Group of 4 - Noisy Restaurant

Hearing Aids
#15

Have you used a transcribing app on your phone?
I’ve found NALscribe is fairly good and it’s free on iOS.
If your aids are MFI and you have an iOS phone you can also use live listen. It acts as a microphone and streams directly to your ears. Well it works with my HA & CI so I don’t see why it wouldn’t for be HA’s.

Other than those 2 simple things you can use, you need to learn to advocate for yourself. Try to choose a restaurant that you know has a quiet ambience. I explained to people that if everyone speaks at once I couldn’t understand word they are saying.
Good luck.

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#16

Generally, I try to avoid eating out if it’s indoors. It’s just too much work. And it’s not like I can carry my part of the conversation: By the time I’ve understood what’s being said the conversation has moved on. Only thing worse are children present: Even adults with good hearing stop their conversations with those bundles of noise.

Best are those events where you can walk around with drink and food, find a place and allow conversations to happen, where they can and get out where they can’t. People’ll will find you and I find that the number of strangers I have conversation with increases, too. :slight_smile: Apparently, there are a lot of people following such strategies.

I do find that upper tier restaurants – those where you go to experience new tastes – can be less noisy. I hardly have any problems with my Phonak M90’s in some of those. (Also no loud children, there.) Only problem is hearing the price.

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#17

Google Live Transcribe for Android

#18

Agreed! In my experience, if I can’t hear others can’t either.

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#19

Thanks for this info - much appreciated.

#20

This was one of my tests when I was trialing my Oticon OPNs. My audiologist told me not to set my expectations too high, because even people with normal hearing have trouble hearing in noisy restaurants. Earlier this week, I went to a noisy restaurant/bar with a group of 13. I turned on my speech-in-noise and quickly determined I could only converse with three people at the table. The person directly across from me, and the people on either side of me. Luckily all three had loud booming voices and enunciated well. But it was still exhausting untangling all the voices around us from the voice I was trying to focus on. Then I noticed the guy on my right was wearing a hearing aid, so I asked him if he was hearing impaired and lifted my hair to show him my Oticon. We ended up tuning everyone else out for about 15 min to have a great conversation about the challenges of communicating in loud restaurants and other noisy work settings.

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#21

I have the same hearing aids as you do (1 year) and it was worthless! So, what we do is ask for reservation for quiet zone and patio (open table reserv is great!) I read lips real well so it is not too much of a problem. But, most of your input was good. Appreciate you sharing your thoughts!

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#22

I went to my favorite coffee shop today for lunch with a client. The barista knows I wear HAs, but had only ever talked to me at the counter. When he seated us at a table, he noticed we were close to a hidden speaker and he quietly reached back and turned it down as a took a the seat with my back facing the wall. I thanked him and he winked at me. That is the most thoughtful thing anyone has done for me in a while! And he is about nineteen.

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#23

Avoid HARD restaurants. Restaurants without soft furnishings are bad. I am on a Parish Council and we now meet in a church hall with the same problem.
Had to go to a McDonalds earlier this month, same problem.

Insist on going to restaurants that have drapes, fabric chairs, carpets if possible and sound baffles - ie you are not eating in a kitchen. A cruise ship has all of these and with 100 diners it is rarely a problem.

If all else fails, switch them off :slight_smile:

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#24

I’ve been in property management. Cheap restaurants say they don’t have a large profit margin. They want to have rapid turnover. Ceilings and carpets? Bah humbug. Gotta pay for those.

#25

Where did I say go to cheap restaurants?

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#26

From my perspective, there’s not a noisy restaurant on the planet.

#27

There’s a SoundPrint app for reporting sound levels in restaurants and searching for an establishment’s reported levels.

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#28

I have Phonak Marvel HAs and a Roger Select iN. The Roger Select makes all the difference in a restaurant. If I’m just with my spouse, she wears the Roger around her neck. If we’re with others, I put the Roger on the table. If no one is talking at our table, I do hear a lot of noise from nearby tables. If people at my table talk, their words come directly to my ears, like they were talking into an ear trumpet. People at surrounding tables are mostly muted. But when someone else at my table talks, the ear trumpet moves over to their mouths. It’s magical. It’s also. not cheap, but when Roger had an accident a year ago and stopped working, my spouse told me that in no uncertain terms was I to find the $$ to get a new one. It seems that Roger wasn’t just a benefit for me, but for my spouse and cohorts as well. Fortunately, it got “repaired” under warranty. Whew!

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#29

I was searching for Live Transcribe and found a few different ones. Which is the one that you are using? There’s also another called NALscribe which someone had recommended. I haven’t tried it yet in a noisy place!

#30

In the Android Play Store, I see 3 Live Transcribes listed - Live Transcribe, Live Transcribe & Notification and Live Transcribe App. It appears that all 3 are the same app from Google Research. I’m not sure which one I installed now but they appear to be the same one.

#31

That’s probably like you take your HA’s out. :grinning:

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#32

I know people with perfect audiometry test, yet suffering from the same symptoms as you describe.

Not hearing well in noisy environments can have two main root causes: “hidden hearing loss” and “auditory processing disorder”.
Googling will bring you many links, picking a couple from the first page:

and

In my opinion you could:

  1. Ask for comprehensive exams to understand the root cause (eg. speech-in-noise test)
  2. Ask your audiologist to create a dedicated program for noisy environments

Point 2. is basically about filtering out some frequencies to favour the speech spectrum and enabling noise cancelling through DSP (digital signal processing). In standard conditions you may not notice the difference, but in noisy environments this can improve your (social) life a big deal.

#33

The type of loss matters too. I believe nose cancellation and directional microphone settings work best for significant hearing loss across the whole frequency range. In noisy restaurants, I feel my direct hearing through the vents prevents those features to work as well as they could. So what I do in noisy places, I use closed ear pieces without vents to bring the overall volume down. Then, then the aids perform better, specifically noise cancellation. In really loud places like some bars, for me, it is even beneficial to use earplugs. Signal to noise ratio can be improved by bringing overall volume down and allowing people to shout in your ear.

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#34

Thanks to all in this blog string. Very useful information, comments, and tips. Much appreciated.

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