Hearing aids


With age comes wisdom and unfortunately hearing loss. I’d like to have the opinion of other senior audiophiles who have taken the plunge to hearing aid devices. Have you found improvement in the sound and listening experience? 
Do you prefer to listen with or without the aids? Any thoughts from other seniors will be much appreciated.

Please,  respect me and other senior audio enthusiasts with your comments.

TY

 

drob13875

Showing 1 response by carlsbad2

Hearing aids have a reputation of being horrible for sound.  they traditionally amplify voice frequencies with the goal of making a person barely functional to hear directions from a caretaker.  That comes from past days when people didn't get hearing aids until they were just short of totally deaf.  

Today, hearing aids on base settings are still very voice focused but not nearly as bad.  More younger people are getting hearing aids before their hearing goes fully away.  Think about glasses.  I magine if people refused to wear glasses until they were legally blind.  But now people are realizing that hearing aids are a great help, even if you have only mild hearing loss.  

With these changes, hearing aid manufacturers are becoming more and more accomodating of the needs of users who still have a lot of hearing.  Long story how I ended up with hearing aids about 5 years ago but people were shocked when I started wearing them.  they said "i didn't know your hearing was so bad."  I said, "It's not, but now it is much better, almost like being a kid again.".  Now I can name half a dozen people at work who have followed my lead and gotten hearing aids long before they were struggling.

So what about listening to music?  for music you do not want the heavy Artificial Intelligence playing with the sounds to make them more understandable.  What you want is just amplification in the frequency ranges where you have losses.  Most hearing aids now have a "music" setting which does just that.  

I have phillips from costco and they have a "Hifi Music" setting that makes me feel like I'm a kid again.   There is an ap on my phone that I can control them with.  Now the HIFI music mode can get tiresome in a busy restuarant or noisy car.  So I use the normal mode when not listening to music.  And when I turn on hifi mode, my face just smiles.

Jerry