Music vs General in Masterclass

I’ve read all the stuff about how music programs should be set up, and worked with my audiologist on this. The problem I’m having is I attend a lot of things like masterclasses and courses on music history. These involve music being played live or recorded, interspersed with speech as the instructor comments or provides suggestions to the instrumentalist to experiment with. I find the live music too loud so I have to turn the music program down, but the speech is unintelligible if I leave my music program on while the person is speaking. So I’m constantly having to switch between General and Music, and adjusting sound volume each time. This means I’m getting beeps as I make the program change and clicks as I adjust the volume, and these interfere with my ability to hear the first few seconds of speech or playing. Besides, it’s a royal pain having to switch back and forth continuously for up to 2 hours at a time.

I’m currently trialing Oticon Reals, but had similar problems when trialing Widex Moment Sheers and Phonak Lumity. Any suggestions for how to deal with this particular type of situation?

My thought would be to get a remote microphone for the instructor to wear that streams to your hearing aid You should be able to have it adjusted where the sound coming from the remote microphone is loud enough to hear speech, but the music which would come through the hearing aid microphones would be more subdued.
Just looked at your audiogram. You also might want to consider getting evaluated for a cochlear implant. Even if you don’t qualify or decide against, you’d still learn a lot about your hearing.

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Welcome to the club. I’ve wrestled with this conundrum for forty years and have found no viable solution. Maybe in the next life I will have normal hearing. :grinning:

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Your audiologist ought to be able to balance the volumes on the music and general programs so that at least you don’t need to keep making that change.

Thank you all for your thoughtful advice.
@MDB - What a coincidence you should mention that! In fact, I am scheduled for a cochlear implant evaluation this coming Wednesday. I’m not sure whether I would go ahead with it if I qualify, but I am looking forward to knowing more about it.

On the subject of the remote mic, the two situations I was in on Friday wouldn’t have been conducive to it. In the first, a violin masterclass with James Ehnes (foremost Canadian violinist), he was appearing on video-link, and the students were here. I had a great deal of trouble hearing him speak, but both his and the students’ violins were blasting me, and of course, a remote mic wouldn’t have been feasible. In the second event, a music appreciation-style class, the instructor was already wearing a wireless mic for the room’s speaker system on his shirt, and I didn’t feel another would work well. They did not have a t-coil system.

@Jthomas - The masterclass was 1.5 hours and the music appreciation-style class was 2 hours, so you can see I had a very frustrating day!

@JohnA I agree, my audi should be able to balance it. But there will always be situations with low volume where you need to crank your hearing aids up, which I did in the masterclass situation, were the volume on the video-link was really low.