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Mrs D and Ms D have been going on at me for ages to get tested as I have to have the tv volume at a "decent level" to hear anything. The first thing they do if they walk in the room is declare FFS and turn it down. Mind you I swear they put the dishwasher/tumble dryer/ washing machine on as soon as I want to watch something which doesn't help. Often I'll give up on a programme I cant hear and bugger of and do something else leaving them to it.
So a question to any wearers - as well as the crap hearing I suffer from tinitis. Mine is a constant "white noise" if that makes sense. Looking at the ages of some of the posters, you'll remember when BBC and ITV closed for the night and the tv went fuzzy, that noise. Would an aid help in this situation? I'll be 65 next month and would love to watch and hear a decent programme all the way through.
So, moral of the story is: if you suspect you have hearing loss get in there and get tested.
The hearing aids are configured to supplement frequencies from 3.5 kHz upwards. They make it easier to distinguish speech in noisy places, and I’ve turned down the television. I also have renewed interest in the acoustic guitar where I can hear the rasp of skin on the strings. Electric I can play at a lower volume and still hear clearly.
Do I like them? No. There’s the delay problem which I can’t do much about. Left and right aren’t correctly matched in volume or tonal response. That’s not my ears - I’ve swapped the devices over to check that. However they are an improvement on nothing. My brain is still going through a period of retraining, and I’m told that could take up to three months. After which I’ll get them reconfigured.
So I went to have hearing aids fitted for a week's free trial at one of the big ones, Amplifon. I don't have a spare 3k to spend on hearing aids so I've ended up with the NHS ones. Not as good as the expensive ones but still pretty good. And yes I get the weirdness on the high strings and yes I get a certain amount of feedback and yes they're weird and tricky to get used to but what has returned, and to me more important than the hearing itself, is proper stereo. My right ear was doing all the work and I was missing so much stereo imaging. That's back when I have my hearing aids in and it's pretty wonderful.
Can anyone think of a reason for the weirdness on the high strings thought? It’s a mystery to me.
No, so we adjusted the EQ and compression settings
Yes, the cracked plate syndrome disappeared after about 48 hours
No, but then my tinnitus wasn’t triggered by hearing loss.
The first answer is that a modern hearing aid typically has 8ms latency, so you get phasing between the room sound and what the hearing aid is delivering. I proved that this was part of the problem by injecting delay settings between 7 and 10ms at 50:50 wet:dry mix into my guitar signal.
Now the really interesting bit! These NHS Phonak hearing aids are too clever. They automatically detune frequencies in the 6 to 9 kHz range! The theory is that people who have lost hearing in that range can hear aspirants better if those frequencies are transposed downwards to a frequency range which they can hear. The impact on you and me is that they create artifacts which bugger up what we hear. We turned the setting off, along with wind suppression and a couple of other smart settings. At the time I could hear how the changes affected reverberation in the 3x2m room where we were working. Everything became more natural sounding.