For reference, I do have an audiologist that I am very happy with, and I have only very recently bought these hearing aids. For the most part, I do hear very well with them. I am moving more into the tweaking stage to perfect the areas where I would like to see improvement. I am wearing Oticon Intent 1 aids.
My three main tweaks at the moment are the following:
- Understanding what people (particularly women) are saying when they are speaking softly (like thinking aloud volume). I think this is a high frequency/clarity issue.
- Certain sounds like microwave beeping, kettle whistling sound a bit louder in right ear than left. I am trying to determine what frequencies these are.
- While I do hear quite well for the most part, I would like to sharpen/crispen the speech a tad bit more than current configuration. When I first got the aids, the Genie Software was misreporting the vent sizes, so the high frequencies were much higher than they should have been and there was a massive volume imbalance between the ears, but clarity of speech was incredible!
I did a test using this site - Online Tone Generator - generate pure tones of any frequency6
and tested the following frequencies at 10%, 50% and 80% volume (on my computer) and 80% (volume on the website) to broadly get soft, moderate, max volumes? The main purpose of this test was to try and identify what frequencies are louder in right ear than left to address that slight remaining imbalance of volume/sharpness that I get from beeping like microwave or that whistle as the kettle boils etc. It is not massively scientific, but I did see something very surprising.
440hz-1khz - LHS slightly louder/warmer - RHS slightly softer/sharper - all volumes
2khz - LHS 10% slightly louder/warmer. 50% and 80% RHS louder/sharper. 80% uncomfortably loud/sharper in RHS
3khz - 8khz - 10% volume neither ear can hear anything (apart from RHS at 6khz). At 50% volume both hears can hear ( but not as well as lower frequencies) and better at 3-4khz than 6-8Khz. In fact with 6khz frequency, left ear can only just hear at 50% which is shocking!
In short, my main question is whether it is expected that I am not hearing anything at 3khz above at 10% volume on computer as hearing aids boost for speech comprehension not just boost all frequencies? In other words, is my test flawed as naturally hearing aids suppress certain frequencies to aid speech comprehension?
All I want to do at this point is identify what frequencies are louder in right ear than left to get the microwave/kettle/pedestrian crossing/blackbirds etc balanced in volume/sharpness.
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
PS - I also noticed that when testing sounds, it was louder (in both ears, but right more so) for a second or so, then drops in volume. I don’t know if that is ear adjusting or aids suppressing or what? Just in case that is relevant.
You’re ignoring this member’s posts.