I returned my Oticon Synchro hearing aids today, switching back to the Oticon Adapto model I’ve had for the last year. I’d like to clarify why.

Note: For the one or two people who e-mailed me, I cannot offer professional advice on these aids. This is my experience with the Synchro and I am not an audiologist in any way, shape, or form. Please see a licensed audiologist who holds an Au.D (doctorate of audiology) for diagnosis and professional advice.

I had the opportunity to test drive these within the last two weeks at both the Writing Center’s tutor retreat and in class. I’ve noticed that, with the programming as it was set, the aids skipped massive amounts of information from the faculty. For instance, in the middle of a lecture, he might be talking about the existence of power within the mass media — I would catch about 60% of the sentences and be able to understand them, with the other 40% being heard but not comprehended. This would seem to be a programming problem — which is what my audiologist thinks it is — but I’m not so sure.

The Synchro’s essential goal is to give hearing aid users something closer to normal hearing. I’ve italicized “normal” here because I don’t know what normal hearing is — my loss is considered severe at around 70dB in both ears, and I’ve had that loss since birth. I’ve never had the opportunity to experience normal hearing, so I don’t know what I’m missing and don’t know how to handle that kind of input. The Synchro brings the user closer to experiencing that input, which may simply have been too much for me to be able to cope with. As someone with no natural hearing experience whatsoever, my brain isn’t wired to accept those kinds of input, and may be experiencing some form of sensory overload. It’s perhaps because of the amount of information fed in through the aids that I wasn’t completely able to comprehend what my faculty was saying in lecture.

The thing that’s very strange about these aids — which my mother rightly pointed out — is that they are supposed to be able to take data from an audiogram (which is basically a measurement of how well you hear) and adjust itself to a hearing loss based on that data. However, technology is never that easy — the Synchro’s software is very programmable and tweakable, perhaps to an extreme. As you add on layers of complexity, you also add on the ability to screw up royally. The amount of time it’s taken to get my hearing aids working the way I need them to has gone up exponentially with each new aid model. Switching from analog to digital incurred a series of appointments with my audiologist (I seem to recall around 6) just to get the aids working properly in the environments I was in. Switching from the Adapto to the Synchro threatened to require just as much effort and commuting. This is completely not what you would expect when you hear that an aid is supposed to adapt itself to an audiogram and a specific loss.

The final verdict seems to be that, number one, the programming was insufficient, and that, number two, there was no time to tweak the programming to satisfactory levels — basically, bad timing and possibly incompatible technology. Now, this isn’t to say that the Synchro wouldn’t be right for someone else, but for someone with my kind of severe loss with very particular needs for noise levels and noise compression, it may not be the right aid at all. Again, my audiologist is convinced that given more time to be able to tweak the aids, it would work. My counterargument to that is that my audiologist gave me a 30-day return policy on those aids (which they then graciously extended another 20-30 days on request). It is my opinion that within those thirty days, the customer needs to be satisfied with their aids. Satisfaction means being able to utilize the technology comfortably in all situations a user may encounter, without the need for dramatic programming changes. In this regard, we didn’t succeed. If we can’t meet those requirements within a thirty day window while still respecting the restrictions imposed upon us by distance, then what’s the point? What does it say that, when going into a class situation, I missed major components of a lecture regardless of the fact that the entire class was aware of my hearing loss, including the faculty? That’s a clear reflection on the technology. I have a lot of patience when it comes to technology, but when it comes to my hearing, I can’t afford to screw around.

Hopefully, this has given people insight into what it’s like to be a hearing impaired person. I will continue to post details from time to time — that is, when I feel like it — about being hearing impaired. I fully encourage people to e-mail me about this, but please include the words “Oticon Synchro” in your e-mail so that I don’t disregard it as spam.