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Hmm. That seems odd to me. There is no technical or physical reason for digital hearing aids to have this issue. It makes sense for the cochlear implants, but n

Hmm. That seems odd to me. There is no technical or physical reason for digital hearing aids to have this issue. It makes sense for the cochlear implants, but not for digital hearing aids - which are no different in principle to headphones on transparency mode.

egberts1 4y ago
Yea. That’s a common input that I get often. BUT, a lot of my musically-inclined folks having gone hearing aid have to experienced and then commented on superiority of analog hearing aid over digital; and analog are continuous spread spectrum, and I concur. I suspect the narrow channelization / narrow pass filter but multiple of them to blame in digital hearing aids. Analog however takes more power consumption to perform at same dB output.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Yes, bad filter configuration can cause these kinds of issues. However, this is a configuration issue. Any competent hearing aid is going to have configurable Q (narrowness) for the filter, so this is on whoever set up your hearing aid.
  - egberts1 4y ago
    Hence digital will never be able to recreate the same continuous spread spectrum of auditorial frequency band and outcompete the analog in power consumption. The trade off made by digital hearing aid manufacturers is you will only get “passable” hearing experience instead of par excellence … all this so that your battery life is merely 1.8x longer. I’d take quality over battery life: makes a difference in distinguishing between V, P, Z, D, E, T, G, and C. But I’ve had to elect to take the one-way to CI because of total loss. In short, all digital hearing models choke on high frequency range.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      I'll be interested to see if this changes with hearing aids being able to be sold over the counter (More people buying them -> more interest in creating good products -> better digital options). Something tells me the existing hearing aid companies are stodgy and slow when it comes to new tech.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      That seems odd to me. Modern digital hearing aids have a great many features that are far more costly in terms of processing power than a simple parametric EQ or minimum phase convolution. You should definitely be able to do so with less power consumption than for an analog one. I can't see how hearing aid manufacturers are implementing Bluetooth, multiple speaker arrays with sound source detection, etc..., but can't make these fairly basic features available. I would be be surprised if it wasn't simply misconfiguration.
      - egberts1 4y ago
        Features like automatic gain control (AGC), frequency range compression (for those with a specific range loss, or amplitude compression (for those with advance dB loss) do not mean much if it doesn’t help you to discriminate bird calls. Bluetooth is just a transport carrier of whatever audio processor can do. All advance high-power digital hearing aids have failed high frequency range response time. Keyword, response time.
        sudosysgen 4y ago
        I understand what you are saying. I'm saying that doing this properly is a solved problem, and that power consumption isn't an issue because many of the features they do have (not AGC or frequency/amplitude compression, those are quite simple) would consume far more power than it would take to do this properly. Modern low-power DSPs can achieve latencies in the microseconds, especially for such a simple task as EQ. That's going to be far beyond human hearing to notice.
        4y ago

egberts1 4y ago

Yea. That’s a common input that I get often. BUT, a lot of my musically-inclined folks having gone hearing aid have to experienced and then commented on superiority of analog hearing aid over digital; and analog are continuous spread spectrum, and I concur. I suspect the narrow channelization / narrow pass filter but multiple of them to blame in digital hearing aids. Analog however takes more power consumption to perform at same dB output.

sudosysgen 4y ago
Yes, bad filter configuration can cause these kinds of issues. However, this is a configuration issue. Any competent hearing aid is going to have configurable Q (narrowness) for the filter, so this is on whoever set up your hearing aid.
- egberts1 4y ago
  Hence digital will never be able to recreate the same continuous spread spectrum of auditorial frequency band and outcompete the analog in power consumption. The trade off made by digital hearing aid manufacturers is you will only get “passable” hearing experience instead of par excellence … all this so that your battery life is merely 1.8x longer. I’d take quality over battery life: makes a difference in distinguishing between V, P, Z, D, E, T, G, and C. But I’ve had to elect to take the one-way to CI because of total loss. In short, all digital hearing models choke on high frequency range.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I'll be interested to see if this changes with hearing aids being able to be sold over the counter (More people buying them -> more interest in creating good products -> better digital options). Something tells me the existing hearing aid companies are stodgy and slow when it comes to new tech.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    That seems odd to me. Modern digital hearing aids have a great many features that are far more costly in terms of processing power than a simple parametric EQ or minimum phase convolution. You should definitely be able to do so with less power consumption than for an analog one. I can't see how hearing aid manufacturers are implementing Bluetooth, multiple speaker arrays with sound source detection, etc..., but can't make these fairly basic features available. I would be be surprised if it wasn't simply misconfiguration.
    - egberts1 4y ago
      Features like automatic gain control (AGC), frequency range compression (for those with a specific range loss, or amplitude compression (for those with advance dB loss) do not mean much if it doesn’t help you to discriminate bird calls. Bluetooth is just a transport carrier of whatever audio processor can do. All advance high-power digital hearing aids have failed high frequency range response time. Keyword, response time.
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        I understand what you are saying. I'm saying that doing this properly is a solved problem, and that power consumption isn't an issue because many of the features they do have (not AGC or frequency/amplitude compression, those are quite simple) would consume far more power than it would take to do this properly. Modern low-power DSPs can achieve latencies in the microseconds, especially for such a simple task as EQ. That's going to be far beyond human hearing to notice.
        4y ago