Advice on Hearing Aids

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qwertee

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#2832771 15-Dec-2021 11:32

morrisk:

qwertee:

Sorry to hijack this thread but I wanted to ask this from people wearing hearing aids

My mother in law have uses an Oticon. Is it normal for a hearing aid to have a consistent hiss? She finds this quite irritating and
has never adjusted to ignore this consistent hiss. Hence does not wear it.

I can hear the hiss, when I put it close to my ears. I was expecting silence in a quiet room, and only amplifying when there is noise- ie people speaking, TV or other transients like doors closing,

Thanks

No this should not be the case. I would definitely be going back to the audiologist to have this checked.

I am completely unaware of my Oticon aids when wearing them - I put them in on getting up and take them out to charge overnight. I have tinnitus which is common and this is present whether the aid is in or out. There should be no hiss.

Thanks @morrisk

I would have thought so.
I was thinking that though I can hear the hiss , a person with an aural impairment might not hear this hiss.
Also the Oticon batteries need to be removed every night, to prevent battery drain during periods of non usage, and this is difficult at her age of 80+

sparkyred

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#2832778 15-Dec-2021 11:39

Used to work as a Business Analyst/ Dogsbody for an audiology franchise. We even had an incentives program where less than half of the audiologists took it up. So from that perspective there are plenty of caring for the patient audiologists out there - it will be the push they get internally from corporate that can derail the experience.

Get earwax checked out first - if you have a ton of wax in your ear, a cleaning will do wonders. Give it a week then go in for testing if you think it's needed.

If the hearing loss is negatively impacting everyday life then consider hearing aids. If it's occasional, like struggling at the weekly RSA meetup, then decide if it's worth hearing aids to improve that part of life.

Audiologists might see hearing loss on the graph and that's it; you need to decide if it's impacting life enough that you need to hear those sounds better.

Always go for 2nd opinions - a shit ton of money for hearing aids is worth the time for a 2nd visit somewhere else.

If you have high frequency hearing loss and your wife has a high pitched voice then a good option might be to just do nothing... or might be vitally important you get that sorted to avoid marital complications. If you suffer from noise recruitment and want that sorted, the approach is different to regular hearing loss. Understanding what is being solved by X hearing aids and how is important.

It's a shame the tech can be really good but usually fails due to user error - grandpa had god awful fit and just did nothing about it until mum hauled him to the audiologist to get them sorted, he would also never seem to change the battery, or still have the battery door open, or just have no batteries in them. Since going into a home - where the staff keep the batteries fresh - talking to him is much more tolerable.

Another 'user error' is not communicating with the audiologist or just not going in for aftercare appointments. Expect some tweaking to get things right; background noise filtering, getting the frequency gains right, fitting.

If you're spending $5k per hearing aid, expect $5k per hearing aid kind of service from your audiologist. Be firm with expectations.

allan

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#2832781 15-Dec-2021 11:41

Yep agree there should be no hiss. Also a wearer of Oticon aids since earlier this year - actually one hearing aid and one cross-aid as i have zero hearing in one ear (tumour removal many years ago) and i persisted with no aids until earlier this year when I developed some loss in my good ear. So decided I may as well see how good the cross-aid was at getting sound over to the other side. I've found it works well in quieter environments and I am picking up conversations on that side that I wasn't before. However, it doesn't restore any sense of directional sound so it doesn't help much when it's noisy.

I do like the bluetooth integration with phone and laptop and have been just using the hearing aid for work online meeting calls etc, often muting the local hearing aid and just listening to the bluetooth delivered sound. Tried it with bluetooth from TV, but given the TV sound still needs to be on for other family members, the millisecond difference between bluetooth delivered sound to my hearing aid vs sound from TV speakers makes it not usable.

Re the hiss - I would try changing the wax filter first, (my hearing aid "kit" came with a supply) but if that doesn't help, yes back to audiologist as others have suggested.

qwertee

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#2832795 15-Dec-2021 12:00

Thanks guys for confirming that there should no hiss.

Will check the other points , wax in ear canal and also the device. and check up.
A visit to the audiologist will not happen soon due to other reasons.

psychrn

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#2833022 15-Dec-2021 20:07

eracode:

It's interesting and coincidental that this thread has been revived. I was the OP here three years ago - and just in the last few days my 'family member' - actually Mrs Code - is reporting the problem again. We're back where we were in 2018 - so she's going for another ear-clean and we'll take it from there.

Yes wax in the canal is often the case. I went to Tui Rototuna at the recommendation of my audiologist and the price was cheaper however she left some wax behind apparently believing the ear needed some left. My Audiologist was flabergasted.

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psychrn

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#2833027 15-Dec-2021 20:17

sparkyred:

Used to work as a Business Analyst/ Dogsbody for an audiology franchise. We even had an incentives program where less than half of the audiologists took it up. So from that perspective there are plenty of caring for the patient audiologists out there - it will be the push they get internally from corporate that can derail the experience.

Get earwax checked out first - if you have a ton of wax in your ear, a cleaning will do wonders. Give it a week then go in for testing if you think it's needed.

If the hearing loss is negatively impacting everyday life then consider hearing aids. If it's occasional, like struggling at the weekly RSA meetup, then decide if it's worth hearing aids to improve that part of life.

Audiologists might see hearing loss on the graph and that's it; you need to decide if it's impacting life enough that you need to hear those sounds better.

Always go for 2nd opinions - a shit ton of money for hearing aids is worth the time for a 2nd visit somewhere else.

If you have high frequency hearing loss and your wife has a high pitched voice then a good option might be to just do nothing... or might be vitally important you get that sorted to avoid marital complications. If you suffer from noise recruitment and want that sorted, the approach is different to regular hearing loss. Understanding what is being solved by X hearing aids and how is important.

It's a shame the tech can be really good but usually fails due to user error - grandpa had god awful fit and just did nothing about it until mum hauled him to the audiologist to get them sorted, he would also never seem to change the battery, or still have the battery door open, or just have no batteries in them. Since going into a home - where the staff keep the batteries fresh - talking to him is much more tolerable.

Another 'user error' is not communicating with the audiologist or just not going in for aftercare appointments. Expect some tweaking to get things right; background noise filtering, getting the frequency gains right, fitting.

If you're spending $5k per hearing aid, expect $5k per hearing aid kind of service from your audiologist. Be firm with expectations.

Yes excellent post. I agree entirely.

I went for my 1 week post installation of new aides today.

Finely tuned the aides checking up with a probe to check their effectiveness compared to data already calculated.

The previous issue of wax seemed to have diminished as I had some in one of my filters so that had been degrading performance.

I have actually bought a magnifyer/light arrangement so I can check for wax anywhere near the wax filter. Even the Audiologist was impressed with what I brought in and showed her colleagues in the practise.

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grenow

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#2833439 16-Dec-2021 13:43

Three years ago I posted about some earbuds I'd ordered: Nuheara IQbuds2 Max. They adjust to moderate hearing loss via a smartphone app, have good sound quality, will process speech to improve clarity, excellent noise cancelling, Bluetooth, hands-fee phone and video conferencing, lots of different programmes that can be customised, etc etc. They're on sale at the moment for NZ$450 (https://www.nuheara.com). I have been very impressed with the performance of my pair, and I still use them regularly despite...

Earlier this year I gave in to nagging from family and went to see our local independent audiologist (Vera Setz, Rangiora/Amberley/etc) to see what she could do for me. We ended up agreeing that I needed some top tier Widex aids (Moment 440) that cost an arm, a leg and a kidney ($8,500), but which are supposedly state of the art for hearing aids, and reputedly the best for listening to music. They're rechargeable, link to my iPhone over Bluetooth, stream audio from the phone, have a variety of customisable programmes via the app, etc etc. It took me a while to get used to them, but I have to say that they have made a very big difference to my speech/social interactions and so on. Life is very dull without them. But...

I was very disappointed with the streaming audio quality of the Widex aids. Streaming speech and music sounds very tinny - little or no bass, very boxy - and no amount of customisation improves them significantly. I can just about live with the speech quality when streaming podcasts, but if I want to listen to music privately, I take the aids out and use the IQbuds. On the other hand, listening to music live or from good speakers is very good.

The Widex programmes don't include noise cancelling. I can hear that they do it to some extent, because they have settings for "party", "travel" and so on, but they have nothing as good as the IQbuds. On a flight from Wellington to ChCh earlier this year, the IQbuds enabled me to understand the pilot's in-flight announcement for the first time in decades... ;-) We live on a small farm, and I have a variety of noisy jobs to do - mowing and so on - and I find the aids just amplify the noise, even when wearing ear defenders. They can't cope with wind noise when I'm riding my bike either. So I take them out and use the IQbuds.

Although the Widex aids have Bluetooth, they are tied to one link - to the app on the phone. You can't unpair and use them as Bluetooth audio for a TV or Watch. If you want to stream TV audio, Widex want you to spend more money - several hundred dollars. Which I'm not about to do, because of the streaming audio quality noted above. The IQbuds will pair/unpair with a tap, and happily accept streams from any source. I use my Watch to play podcasts and music while mowing, for example.

The Widex aids can't do hands-free phone calls - they require you to use the phone microphone - and are therefore not much good for Zoom etc. They have the microphones to do it, but they just won't.

The rechargeable battery performance is good, easily lasting a day (they're rated for 16-20 hours of use). They have a charging cradle they live in overnight. The IQbuds will do 8-10 hours of noise cancelling and speech processing, and about 4 hours of streaming on a charge, but their charging cradle includes a battery which will recharge them three times. For the money, I think the Widex should have the same (other brands top aids do).

To be completely fair, the IQbuds are not powerful enough/customisable enough to fully compensate for the hearing loss in my left ear, and are on their limit for my right ear, and a smartphone app is never going to completely replace the sophistication of an audiologist's diagnosis. But the next generation of buds probably will.

So: my state-of-the-art hearing aids are very good at what they do, but they lack many of the functions of earbuds that cost only 5% of their price. My expectations of what hearing aids should do is not matched by what the established hearing aid manufacturers are offering. Meanwhile, earbud manufacturers are improving their products at a rapid pace, and it very much looks to me that they will disrupt the hearing aid business in a big way.

When I replace my current aids, I very much doubt I'll be spending the same amount of cash, but I do expect to get a lot more functionality.

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SpartanVXL

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#2833543 16-Dec-2021 15:21

On a related note, curious to know where decent places to get ears cleared out are. Are there general places to go? Do GP’s do it as well?

Not in the age range to worry about hearing loss yet, ears are still young enough to hear the whine of ac-dc bricks and which ones are dying :)

johno1234

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#2833565 16-Dec-2021 16:11

SpecSavers have entered the audiology market as a disrupter. I went to see the audiologist at the Botany branch and after the test ordered their SpecSavers Elite CROS hearing aids. With subsidy these came to $3k for the set. As far as I can tell these are a rebranded Signia (Siemens) hearing aid. They have all the good stuff: rechargeable, bluetooth streaming, digital signal processing, multiple hearing modes, configurable via phone app and so on. Basically the same as what Signia do for 3 times the price.

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#2833632 16-Dec-2021 18:20

allan: ... I do like the bluetooth integration with phone and laptop ...

Had a non-technical family member get some hearing aids & linked to app on phone. Initial hiss sorted on follow up visits. Life is good, she uses her phone like she did before, she can hear us better now. A few months later during a family visit, she wanted to share a video on her phone. We see the video, but we hear nothing. We ask if there is supposed to be audio with this? She says there is & she can hear it. Not us though. We realised the audio was playing through her hearing aids & not the phone speaker. 😋

Please keep this GZ community vibrant by contributing in a constructive & respectful manner.

psychrn

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#2833671 16-Dec-2021 20:17

SpartanVXL: On a related note, curious to know where decent places to get ears cleared out are. Are there general places to go? Do GP’s do it as well?

Not in the age range to worry about hearing loss yet, ears are still young enough to hear the whine of ac-dc bricks and which ones are dying :)

Here in the tron I recently went to Tui Medical at Rototuna. Charged me $58 for both ears. After discount from audiologist. however the Audiologist retested and said there as still wax in canal. They stated that "you should leave some wax in ear" my audiologist said this is ":rubbish" best place in Hamilton is probably Tolbeck in Hamilton east

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