirs. A friend of mine got his first set of HAs at Costco last summer and he reported that music sounded “tinny” and so bad that he listens to music without them. Once I got my HAs, I told him about my experience listening to music in the “music” program with mine, and he said his HAs didn’t have a “music” program.

I searched for an audiologist who was knowledgeable about HAs and what audiophiles look for in listening to music (they all say they are but a few questions weed out the pretenders). I ended up buying the most expensive HAs recomended to me (the Phonak L90s), but I was extremely pleased with them once I got them. No tinniness at all. They sound crisp and transparent. In fact, now that I’ve been wearing them for about 6 months, I often forget that I’m wearing them entirely. My brain has become so acclimated to them that sometimes I worry that they’re no longer working. But they are. All I have to do is to listen to an 8kHz tone on an online frequency sweep generator to confirm that they working. I’ll set the volume so that a 1kHz tone is just a few dBs above my hearing threshold and then switch to an 8kHz tone: if I can hear the higher tone, my HAs are working like they did when I first got them.

As contented as I am, obviously they don’t restore my hearing to where it was 20 years ago. I used to hear tape hiss and weird recording anomalies in recordings that I now can’t hear with or without HAs. I am now simply oblivious to frequencies above 10kHz. And there are a few pockets below that where my hearing plunges into near-deafness. Fortunately, they are narrow-banded pockets.

And the Phonak L90s can get overloaded in the treble and sound distorted (an especially prominent tambourine in a recording, for example). I think this is because to get my hearing between 6kHz and 10kHz up far enough, the HAs’ amplifiers are pushed almost to their limit. It doesn’t happen often, however. And when it does, I turn the volume down.

@ellisonvoice said:

This being impoverished UK, I rely on a pair of obsolete national health Phonak M70

There are other options available to you.

Deciding that the NHS might not be the best place to get specialist tuning of a hearing system potentially isn’t the biggest leap of logic you’ve made: especially if you’ve already spent a few grand on your Hi-Fi.

Haha! Fair comment, Umbongo. But ‘a few grand’? Me? Charity shop: Technics CD £20, recycled Cambridge amp, two BX5 ‘Hafler’ rears eBay £100, analogue Realistic delay box recycled, two car-type sub-amps + power supply £60, two huge Mackie chassis to build man-shed subs thanks to my son, likewise two JBL 10-inch chassis used as open-back main speakers.
Good sound? Well, in an early recording career, I was ear-trained on all kinds of programming via big BBC-designed LS5s… and I think my system sounds at least as good, perhaps more impressive even! Doors visibly shake on organ pedal.
Yes, it called for a fair amount of sawing up timber and cutting holes… but effort was further rewarded by a neighbour giving me about 150 gorgeous CDs. To the music lover, deafness is a curse of course, worsened by low budget, but - justification I hope for this long response - I feel it can be a driver as well.

Thanks so much for that!

Just based on subjective listening, I expect that my Phonak Audéo Lumity L90-RL’s ring a lot more on impulse, and have similar comb effects in frequence response to the Widex Universal. It’s like living in a tube. My old Resound LiNX Quattro 9’s were even worse - especially if any of the automatic features were enabled.

The hard thing about all this is that 8-12Khz is where we start to really lose high end as we age, and that’s still also the toughest range for an HA to reproduce properly. So often, we see a boost at 3-6K or higher that make people cringe when they first hear it. It’s unmusical.

I’ll look for similar articles.

Thanks again,
=seymour=

I also have cookie bite loss so this feedback is particularly relevant. Did you find the roughly 5dB of loss due to the lens to be meaningful? I can see that small difference being meaningful especially in a noisy environment.

The 5 dB loss was only present when I wasn’t wearing the Earlens hearing aids, and I wore them almost all the time. But yes it did make it harder to hear if I woke up in the middle of the night, or if something happened while I was in the shower or swimming and not wearing the hearing aids. I’d guesstimate that my unaided ability to understand speech improved by 25+% just by having the lens removed. That said, I don’t think everyone is affected by the lens on the eardrum in the same way I was; from what the audiologist told me, some people’s unaided hearing wasn’t affected at all by the lens.

How many times did you need the lens removed and put back? It sounds like a bit of a hassle even if near one of their specialists. Were the drops annoying? Any discomfort from the lens?

What made you want to try it? It’s very expensive.

I had to go in for appointments every 6 months. They didn’t remove the lenses every time; usually they’d just remove earwax and maybe slightly move the lens if it wasn’t in the perfect spot. They removed the lens once every year or two to do a hearing test without the lens.

The drops were a little annoying because they affected my hearing even beyond the 5 dB from the lens itself. I’d guess another 5-10 dB for an hour or two after putting in the drops. I put them in just before going to bed so it wouldn’t affect daily life.

No discomfort from the lens; I had no idea it was there. But I had to wear swimmer earplugs when swimming; otherwise the water-in-ear feeling you might have after coming out of the water (usually just a few seconds) would last an hour or so and would affect my hearing significantly.

I tried it after watching the first Dr Cliff review of the system. He mentioned that the sound quality with Earlens is theoretically better than any speaker-based hearing aid can achieve.