Phonak sound recovery

Terry, at the risk of sounding picky, it is my understanding that the knee point is the frequency at which the compression starts. Up to that point everything is “real”.
Above the knee point, frequencies are compressed so that 8k may be translated into 6k etc.
Jim, I have this on my Phonaks and it’s really helpful. Sound like the whistling kettle, and all the high-pitched beeps that electronic equipment makes were totally beyond me, but now I hear them anywhere in the house.

Gilbert

You guys might be beyond my comprehension. I am brand new to HA and have Phonaks. I thought all they did was amplify the high freq. I couldn’t hear while letting the lower greq pass thru “untouched” thru my open fit aids. Are you saying they don’t really amplify the high freq, but simply convert a 6k hz sound to something lower I can hear? There would have to be some amplification. If all sounds were converted to lower freq., all females would sound like bass tenors.

…mike

@Gilbert said:

Terry, at the risk of sounding picky, it is my understanding that the knee point is the frequency at which the compression starts. Up to that point everything is “real”.
Above the knee point, frequencies are compressed so that 8k may be translated into 6k etc.
Jim, I have this on my Phonaks and it’s really helpful. Sound like the whistling kettle, and all the high-pitched beeps that electronic equipment makes were totally beyond me, but now I hear them anywhere in the house.

Gilbert

Gilbert, that explanation definitely helps me getting my mind around the way it sounds.

Thanks,
TerryB

I have SoundRecovery on but still can’t hear sounds like beeping of the microwave or chimes in the car. However, I am picking up other sounds like door hinge squeaking, water gurgling as it goes down the drain, my chair groaning, sporadic noises in the digestive system, etc. These are sounds I don’t recall hearing before, so who knows what improvement I am getting from this program. Haven’t noticed any distortion of female voices. I am considering going back and having the program strengthened.

Roger
California

I have the now older Audeo YES IX with the sound recover. I don’t know anything fancy about how it works or what it does, I’m a computer tech, not a sound engineer. What I do know is that Phonak’s SoundRecover WORKS! I can without a doubt hear and understand much better than with either of my previous Phonak or Siemens aids. I can understand a neighbor with a higher pitched voice who speaks too fast and doesn’t open her mouth who my wife with perfect hearing has trouble with. I can hear a boss at work who has a little girl’s voice, although I sometimes have to up the volume as she is another one who doesn’t speak very loud and is always being told to speak louder by everyone else. But with the volume control, I am at an advantage and can actually understand her when I boost the power. There is no doubt in my mind that the SoundRecover makes a big difference in my life.

If you think of sound waves as having a height represented by the gain or volume level. Then on the other side of the coin the frequency is represented by the width or length.

Up to now aids only effected the height of the sound waves. Made the sounds louder or softer and that’s pretty much in the simplest form all it did. It never touched the width of the sound waves.

Sound recover now gives the aids the ability to manipulate the width of the sound waves.

The threshold or kneepoint is just the point AFTER which compression is applied. Whether it’s applied to the height or width.

so up to now aids had a way to fit sounds waves into a certain height range. now with sound recover they’ve gave us to fit the same waves into a certain width range.

All this is done at the cost of speech discrimination as with all compression scheme, information is lost.

There have been a lot of discussion about this technology on the board
http://www.hearingaidforums.com/showthread.php?t=34844

@mdboy said:

I’m two days into a trial with Naida Vs with Soundrecovery turned on. I’m coming from power Audibel CICs

I haven’t yet had the experience of hearing new sounds but my Audi seems to think we can do better. There doesn’t appear to be any way to “increase” Soundrecover but I think she was going to adjust some of the inputs on my hearing so Soundrecover calculated a more robust compression to lower frequencies.

I have found that the Naida’s do an excellent job with soft sounds, they appear to help quite a bit in a noisy environment, and the 10 decibel audio boost is very nice when trying to hear a single person standing far away.

In the software there is a slider to set the degree of frequency compression. It allows more sounds to be pulled into your audible frequencies, however as you move this over there’s a risk of loss of frequency resolution which you can hear as distortion, so it needs to be set up with a bit of trial and error.

Is soundrecovery something that should be played with or does the Target software set it up to what should be an ideal setting? I find that for the most part these are great HA’s right out of the box.

@Jim_Hinkson said:

I am a retired electronics engineer. I’ve worn hearing aids for over 20 years. I am excited about what I think I understand about Phonak’s Sound Recovery feature in the Audeo series. The company info says that frequencies normally beyond what a person with hearing loss can detect are somehow changed by the hearing aid electronics into frequencies that can be heard. The info says that word recognition is enhanced. Has anybody had experience with these aids?

I discussed this with my audi. She told me that my “theory” is basically correct. This suggests in the extreme that a soprano may sound like an alto. Even so, if the higher frequency components of a spoken word are translated to within my hearing range, that also suggests that I may not have to say, “Pardon me?” again and read lips.

As an engineer, I suspect that a Fourier Transform on the higher frequency components of a sound are being translated to lower frequencies that can be heard. I which I’d thought of that!

Any comments from the group?

Jim Hinkson
Latest Audiogram
Hz L R
250 50 45
500 45 50
1000 65 55
1500 75 70
2000 85 85
3000 110 100

The results of the frequency shifting has been mixed. The idea is sound but it’s tough getting used to hearing speakers in this new way. Looks like you could be a candidate for this technology but you’ll have to do most of the work in getting used to an aid whose output signal is essentially heavily distorted.

@dsi1 said:

The results of the frequency shifting has been mixed. The idea is sound but it’s tough getting used to hearing speakers in this new way. Looks like you could be a candidate for this technology but you’ll have to do most of the work in getting used to an aid whose output signal is essentially heavily distorted.

You’re right that it doesn’t work for everybody, but you wouldn’t implement it for everybody. The suggestion that the signal becomes distorted is flawed too.

I’m not a big fan of Phonak per se, but I would suggest that an advancement like Soundrecover does way more good in than it ever does harm.

If you don’t like it, you just turn it off.

However, there is an ethical point here, especially wrt paediatric fittings - Should children be exposed to a proprietary form of acoustic modification, which although largely beneficial may mould their neural pathways in a particular fashion - thereby indoctrinating them into a particular manufacturer’s products for life.

@Um_bongo said:

You’re right that it doesn’t work for everybody, but you wouldn’t implement it for everybody. The suggestion that the signal becomes distorted is flawed too.

I’m not a big fan of Phonak per se, but I would suggest that an advancement like Soundrecover does way more good in than it ever does harm.

If you don’t like it, you just turn it off.

However, there is an ethical point here, especially wrt paediatric fittings - Should children be exposed to a proprietary form of acoustic modification, which although largely beneficial may mould their neural pathways in a particular fashion - thereby indoctrinating them into a particular manufacturer’s products for life.

Hummm, an ethical point wrt pediatric fittings?

1. Do you really feel that compressing 2 kHz for sound spectrum into 1.111 kHz of audible bandwidth is so detrimental as opposed to letting the sounds fall off of sensation?

2. Don’t you think that other vendors will be able to provide an alternative solution before a lifetime has elapsed?

Seems like a harsh assessment to me, a layman.

TerryB

My audi told me that studies have shown that children who use the soundrecover in their hearing aids actually speak clearer than those who dont have the feature.