I recently visited my audiologist here in San Francisco to meet with him and a representative audiologist from Widex to try out a brand new hearing aid- the Widex Passion. The representative was there to fit and adjust the new hearing aid and see how I responded to a unique concept called the audibility extender. The audibility extender brings the higher frequency sounds that are unavailable to me down to a lower octave that I can hear. It was amazing!
Its certainly a bewildering experience to have new sounds available that I’ve never heard before- and its not without a certain “unnaturalness” and strange sound artifacts. These are the inevitable consequence of tinkering with sound in this way. However, I found the new sounds to be something that I really want. For instance- I can barely differentiate between “sh”, “th”, “ch”, and “s” sounds. The audibility extender brought those particular sounds into a range that my hearing aid could amplify for me- at a lower octave. I could understand speech better as a result…truly amazing and I hope they keep this technology and continue to improve on it. It really clicks with me.
This concept won’t work for everyone. Some people find that the audibility extender makes speech harder to understand and find the strange sounds to be unacceptable. But I think if people stuck with this for a while and went through the training provided on a compact disc- they might find that these strange and foreign sounds become more useful over time. It really requires some work and flexibility. I told the Widex representative that it wasn’t unlike being on a hallucinogenic drug- where the brain has to grasp onto brand new sounds that it’s never dealt with before. I think the brain should be given some credit..built with a huge amount of flexibility it can deal with these new sounds over time and adapt to them. Im confident that the audibility extender will prove to be a more and more useful and positive experience for me over time. I’ll report back on this as I move along with it.
The audibility extender needs to be fined tuned and adjusted for each user. It helps to have someone tinker with the settings and get them right- otherwise the experience won’t live up to its full potential.
Some areas that I’m excited to use the audibility extender in: listening to bird songs, playing the higher notes on my guitar, the high pitched whirring noises that my transmission is apparently making, whispers, overhearing gossip.
This is a deal breaker for me- I might go with the Widex Passion hearing aids over all other hearing aids simply because of this feature. As a quick disclaimer: Please take my opinion with a grain of salt- what works for one person may not work for another. I’d like to hear from other people what they experienced when they tried this feature- both negative and positive!
As a quick sidenote: For my hearing loss, I felt that the Lyric hearing aid was even better than the Widex Passion in terms of sound quality and making high frequency sounds audible for me. Having said that- I find the Widex Passion to be a close second. I’m not going to wear the Lyric because it won’t work for my ear canal. I’ll write more on that later.
Heres an example of a negative reaction that I found at hohadvocates.org forum
Another more technical article about frequency transpositioning in general
