CI Mapping - crinkling sounds vs speech sounds

[Lenny]

Hi,

 

I'm not sure if anyone can help, but I will be going for my 3 month check-up and mapping shortly and I was wondering if anyone can suggest some points to consider in adjusting my map for the Sonnet? 

 

The situation is that I am hearing crinkling sounds very clearly and distinctly. Cutlery, chip packets, paper crunching, keyboard clicks, running water etc all seem to come at me with no trouble at all. However when someone speaks, I can make out only some of the sounds and sometimes I will miss a syllable or entire word altogether. I'm not talking about understanding speech as I know I've got a long way to go with that, but I am worried about only hearing some sounds and not others. 

 

Can anyone suggest why there would be such a difference in me registering the sound? Whenever I have done my mapping I have been able to hear all 12 electrodes without any difficulty. The high pitched sounds did cause me some discomfort, so my audiologist turned down electrodes 11 & 12 at my last appointment and this made the crinkling sounds much more bearable and allowed me to turn up the volume and pick up the lower pitch sounds. 

 

Again, I am not particularly concerned with understanding what the speech or sound is, as I know that takes lots of practice and time, but if my brain is not registering certain sounds then it is unlikely I will ever get to the stage of understanding it.

 

Don't know if this is making any sense, but is there any particular setting which I could discuss with my audiologist which may assist in increasing my pickup of speech based sounds? 

 

Lenny.

[ErikHaugsby]

Hi Lenny,

Thanks for writing to us here on HearPeers!

Because I don't know about your hearing history or clinician, all I can say from a fitting side is that the best thing you can do is keep talking with your audiologist. From a non-fitting side, you might try to test different volume and microphone sensitivity settings with your FineTuner.

I've also sent this post on to our team in Australia so that they know about it.

Cheers,

Erik

[Mary Beth]

Hi Lenny,

You may find it helpful to ask the audiologist if she/he can play each electrode beep for you and try to comment on whether they seem to be the same loudness level. I did this at a MAPping and found it helpful. We adjusted some of the electrodes.

Keep talking with your audiologist. Good luck.

Mary Beth

[hadron]

Hi Lenny,

When I hear crinkling sounds when there should not be any, it is usually an equipment or moisture problem.

You should have a backup coil cable. Try changing the coil cable.

It is common for new users to hear strange sounds but crinkling is not usually one of them.

If it is not an equipment problem try speaking some words to the audiologist when they set your T and M levels (Threshold and comfortable) at your next mapping session. See if the crinkling sounds are still there.

[Lenny]

Eric . . . thanks. I've been adjusting the Finetuner to increase sensitivity, but still don't seem to be getting everything. 

 

Mary Beth . . . we went through the electrode beeps and adjusted accordingly. That is what doesn't seem to make sense, because I could hear each one of the electrodes very clearly. So I was wondering if there was some other setting which might mask or cut out sounds.

 

Hadron . . . I just call them crinkling sounds, but they are actual real world sounds which I like hearing now, so it's not an equipment issue. I just don't understand why they come through so clearly but other sounds are muffled, missing clarity or missed altogether.