Newbie looking for some advice about hearing aids

Hearing Aids
#21

I think you’ll find this easier than you thought. They’re not going to increase the volume of a sound if it’s a sound you already hear well.

Drug stores sell little plastic pill boxes for a couple bucks that are just the right size for my hearing aids. They’re flat and slip into a jeans pocket very neatly with lots of room to spare. But if you’re deliberately walking in the rain I bet you wear a hat, which is all the protection you need.

Your hearing loss is greater on your left, and that screws up the brain’s ability to locate sounds. The hearing aids will make your ears equal again, which is more than half the battle in my opinion. Higher-end aids have more than one microphone per aid, which adds to the location ability.

We haven’t mentioned whether you want your aids to connect with your iphone or bluetooth devices. Different brands have different strategies for doing that. I specifically told the audiologist I don’t want that, which helped keep the price down.

When I was deaf in one ear and had my current loss in my good ear, I started deliberately meeting friends in loud locations. They spoke much louder because the background noise bothered them. I couldn’t hear much of the background noise, so I could hear them well. In a quiet room they spoke so softly I couldn’t hear them at all.

#22

Hello Robysue,

yes, a hearing aid uses a compressor (usually even a multiband compressor, meaning that the compression doesn´t need to be the same for all frequencies) and an equalizer. Besides that, there is also directionality (modern aids use directional microphones to allow the aid to focus on the speaker in front of you, for instance) and some more digital signal processing (to reduce noise, for instance).

Yes, I also think that your reverse-cookie-bite loss might help in noisy situations. You don´t hear the low-frequency and highest frequency noise, but you hear the most important speech frequencies. But at home when it´s quiet, soft male voices will give you trouble, as you don´t hear the base frequency of their speech well, and you don´t hear the top end of the consonants either.

As for the possibility of trying out domes other than open domes I cannot tell you for sure as i use open domes and have always done so. I guess that custom molds will always cost something. But there are other options. Oticon has a “bass dome” with one or two vents, for instance, and there are other , more closed, non-custom domes, too. Personally I don´t like tulip domes as they tend to collapse in the ear and give very unpredictable results. Ask your audi about what kind of domes you need. I guess that during the trial most people use standard-domes and some of them get custom molds after the trial.

#23

This makes sense to me. And locating sound is a current issue for me, so it’s important that whatever aids I wind up with address that issue in some kind of fashion.

We haven’t mentioned whether you want your aids to connect with your iphone or bluetooth devices. Different brands have different strategies for doing that. I specifically told the audiologist I don’t want that, which helped keep the price down.
Connecting with an iPhone is a non-issue. I don’t own one and I’m not likely to buy one any time soon. My el cheapo TrackFone is a rather dumb smartphone that is slower than molasses, but it’s cheap. And I don’t spend much time talking on the phone anyway and I never have. It would be nice if the aids could act as wireless headphones for my Mac computer. My iPod is too old for any kind of bluetooth/wireless connections.

When I was deaf in one ear and had my current loss in my good ear, I started deliberately meeting friends in loud locations. They spoke much louder because the background noise bothered them. I couldn’t hear much of the background noise, so I could hear them well. In a quiet room they spoke so softly I couldn’t hear them at all.
Hubby sometimes speaks a bit louder in noisier environments, but it’s not consistent. It’s funny when I ask him to repeat things when we’re at home: Sometimes all he does is articulate the words better, and I can understand just fine. Sometimes he raises his voice, but fails to articulate and I tell him I still can’t understand what he’s saying, but that his voice is getting loud enough to cause my head to hurt. Usually he’ll then lower the loudness of his voice, but pay more attention to articulating the words.

#24

Yep. I’m aware there’s some really nifty mathematics involved in the digital processing of the sound. The math is pretty phenomenal, but it’s mainly from differential equations and related areas of analysis, whereas my own research has been in a very different area. The only stuff I know about fast Fourier transforms is stuff I’ve half-forgotten from the one time I taught a DiffEQ course a long, long time ago.

Yes, I also think that your reverse-cookie-bite loss might help in noisy situations. You don´t hear the low-frequency and highest frequency noise, but you hear the most important speech frequencies. But at home when it´s quiet, soft male voices will give you trouble, as you don´t hear the base frequency of their speech well, and you don´t hear the top end of the consonants either.
Thank you for pointing this out to me. It does help to explain why I have the difficulties I do with understanding hubby and son in our home and have fewer problems when we’re in public.

The audiologist did not mention “reverse-cookie-bite loss”. I’ve googled the phrase and I can see why you used it. My best hearing is in the middle, and in the middle it’s “near normal”—as in a very mild hearing loss in the middle, if I’m reading the audiogram correctly. The loss at the upper end is clearly well into the Moderate range (and even getting towards the upper end of moderate, if I’m reading charts correctly?) The loss at the lower end seems to be at the boundary of mild-to-moderate.

#25

I’d like to add, 8 hours of exposure to 85 dB noise will cause hearing loss. For that reason alone, the fitter is not going to allow the aid to increase volume to that point. And the reason they check for your level of discomfort is to make the aids work comfortably for you. So I would not worry about that. But when it’s time for the fitting, it’s good to remind the fitter that you don’t like loud.

#26

I do talk a fair amount on the cell phone and office phone using my hearing aid bluetooth device, and I wear out my smartphone doing text, email, internet, facebook, Yahtzee, Gin Rummy, Chess, music (mine, Pandora, XM Radio), etc. Another use for the Bluetooth capability is to get sounds from your desktop computer, laptop, and tablet directly into your hearing aids. I also have the TV transmitter. I love getting sounds from all my devices. Things are much clearer using bluetooth into both ears.