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Why does impulse noise sound so different as it gets louder?

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Hi all,

I’m currently experimenting with my new Phonak Naida Lumity L90 after moving up from 10 year old Starkey Hearing Aids.

When I rap on my desk using my old aids, it sounds pretty much normal no matter how hard I rap on it.

When I rap on my desk using my Lumitys though, it will sound normal when I gently wrap, and then start booming and reverberating with a slightly different pitch as I start to rap harder. The progression feels unnatural and seems to be overamplifying the noise when it hits a certain decibel.

I’m trying to understand what’s causing this so I can have the aids adjusted accordingly. This feels like a linear progression thing, my old aids I think are using a straight linear formula, while these aids are semi-linear using Phonak 2, so I’m wondering if this is a factor?

If you describe this to your audiologist, they can probably answer your question and adjust your hearing aids accordingly. I’d be interested to know what they say about this. :thinking:

Since I’m using Phonaks, my audiologist adjusted the SoundRelax setting, but all this does is simply cut off the sound once it hits a certain decibel, so it results in a jarring cutoff of the impulse sound.

I did more research and it looks like this is likely more related to compression ratios at higher decibels and attack times; when the input sound exceeds a certain threshold, it triggers stronger compression or limiting. This can cause the sound to feel amplified, distorted, or reverberant because the hearing aid is aggressively reducing gain to protect my ears. If the compression ratio or attack/release times are not optimized, sudden loud sounds can sound unnatural. For example, a fast attack time might clip the sound, creating a reverberant or “boomy” effect.

Another factor is that is too high (which is why these impulse noises sound too loud to me) and may need to be adjusted downward.

A combination of adjustments to compression ratios by reducing it and slowing attack times and reducing MPO slightly would probably do the trick. I’m going to be testing this out and see how it goes. :slight_smile:

Interesting, I’ll have to factor that in when testing. Right now I’m testing compression instead to see if semi-linear or linear will be better for me.

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