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If you suffer from volume/sharpness imbalance between ears and wear Oticon - Read on

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I have been prompted to write this post because of an issue with Oticon hearing aids that in my case took me years to find out the cause as nobody seemed to know why I was experiencing this issue.

For reference - my hearing loss is very unusual as my mother had scarlett fever when she was pregnant with me. This caused a loss of predominantly low frequencies in the left ear and predominantly high frequencies in right ear. So, my ears hearing loss is an exact opposite of each other more or less.

When I started wearing Oticon hearing aids 7 years ago, the first thing that I noticed is that sound was always louder/sharper/more active more switched on in the right ear, than the left ear wearing the hearing aids. Especially high frequency sounds like pedestrian crossing beeping, kettle whistling, microwave beeping - basically electronic sounds.

Despite a lot of tweaking on my old hearing aids, with my previous audio and with the new audio, where I just bought hearing aids 3 months ago, I experienced the exact same problem where sound always seemed louder in the right ear - although it was significantly better than my old hearing aids.

The problem it seems is the Oticon Sound profile Vac+. I tried switching to to solve issues where I wasn’t hearing as well as I would have liked when people were speaking in soft conversational mode. To my surprise, when I switched to NAL-NL2, the volume balance disappeared completely and this is on the default configuration of NAL-NL2 with zero tweaking or adjustments. In addition, I have already noticed I am hearing better in those difficult scenarios like hearing in the car for example.

In short, for anyone who experiences the same problem as myself where the volume or sharpness of sounds is noticeably different in each ear and you are wearing Oticon hearing aids - the problem is most likely the Vac+ sound profile and NAL-NL2 is the solution!

Chatgpt has suggested that the problem is that Oticon focuses more on speech comfort and natural sounds, without losing speech understanding and because my right ear has such significant loss of high frequencies - it has to boost massively in the right ear to bring that ear back up to what it should be. With the left ear, because of their focus on speech comfort, they don’t boost the high frequencies very much. This approach somehow ended up with the result where the high frequency boosts in the right ear basically overwhelmed or drowned out the natural high frequency capability of my left ear (which was not boosted as much) creating this disparity.

NAL-NL2 focuses more on providing both ears with what frequencies I am missing and is less concerned about creating so called natural speech!

I wrote this post, in the hope that other people who suffer from the same problem, will hopefully benefit from the solution regardless of what hearing loss or hearing aid they wear - try different sound profiles, not just the manufacturer default. I am so pleased to have finally resolved this longstanding problem with Oticon.

I’d agree with most of this: I’ve found through that while the ‘gain averaging’ in the Oticon product is more comfortable for users, it falls short in terms of outright clarity in many environments. However, for people who have lowered ’s due to recruitment that might sound better.

When Sonova product does it’s dynamic mode switching or fast adjustments for impact noises, rather than just speech; users can become very aware of the aid working and dislike the ‘over-processed’ nature of things. However, it’s pretty easy to turn down these in the Phonak and Unitron software.

I have been meaning to look into what recruitment is and whether this is relevant for me, because one thing I do suffer from is a low threshold for loud sounds.

The strange thing about the Oticon Vac+ profile is that I had done on my old hearing aids - which fixed a lot of issues - but even REM did not fix the volume imbalance problem with the old hearing aids. I am going to have REM done on my new hearing aids - but that is more because almost everyone says that hearing aids without REM are underfit and are not boosting various frequencies as much as they should be. While has definitely improved everything for me, I suspect that aids are still slightly underfit and that REM will solve the last remaining issues.

No idea what is?

I didn’t like Widex because of their dynamic mode switching as I could actually hear my voice change in volume etc while speaking when it was switching programs. I agree - very irritating. Oticon’s open speech paradigm is so much better in my opinion.

A quick Google of abbreviations, perhaps with hearing added to the search will usually get you an answer. is uncomfortable loudness level and is most comfortable loudness level.

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