Tag: noise

Programmes: Want Them But Never Use Them [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

When I got my first pair of hearing aids, I was hesitating between a smaller and slightly cheaper model, and a somewhat larger and more expensive one. I honestly wasn’t sure the sound quality was better in the more expensive one. I thought it was, but I wasn’t sure.

What tipped the balance was that the more expensive hearing aids had a button that I could use to switch between programmes. And I wanted that. I was frustrated by the lack of control I had as a user on the hearing aid settings, and so the idea of having programmes I could switch between gave me something to hang on to.

programmes-make-me-feel-more-in-control

Normal, noisy environment, quiet environment, mute.

When I tried Phonak Quest and then Venture, I got extra programmes. I was super happy! My current line-up is something like: normal (AutoSense), calm environment with nothing fancy added in, super zoom for loud environment, 360 zoom, speech in wind (for sailing) and music. Mute is in addition to all that. And the “normal” setting itself actually contains a whole bunch of programmes that the OS switches to automatically.

In reality, I almost never use my programmes. I do use mute (when working in a café, I’m happy to “turn the sound off”, or in public transport), but the programmes? The only times I really use them is when I’m struggling, and this usually results in me cycling through the programmes without really finding anything more satisfying than the initial setting.

For me this means two things:

  1. the automatic programme (AutoSense) is doing a pretty good job selecting the most appropriate setting for the acoustic situation I’m in, and as a result I’m rarely in trouble hearing;
  2. my desire for programmes has more to do with my peace of mind than with my actual necessity for them — something I suspected since the beginning; it reminds me of the disconnect between what you think will make you happy and what actually makes you happy…

If you have programmes and actually use them, I’d love to hear about it!

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Impressions on New Hearing Aids [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

As promised, here are my impressions of the Bolero hearing aids I’m currently trying out (hoping I don’t get any of the technical stuff wrong here, do tell me if I did!). They have open tips, like my Widex ones have, but are BTE (entirely behind-the-ear) rather than RIC (with the receiver, the part that produces sounds, directly in the ear canal — this would be the Phonak Audéo model, which I might try in future). My Phonak audiologist Jennifer tells me it doesn’t change much, acoustically: a RIC just moves some of the technology away from behind the ear, allowing the part that sits there to be smaller — important for those, who, like Steve, appreciate when their hearing aids are invisible.

Phonak Bolero Q90

The first thing that struck me with these aids was that there was less ambiant noise. Or less operating noise. Or different. I had the strange feeling I wasn’t really wearing hearing aids. There was probably a little less amplification than what I was used to, but clearly something in the sound texture too.

Voices felt a little tinny/reverb-y at first. Mine, Jennifer’s. Not unpleasant, but a little bit weird. Jennifer told me it was probably due to SoundRecover, which compresses high frequencies into a lower frequency region so we can hear them better. She warned me it would take some time getting used to. I don’t notice anything strange with voices nowadays, so I guess I did indeed get used to it!

I discovered that with Phonak there is a whole list of programmes the hearing aids can switch back and forth from, and which can also be set manually. I left my “main” channel in automatic mode to see how that worked, and for the other ones picked StereoZoom, which is optimised for speech in noisy environments, with a lot of noise reduction and a very narrow beam for amplification, speech in wind (for sailing), and a phone programme (right ear). The last position is a “mute” mode (indispensable for me).

The buttons on both aids have different roles: they can either be used to turn volume up or down, or switch programmes. The catch is that the left button is the “volume down” one, and the right button “volume up”. So as I wanted a “volume up” button, I had to have my programme switch one on the left — whereas it would have made more sense for me to have it on the right. I’m right-handed, and switch programmes more often than I increase volume. Oh well.

I can’t say I’ve used the phone programme much. I tried it, and it works, taking the sound from the right ear (the phone one) and channeling it into the left ear too. It’s pretty neat. But it requires positioning the phone in such a way that the hearing aid catches the phone sound (takes some getting used to) and pressing the phone against my ear with the hearing aid in it ended up being a bit too uncomfortable. So, for long planned calls I’ve reverted to my trusty earbuds. For impromptu calls I still tend to switch to mute, because background noise sometimes interferes with the phone mode (i.e., gets amplified too) and I don’t really feel like experimenting with acoustics when I’m on a call. I guess I should probably run some test calls to really try that mode out.

Given the lousy weather this summer, “speech in wind” has also been largely left aside, as it’s the programme I was planning to use when sailing. I like StereoZoom, though I sometimes have trouble determining if I should use it or leave the hearing aid in automatic mode, specially as automatic mode has a whole bunch of different programmes it can switch to and even blend.

While it’s nice to have a hearing aid that recognises the acoustic environment and chooses the best programme suited to it, it’s sometimes frustrating in practice. I’ll be in my car talking to a friend, and suddenly the quality of the sound changes and I have more trouble understanding speech. And then it changes back. Or I’ll be listening to music in the car, and one ear seems to be treating sound differently from the other. I find the whole concept of a hearing aid intelligent enough to know what it’s listening to fascinating, and would love to know more about how to the tech/programme works, but the control-geek in me would like to be able to have some kind of indication telling me which mode I’m in, and an easy way to override it.

I haven’t yet put my Widex aids back in my ears, which in my opinion points to how comfortable I am with the Phonaks. There’ll be a little tweaking to do next time I go to headquarters and see Jennifer (one ear is slightly less-amplified, and maybe I need a smaller size tip in one ear, we’ll see), and I’ll probably change my selection of programmes, including at least the music one.

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Solved Another MacBook Fan Problem! [en]

[fr] En recherchant la cause d'une trop grande activité du processeur (et donc du ventilateur) de son MacBook, ne pas oublier d'afficher "tous les processus" dans Activity Monitor. Sinon, on risque de rater MozyBackup, par exemple, qui a piqué une crise et décidé d'utiliser 99.6% du processeur...

Remember how happy I was after solving my print-queue-related MacBook fan problem? Well, for the last few days, my fan has been noisy again. I had a vague suspicion the noise coincided with when I reactivated my Mozy account and endeavoured the get my computer backed up again remotely. However, the fan remained noisy even when Mozy wasn’t uploading or being active.

A friend of mine dropped by on IM to help me troubleshoot. I went through Activity Monitor, sorted the processes by CPU, and closed off those that were using the most ressources — to no avail. The highest process on the list was using 4.5% of CPU ressources, and iStat Nano (a dashboard widget I heartily recommend) was still telling me my fan was running at around 6200rpm and my CPU temperature was approaching 70°C. I could also see that the graph depicting CPU activity was showing it pretty active overall.

I bit at loss over what to do next. Clicking around in iStat Nano, I noticed that at the top of the process list there was MozyBackup, using up 99.6% of my CPU! The reason this process didn’t appear in Activity Monitor was that I was filtering “My Processes” instead of viewing all processes, and MozyBackup was running as root.

Activity Monitor

I killed (force quit) MozyBackup, and it popped up again. I killed it again. And again. By that time, my friend had unearthed this article about Mozy Backup going crazy, where I learned that MozyBackup coming back from the dead was normal (it’s a feature).

Thankfully, once I’d killed MozyBackup a few times, it started behaving normally again, and as you can see on the screenshop posted above, it’s now happily backing up my data without squeezing all the ressources out of my poor old MacBook, which is now quiet again.

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