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Intense midrange

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I’ve used Oticon S for a couple of years now. I had my HAs tweaked because they sounded kind of flat and dull in the midrange and highs while listening to music using a music program with compression, noise reduction, frequency shifting, etc. disabled. My audi found that the feedback management was interpreting some of the mids and highs as feedback and reducing their volume! She adjusted the feedback management until she got the mids and high frequencies back into range to compensate for my hearing loss.

When I got home I threw on a favorite rock cd from college days long ago. It sounded shrieky in the midrange. It’s got a strong elecric guitar line through the album and it is just awful. I had to take it off the cd player. I put on a completely different genre CD by Rosie Flores called “After the Farm”. It was pretty intense in the mids and highs too. It was extremely hard to listen to also.

With the HAs set to music and with appropriate compensation for my hearing loss (the usual ski slope loss associated with loud noise over the years), electric guitar sounds terrible. I told her it was like having a banshee screaming in my ears!

Went back to the audi and she turned down the mids and highs a bit and things sound better now. Not perfect, but better. CSNY cd “So Far” now sounds pretty good except for some edginess of vocals that I doubt are on the CD. By edginess, I mean some of the vocal sounds have an a funny sharp “edge” instead of a more natural “edge” if that makes any sense.

Im a music lover/semi-audiophile and have a very good audio system at home, so I doubt the these problems are due to my system.

Can anyone help explain what’s going on here? If the frequency response of my HAs is set correctly for my hearing loss, why would electric guitar “shriek”? Is this just another adjustment period I have to go through like when I first got HAs and everything was loud and nasty?

Is there some different sort of equalization needed for music as opposed to speech maybe?

Edited
@devicktimothy01 said:

Is there some different sort of equalization needed for music as opposed to speech maybe?

I too have a high quality music system and so spend a lot of time and effort getting my hearing aids to sound right. I don’t know the Oticon so can only speak generally.

I assume from what you say that you have a music program different from your everyday program. That’s good and you should have all those things you mention turned off, except that some compression will probably be necessary, depending on your loss. So yes of course you can have different gain settings for music than speech, assuming your hearing aid allows that. Basically you have the general programme set to give you best speech understanding and the music program set to give you greatest musical pleasure. It may be worth your audiologist looking at the feedback settings again. In my Resound aids for example, there is a music setting for the feedback manager and this is more gentle than normal, concentrating particularly on sustained tones that the hearing aid might interpret as feedback.

Another thing you could get your audiologist to check is whether there is scope to increase the (max power output) in the midrange and high frequencies. In my experience the fitting software tends to be rather conservative and sets the MPO to be “safe”. But if your music goes anywhere near the MPO limit, you will get distortion and that can sound shrieky. It depends on your loss, but I suggest you ask for at least 6dB more MPO from 1kHz upwards in your music program and see how that works.

Another point is that if the audiologist has increased the mid and treble a lot, it may take time for your brain to get used to that. The brain learns slowly, so you could have the mid and treble turned down a bit further for a couple of weeks and then have it increased in one or two steps to the prescription fitting. But if you think it’s getting too bright and shrieky, back it off a little again and leave it like that.

Anyway good luck. Persevere. It’s worth it.

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