Using Genie 2

First off, by looking at your almost flat hearing loss, I’m not sure if Speech Rescue would be very helpful for you, because the whole idea is to lower the sounds in the higher frequencies where there is severe to profound loss to lower frequencies where there is better audibility (less severe and profound loss there). And the lowest destination region as can be seen in the screenshot below is 1.5 - 2.4 KHz. But your hearing loss there is at around 90 dB, not any better than your hearing loss beyond that destination range. So even if you use Speech Rescue, you don’t really have a better audible range to lower it into.

Having said that, if you use it anyway, I guess it doesn’t hurt even if it may not help as much, simply because now you’ll hear a duplication of sounds in both the source region and the destination region (sounds in the gray band gets duplicated into the red band). This is assuming that you leave the High Frequency Bands setting to ON.

The adjustment of the Strength slider means that the higher value you set it, the louder the volume of the lowered sounds will be for you to hear. For example, the “sh” and “s” sounds in the higher frequency source region (where the gray band is) now will be heard louder in the lowered destination region (where the red band is) if you increase the Strength value. In your case, however, like I said, it may not be as obvious to hear louder volume of the lowered sounds because your hearing loss in the destination is almost as bad as the hearing loss in the higher source region anyway. But you can always try to vary this Strength value from the left most to the right most value on the slider to see if you may notice a difference or not.

I don’t use the Sound Studio inside Genie 2 at all. I just set Speech Rescue up then I listen to my streaming videos to see if I can pick up more “s” and “sh” sounds on the TV shows I watch or not.

Regarding Binaural Broadband, I think that it’s only available in P1 because Genie doesn’t allow it to be set different inside of each different program, so that’s why it appears only in P1 and not in P2, P3, P4. However you have it set in P1, it’ll have an effect on whether you can adjust Spatial Noise Management in each of the 4 programs or not. If you turn off Binaural Broadband in P1, you won’t be able to make any adjustment for Spatial Noise Management in any of the programs anymore.

I tried to set Binaural Broadband to OFF, but in the End Fitting window, program change and volume control, which are part of the Binaural Control, are not grayed out. So I’m guessing that turning off Binaural Broadband only has an effect on the Spatial Noise Management, and does not have any effect of binaural controls like program change and volume change. I guess Genie 2 is wrong in saying that Binaural Broadband controls the Binaural Control like program change and volume change.

@michael1 said:

Hi, just thought I’d let you know my latest experiment with Xceed1,
Using DSE which appears to be the flavour for Xceed I get an overwhelming bias towards own voice, footsteps and toilet flush (very loud)
I think this supports your recent arguments about proprietary not being a sales pitch. If I’d been fitted like this i would run a mile.
Even NAL2 is biased the same way but overall less volume.
Using my latest REM values I get the same volume as my paradise but the bias is still there.
Using your audiogram method to adjust where would you start to lower those sounds?
I tried lowering all soft gains to no effect.
Generally none of the sound controls had any effect (DSE) nor did transient noise management.
Disappointingly open sound navigator has no benefit either.
I wonder if my loss is too severe for these options to work.
Michael

I don’t know what you mean by DSE. Are you referring to one of the fitting rationales? There’s DSL v5.0 Adult, but there’s no DSE. I’ll continue the rest of my post here assuming that you meant DSL v5.0 Adult when you said DSE.

The standard rationales like DSL, NL1, NL2 were all design with giving speech priority, so they tend to be a bit sharper/harsher compared to the Oticon VAC+ proprietary rationale. But the trade-off for clearer speech is that now other things sound harsh and unnatural as well, like your own voice, footsteps, toilet flush, water run, etc.

I don’t know how REM was done for you, but if it was done using external/stand-alone REM equipment which is not integrated into Genie 2 for the Genie 2 REM Autofit to be run and a VAC+ target to be generated, then the REM external/stand-alone equipment will most likely have force-fitted your end result into sounding like the standard rationale it was used for the target gain curve, probably the NAL-NL2 one.

This is why you’re seeing that with the REM values you have, you can still see this bias. You might have assumed that the program is showing VAC+, and yet why it sounds biased toward the harshness of the standard rationales? It’s because the REM target gain curve is based on a standard rationale, it’s NOT based on VAC+.

You can simply add a new program and choose VAC+ for this program to see if you like it better or not. OK, it won’t have the REM stamp of approval there, but you can be your own stamp of approval and decide whether you like the true VAC+ sound better than the fake VAC+ sound that was REM force-fit or not. You can always start playing with Fine Tuning the VAC+ based program to shape it into what you like (using the Sound Controls menu to start with). Explore the Fitting Assistant as well to see if it’s helpful for you or not.