John's Blog

Since I started my new job last August, I have discovered being part of a sophisticated technology team at a big company can be very demanding. I have had little time to write.

I have made some improvements in terms of my hearing. Last January and February I went in for some new mappings to experiment with the groundings. Apparently there are 3 grounding options. One where the magnet goes, one in the array in the cochlear and the other thats is a third wire the is embedded into my skull a few inches above my ear. Originally there were 2 grounds being used - the magnet and the third wire. The possible theory to my problems was the way the current was completing the circuit which may or may not be causing the current to stimulate the facial nerve. So they turned off the magnet ground and assigned the ground to only the third wire. It didn't really help much. The sound was very different too.

I decided to keep it set with one ground and turn on some more channels just before the pain threshold. So we were able to turn on channels 16-19 back on. Unfortunately it seemed the loudness was only based on the lowest channel. Pushing one channel down decreased the overall volume.

I decided to try pushing the other channels up from 6 through 14 so you get kind of a curve with the middle channels being the highest. Also found that we could turn up the equilizer settings for each of those channels to compensate for the lower channels - 16-19. I wish I had discovered this earlier! It works well - I am able to listen to audio books again! I feel like I am getting crisper and wider range of sound. Im able to take advantage of 14 channels instead of just 10.

I am also down to 1000mhzs too which is giving me about an extra day or two of battery life. I was only getting 2 days out of 3 batteries previously.