EarTalk Q&A: Wind Noise

Time to Read: 3 minutes

This question and answer is from the February Ear Talk webinar with Value Hearing founder Christo Fourie. You can find the full presentation on YouTube. If you would like to have your question answered live, leave a comment below RSVP to the next webinar which is on the third Wednesday of the month at 11am AEST.

Question:

What can I do to reduce the nuisance noise and wind interference? Since my last service this has been an ongoing problem in my right hearing aid. There is also an ad hoc clicking.

Answer:

The next question revolves around wind noise again quite a specific situation this seems to be a situation where a hearing aid may have gone in for repair or an adjustment, I'm not certain, but after that the right hearing aid seems to be causing a lot more wind noise as well as some clicking issues.

There's a few things that could be going on here. The first one obviously, is they've been in for repair. The manufacturers do quality control but it might have come back and something slipped through the quality control so that's one possibility.

The other possibility is that the hearing aid wasn't actually functioning properly until it went for a service. Now the hearing aids are picking up soft sounds more sensitively and the contrast of what wind noise was previously, compared to what it's now, is great, so you're paying more attention to that.

The other thing is if they change the speaker length or anything of that sort. That will change the positioning of the microphone. The microphone might have been brought forward a bit, so it could be picking up more wind in that position. That is definitely something to look at with your clinician.

The only other thing that could be is that the right ear, in this case, might be a little bit worse than the left ear with wind noise. It essentially causes turbulence on the microphone and that gets heard in the low frequencies, so if the right is a little bit worse up to about a thousand hertz, there's more gain applied to the hearing aid so the hearing aid will automatically be boosting those soft sounds which could include wind noise despite the wind noise cancelling the hearing aid.

This is a more complex issue than I can just address here but I'd certainly want to look at those technical factors first. 

If all that fails, and considering if wind noise was not previously an issue, and it's an issue now, that's definitely a reason to go see  your clinician again and get that addressed.