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Philips HearLink 9030 Screechiness

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I am trying out the Philips HearLink 9030 hearing aid. Because of my low frequency loss, I am trying it out with custom molds and power dome. It works fine in the house and to hear my wife better. It does impart her voice with a screechy echo, which leads to…

However, in a noisy situation they are worse than useless. The screechiness bombards my ears so much that I cannot understand speech. At a party the other evening the harness bells on the front door were painful and drowned everything else out. The screechiness in the female voices drowned out conversations, and I could understand my conversant better by turning the aids off, though the volume was very low.

This screechiness may be at 1500 Hz, where I understand there is an ear canal peak with the domes and molds. I need the domes or molds for my low frequency loss, though they don’t seem to help that much. Music is important to me.

The Costco fitter is not of much help. Is the Philips HearLink 9030 not for me, or can something be done?

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I am not a hearing specialist but you have a reverse cookie bit hearing loss that is going to very hard to adjust for. Ear molds definitely are needed and also an audiologist that knows how to really find tune hearing aids for your requirements

Yes, I know that’s what it’s called. I don’t know if I can or should on these Philips Hearlink 9030 aids. Since music is so important to me, I may have to go to an audiologist who is a musician and go the Widex route. $$$, sigh.

I don’t so can’t help you there. I get my aids from the and over the last 3 years spent a lot of time with my VA audiologist to get my aids right. It has meant having a great communication between my audiologist, the Oticon rep, and myself. But it has paid off. Have no music experience but I can finally enjoy jazz and classical music again.

@Herbhornist said:

However, in a noisy situation they are worse than useless. The screechiness bombards my ears so much that I cannot understand speech

This is easily adjusted in the software to get them how you like them to sound, this is purely a adjustment that is needed.

@Herbhornist said:

At a party the other evening the harness bells on the front door were painful and drowned everything else out

Again it’s just adjustments that need to be done, go back to your audiologist and explain what’s happening.

@Herbhornist said:

This screechiness may be at 1500 Hz,

Why do you say this, as it could be anywhere really,

@Herbhornist said:

where I understand there is an ear canal peak with the domes and molds.

Don’t know what you mean here, this would need to be confirmed by your audiologist at Costco, did they do for you, if so they could be overwhelming in certain frequencies, get them to check this just in case.

@Herbhornist said:

Music is important to me.

Hopefully not as important as speech, get the speech and your word recognition sorted out first and then move on to your music, you’ll want a dedicated music program for this.

@Herbhornist said:

Is the Philips HearLink 9030 not for me

Any can be fitted to your loss, really nothing special about yours that can’t be programmed to suit, just got to get on to your audiologist at Costco to help, if they can’t then you have no choice but to try another clinic.

Good luck.

Edited

I don’t really know what you mean by screechiness. And I’m not sure how you guess/know that it’s at 1500 Hz.

If this “screechiness” tends to appear at the end of a sound, it may be that you have bad receivers. I’ve had experience with bad receivers many times, and when it’s blown and becomes overdriven, there’s a saturated sound that comes usually in the end of the sound that I would characterize as scratchiness -> not sure if it’s the same screechiness in your book or not. You also mentioned a screechy “echo”. This is consistent with my hearing the scratchiness trailing the sound/voices I hear when my receivers turn bad. It’s happened to me several times (receivers going bad) over the course of owning my OPN 1 for the last 5 years, so I can tell right away when they start going bad -> the signature of the trailing scratchiness after the amplified sound ends.

It’s a bit of a coincidence that you’re hearing this in both ears -> both receivers have already gone bad. But who knows if the Costco might not have used brand new receivers on your trial pair and they might have gone bad from the get go. But if the Costco HIS insists that they’re brand new receivers, then it’s unlikely that it’s an issue with the receivers. In a very noisy environment, it’s 10 times worse.

At any rate, as part of the basic debugging steps, changing to fresh/brand new receivers to at least eliminate this possibility would be the first step.

It’s definitely not the receivers. Philips calls them speakers, which is more reasonable to me. It was in both sides when they tried molds. It was also on both sides when they used different speakers with power domes. It’s not the scratchiness or crackly sound of a blown receiver. It’s a high frequency edge to a voice. It’s similar to the 3 kHz singer’s formant, if you’re familiar with that. I suggested that it might be 1.5 kHz because I understand that is the standing wave frequency in the ear canal with domes or molds. That could be what caused me such discomfort from the harness bells on the door. That would also explain the “echo-y” quality of the sound. This is all guessing. I am very sensitive to timbre, but not good at expressing myself.

If it indeed is due to a resonance in the ear canal, then a notch filter would be in order. I don’t know that that can be programmed into the hearing aids. Unfortunately, the Costco fitter really doesn’t know what he is dong other than following standard procedures. My reverse cookie bite loss is difficult enough to fit.

Edited

I presume that you don’t have the functionality enabled, right? If you do, try turning it off to see if it goes away. Or if you want to keep the frequency lowering feature enabled, then you can try to have the Costco change the FL configuration to something else to see if it helps.

Even if you don’t want to , just because the Costco HIS doesn’t seem to be helpful, it still may be helpful to download the Philips HearSuite program and install on your PC and enter in your and simulate a session just so that you can go into the software and look around to understand better what all the menus and options and parameters are. Heck, I don’t even own the Philips HearLink 9030 nor have I ever trialed it yet, but I still downloaded the HearSuite program and installed it on my laptop and created a profile with my audiogram so that I can play around with it to see how comparable it is to the Genie 2 software for my OPN 1.

Then at least when you go into a real session with your Costco HIS, you can have some ideas of what to suggest for him to try adjusting for you. I find that for debugging purposes, if you don’t have a competent to get it done for you, then it’s best to help yourself as much as you can to figure it out. But of course not everyone is a DIY type, so you can always just ditch the HearLink and find something else. But from the exchanges with you so far, you seem like the knowledgeable type who may be open to learn to figure out things more, so that’s why I suggest learning more from the HearSuite program even if you don’t want to invest in the hardware to DIY.

No, I don’t have . That would drive me crazy as an (amateur) musician. That’s a very good idea about installing the HearSuite program and playing with it. I have done , and I might again.

Thanks, @Volusiano

Because Philips license the technologies from William Demant, which owns Oticon, Sonic, Bernafon, they all share the same technology. This frequency technology is not based on frequency compression, but instead is based on frequency transposition and composition. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I use it on my OPN 1, and to my surprise, it does not seem to affect how music sounds to me much at all, and I’m also an amateur musician. Another pro guitar musician on this forum (@SpudGunner) who wears the More 1 also uses the More frequency lowering without noticing any bad effect due to it as well. So it may be worth a try if you’re curious, although your kind of hearing loss is not severe or profound enough in the highs to need frequency lowering.

Anyway, if interested to try it out, you can simply make a copy of your P1 program into P2, then enable frequency lowering on P2 only, that way you still don’t have to live with it when in your P1 default, but it makes a nice A/B comparison without/with frequency lowering when you toggle between P1 and P2.

I’m not trying to talk you into using frequency lowering, but I was thinking that if you use the lowest configuration where the destination region is between 1.5-2.4 kHz, maybe in P2 have the High Frequencies option ON, and in P3 have the High Frequencies option OFF, it may be helpful with your debugging the screech issue, to see if the settings in P2 and/or P3 as set above helps resolve the screeching issue or not. If not in P3, then at least you know that the screeching is not happening in the source region (between 4-7 kHz).

And while you’re at it, try listen to some music to see if it sounds weird to you with the FL or not. Also see if you find it helpful with speech or not as well. Like I said, your hearing loss doesn’t warrant a need for it, but it can be a useful tool to try out, if anything, for debugging or just to know how it sounds like.

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