Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

My one year old hearing aids

Status
Not open for further replies.

audioguru

Well-Known Member
Most Helpful Member
Old age (70) snuck up on my hearing and I did not realise that my high frequency hearing very gradually became pretty bad. One year ago I was offered a free hearing test and a 3 months demo. The hearing test showed normal high frequency loss for my age for a guy and the demo hearing aids were programmed at the beginning with just a little high frequency boost. They sounded great. Then a little more boost two weeks later then full boost after one month. The hearing aids "talk" to each other so when I press a button on one of them to change the mode then both change the mode through wireless communications. I could never design such a tiny wireless thing with compression and adjustable equalization. My design with many trimpots would be housed in a box with wires to my earphones.

High frequency feedback is prevented with their "feedback suppression system" but it seems to cut high frequencies and causes continuous high frequencies to flutter which ruins music. I asked for the feedback suppression to be turned off and for high frequency boost to be reduced just enough to prevent feedback most of the time and it sounded good but something did not sound correct.

Recently I had the settings tweaked and the audiologist said that the "Sound Recover" feature was turned on and maybe it was causing my disagreement with the sounds. Sound Recover is designed for people who have no high frequency hearing and it takes all high frequencies down one octave to frequencies that they can hear. But I can hear high frequencies and like them, I just need their level to be boosted. Sound Recover sounded fake, phony and produced artifacts, the sound is much better without it. Phonak (my hearing aids manufacturer from Switzerland) has a document about Sound Recover and it says tests show that almost everybody likes it even people with mild high frequency hearing loss, especially on a telephone call. Maybe those people who like Sound Recover do not like music. I love to hear wideband music.

One mode cuts levels so that loud traffic noise is reduced and another mode increases the gain a lot so I can hear very faint sounds like people talking far away (am I snooping on them?).
A new feature is that when I use a telephone with a magnetic earphone in its handset then I wirelessly hear the call in both ears!
 
I expect to follow a similar way. Hopefully with such high technological sophistication.
 
I tried another hearing aid brand that spoke the modes in a nice female English accent but I did not like its sound quality. Like loudspeakers, there are some with good and some with bad sound quality.
If I refer you to my hearing aid clinic and you buy then I get a discount on my next purchase. But you are too far away from me.
Here are graphs of normal hearing loss with age:
 

Attachments

  • hearing loss.png
    hearing loss.png
    92.4 KB · Views: 135
If I remember correctly, the very first commercial (non-military) transistor use was for hearing aids. Back when transistors were cutting edge technology.

So it follows that nowadays hearing aids still use cutting edge technology. I would think that they employ a powerful DSP, EEPROM, a bluetooth module and a class-D amplifier, all embedded into a single ASIC.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top