I see it’s listed as obsolete by Apple, so no I don’t think they will be able to help. There are quite a few YouTube videos, but bottom line is that I think the world has moved on from iPod nano 7th generation.
What you could do is pick up an old but not too old iPhone and you would probably be able to sort the problem for little money.
The audiologist said they need to be replaced daily, but perhaps not. I quite the idea of recharging at night. Good tip about leaving them in to allow the brain to acclimatise, it makes good sense.
I had a similar experience the first time I had my ears syringed when I was a student. I could hear a bath being run in an upstairs room as I walked down a north London street.
It’s what I was told , but you should do what your audiologist says, not what mine said to me.
That is what you will probably feel like for a while after you are fitted with them.
Once your brain has adjusted to them you will just feel normal.
Especially when you are listening to music & you remove them you will realise how much hearing you have been missing, probably in the upper & mid frequency ranges.
It’s a sign of getting older but you will be glad you did something about it.
My android phone works fine with Bluetooth David.
I just don’t want to carry a hulking great phone with me when gardening or washing the car. The credit card size iPod Nano is ideal for purpose.
Well the big day came and I collected the hearing aids.
First impressions.
In normal use sound is brighter. More S and everything brighter. Relatively subtle though. I quite like it.
I have have three music settings, two by the audiologist and one within the automatic Phonak programme. My main impression is that it also sounds brighter, like a tone control, but it doesn’t bring up the the too quiet stuff in the mix. So the Roland drums at the beginning of Duchess by Genesis are still much too quiet and cymbals are disappointing.
So perhaps I’m hoping for too much and I suspect I am. I know @Canaryfan found music sounded like when he was younger and I think that @davidhendon was positive but warned not to expect too much. The audiologist is very young and quiet inexperienced so perhaps there is more to extract. I am going back on Thursday. Any thoughts anyone?
Keith
A lot depends what your loss looks like. If it shelves down at the high frequency end but stays level, then you can probably get all of that back up to about 30dB loss. And progressively less as the loss rises.
But if it’s more than 30dB or if it goes over a cliff at say 4KHz or 6 KHz or 8KHz, then whatever is over the cliff is gone basically.
You can tell the audiologist to give you more gain at lower sound levels. The difficulty is that you will have to accept more compression at higher levels. There will be a setting though that sounds the best it can do, you just have to find it.
It all depends on the loss, but as a general comment for most people hearing loss affects the level of perception, ie the quietest sound you can hear at that frequency, but it doesn’t affect the loudest sound you can tolerate. So your dynamic range gets squashed, so to speak.
Another thing is that your response to amplification at frequencies that have become less stimulated won’t necessarily be linear. So you might hear a sound at a certain level, but it is distorted or even not quite the right frequency. And as the sound gets a little louder, you may hear it much louder. It’s all very complicated, depending what exactly is the cause of the loss. Audiologists are trained to give maximum speech recognition outcome. Music is not what they are taught much about.
Well the cliff doesn’t look that high! I think you should get a lot of higher frequencies back. I would be very happy to have your hearing. But it will never be like it was when you were a youngster!
Anyway I suggest give it some time and you will find you really won’t want to listen to music without the hearing aids, because of how much better it sounds with them.
Thanks David, I very much appreciate your help and support 
Another thing I should have said is that when you are first fitted with hearing aids, they have an acclimatisation programme that gives you only part of the final amplification for the first few days. Normally it automatically adjusts to the full prescription over a couple of weeks. This is because otherwise it can be too overwhelming a change for many users.
But you are comparing what you hear now with your memory of what that music should sound like and that isn’t what most people do.
You could ask your audiologist about that. He/she can turn the acclimatisation off very easily, so you get the full gain now. Or you could just see how it goes over a week or two.
Hi Keith,
I’m glad to hear that things seem to be progressing OK for you.
As far as technicalities are concerned, @davidhendon is most definitely the person for you. I may have been lucky, but the default program my Audiologist set up for me seemed to work from the off & has not required any adjustment. My first annual review was in February this year & my hearing had not deteriorated any further so the automatic default remains unaltered. My view is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ & has meant, so far, that I have felt no need to find out anything about the technical side of things. As far as I am concerned, long may that continue.
However, the Phonak (Android app in my case) was very poor in January 2021 (when I purchased my aids) so I didn’t bother with it until about Christmas time or early New Year, when it was upgraded & worked pretty much as it was supposed to.
I therefore fiddled with the setting to see what it could do & how adjusted settings compared with the default program. Two things emerged for me. Firstly, the settings did make a noticeably difference. Secondly, none of them improved the quality of sound over my default settings so those are the ones I have largely stuck with. I do use the default music setting as it is supposed to reduce background noise levels. I can’t say it sounds any different to the default Auto setting as I am nearly always listening to music in a silent room (bar the music of course!).
You should discus you early findings with your Audiologist but also be prepared to give your ears/brain time to adjust to what you are now hearing. If you still feel the mids are a bit recessed & the extreme treble also, then I would suggest, initially, you copy the Music program on the app. Go into it, don’t adjust anything & simply hit the save as button & give it a unique name. Go into the program you have saved & then play around with the settings to your hearts content & try to dial in the settings that suit you. You may be able to fine tune the mids & highs to just how you want them.
If you do create a program exactly to your liking give it a few weeks to make sure you really do like it because it is good & not just different from the auto or standard music programs. I made a musis program that I felt was better than the standard ones. However, after a few days I realised the treble, initially sounding very impressive, was in fact too bright, hard & quite fatiguing. Going back to the standard programs was so much better. If you do find settings that, over the long term, sound better to you then you can return to your Audiologist & ask them to make the necessary changes to your automatic default program.
Once you have had the aids for a while, & the novelty has worn off so that you don’t really notice them, try listening to music, take out the ear pieces whilst listening & ‘see’ what difference you notice. I was surprised just how dull the music without aids actually sounded.
A couple of things to end with. I haven’t suffered from an sibilance & if you are I would have thought that this can be programed out. I can’t recall if I actually said my hearing sounded like when I was younger. I obviously have no idea what it sounded like 40/50 years ago. Whatever I said I meant that music today sounds much the same to me as it did 3/4 years ago which was probably not far from what I remember it sounding back in the 1970s/80’s. Hopefully you will get my meaning.
Hope things go well for you & that you will give us further reports in the weeks/months ahead as to how things are going.
I pretty much echo all of this.
I took the plunge to have my hearing tested about 9 months ago because I was having issues in conversation (repeatedly having to say pardon gets annoying) and was advised that it was better to address hearing issues early rather than later.
I narrowed down the choice to Widex (who claim to be music specialists) and Unitron. This may seem a surprising thing to say but whilst the Widex models were better, they were almost too good. It was like living in a world of noise, walking along the road akin to a Grand Prix. For this reason I went for the Unitrons and have been been satisfied with them.
I cannot agree more with the comments regarding music listening. For me it was little short of a revelation, like a whole veil being taken away. Like I guess most, the hearing aids weren’t exactly cheap but rank as one of the best investments I have personally made in music listening, much better than a lot of equipment upgrades.
I’m going back tomorrow for further adjustment and also to take impressions for the ear defenders I belatedly decided I need for gigs.
In the Tuesday session I used the Duchess track to illustrate what I can’t hear properly. The audiologist then tried boosting various frequencies but nothing worked before we ran out of time. I could hear the Roland drums in the background but nothing really did the trick of boosting them up.
The default setting which works well for @Canaryfan is very subtle in my case. It opens things up a bit but isn’t dramatic. I do find it disappointing that (so far) the aids haven’t picked out and boosted the bit that is too quiet.
I’ll report back tomorrow. Thanks again everyone
The aids won’t pick out what you are not hearing properly. They should boost the frequencies a hearing test has identified as being reduced.
They are automatically programmed from the information recorded in your hearing test. All the Audiologist has to do initially is to transfer the data into the aids, making further minor adjustments to suit if necessary.
That is how it was explained to me & worked in my case. The aids don’t think for themselves, they are simply do what they are instructed.
Don’t forget that you can play with the sound yourself, as described in my previous post, without losing the default program.
Hope you get further improvement tomorrow.
I wish I could agree with those who say that their enjoyment of music has increased with hearing aids. It may actually depend on the type of music: I’ve just come back from a concert (Britten’s violin concerto, played by Isabelle Faust), I listened with and without the hearing aids, and I must say it was more enjoyable without, less harsh. The music programme certainly removed some of the harshness, but I had to reduce the correction level by about three notches.My hearing aids are about 4-5 years old now, more recent ones may be better.
@KRM make sure it is not just a different mastering that you are trying to make sound like what you remember when in fact it might just be the version had been remixed or remastered and the bits that you expect to be there have been backrounded by the mastering engineer.
Your session with the audiologist where you couldn’t hear what you expect considering your mild hearing loss really does point in this direction to me.
Do you have your original version available?
.sjb
If I turn up the volume on my aids, several clicks above the default level, then I can detect a bit of harshness creeping in.
The default volume is fine all the time except sometimes when watching TV with my wife who has the annoying habit of watching a lot of the time with volume so low that she is constantly altering the volume up & down most of the evening. Worst mistake I ever made, buying her another TV remote! I know the volume is too low most of the time because she always turns it up to a level I can comfortably hear at my aids default level when she is watching a program she is really interested in…
My partial hearing loss was so sudden I just wanted it sorted as soon as possible so I just took my Audiologists advice about the most suitable aids for me & did no investigation of my own. I may well have just been lucky that the Audiologist seems to have got it just right for me at the first attempt. I don’t know if this is usual or not.
The Audiologist did say that aids with as many channels as possible were best if music listen was important to me & this seemed reasonable to me & resulted in the purchase of the top of the range Phonaks. As already said, I have no idea if I was ‘over sold’ or not, but they just worked from the start so I have never given it further thought.
If your aids are about 5 years old, it may be possible that the technology has improved since then & I would suggest a discussion with your Audiologist. If you feel music sounds better with the aids out, well this does not sound right to me.
On the day I actually had the aids fitted I was convinced that my ‘new ears’ would sound both tinny & robotic (best description I can give), but these fears were totally unfounded. My current hearing is what my brain tells me is what I would be hearing without aids if it were still 100%. With the aids I believe it is much the same as it was many years ago but, of course, I have no idea if this is the case, just as none of us can ever know exactly what any one else is actually hearing.
Keith, Genesis have always been one of my favorite artists &, as fine an album as Duke is, I don’t think it is the ideal choice to evaluate your hearing with. The Roland drums you refer to don’t sound particularly prominent to me &, from memory, never have. I have listened to my 40 year old LP copy & more recent remastered CD & have to say that they both sound very similar. I think there is a lot of material that may be a better reference for you. I like steel strung acoustic guitar & a lot of modern recordings sound sparkling & realistic to me. Try a few more recordings & try using the graphic equalizer in the Phonak app if the default setting in your aids are still not ‘doing it’ for you. If your hearing loss is slight then I would expect the change in what you are hearing when using them to be fairly subtle.
Hope this makes some sense & has not rambled too much.
