Topic: Hearing devices

[eric]

Anyone have experience playing while using these?  I'm new to them and having some trouble trying to get a good sound mix.  Like  a lot of folks, I've got age and work-related high frequency hearing loss.

[Prof Scratchy]

Do you mean hearing aids? If so, my experience was that I didn’t get on at all well initially. Everything sounded too trebly. That was because I’d accommodated over the years to hearing without the frequencies I’d lost. You just have to be patient and wait for your brain to accommodate to the ‘corrected’ sounds until they become the new normal. This takes about eight weeks. Stick with it.

[eric]

Thanks Prof.

Yes, the thing I immediately noticed was the overtones on the the two high strings were very harsh.  These particular hearing aids can be reprogrammed with various mixes, but like you said, I plan to stick with this mix for a while and see if I get used to it.  For anyone else reading this, I'm told that uncorrected hearing loss can result in the brain losing ability to hear normally.

[dj]

Eric,

I got my "steam-powered mechanical ears" in July.  You're right, one's first reaction is "Wow, these things are really harsh in the high end".  But you soon get used to it, and start to realize that you're really hearing things the way you used to hear them, and the way other people around you hear them.  What really brought that home to me was talking to my wife about all the katydids, cicadas, crickets, and other insects we were hearing on a warm August night, then taking out my hearing aids and all but a few of the insect noises disappeared.  Suddenly I realized how much I'd been missing.

[eric]

Thanks DJ.  Two things led me to the decision to get these: One was inability hear individual voices in a noisy environment, the other was muddy sound in live concerts particularly if they were loud.  They address the first issue well, the second one, sadly will have to wait until live concerts return.