Audiophile hearing loss and hearing aids

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by ghost rider, Jan 12, 2017.

  1. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    Another biological thing about age related hearing loss, is that women will loose their hearing at half the rate of their male counterparts.

    That is why many men will say that their wife has "golden ears".

    On the subject of hearing aids, the main reason for their use, is because, hearing loss is in the vocal range, so they are specifically designed for speech intelligibility and not musicality.

    A long time friend of mine, that grew up playing in bands and being a live sound man in nightclubs, was at a audio show in China.

    There was an exhibitor there who had developed new hearing aid technology. My friend tried them out and was floored by their quality.

    The main drawback was that they are $10,000/pr.

    But, my friend commented, "ten thousand dollars for new ears, is really not a bad deal".

    He said that they made perfect, everything in the normal audible range.
     
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  2. Larry Johnson

    Larry Johnson Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago area
    I have occasional hearing loss from time to time. ENT suggested ear tubes. Thought I'd try these first. Here One™ Wireless Smart Earbuds - Get Your Here Buds™ .

    These are earbuds which are said to combine premium audio (bluetooth), noise cancellation, and SPEECH ENHANCEMENT for only $300.00. They are scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. If they work, they will be the most inexpensive hearing aids yet.
     
  3. wgriel

    wgriel Forum Resident

    Location:
    bc, canada
    You are not alone: hearing loss and (more importantly) the way the brain adapts is more complex than most people assume.

    It's very common for those suffering high frequency loss to be extra sensitive to tipped up treble and harsh high frequencies contrary to what you might expect.
     
  4. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    You really hit the nail on the head.

    You would think with age related rolled hearing, you would think that you would not be able to hear HF as well as you did, back in your younger days.

    Common sense should tell you that you would be less sensitive to those high frequencies that are associated with age related hearing loss, but that is not necessarily the case!

    In my case, as described in my previous post, my ultra sensitivity has returned to normal. Music sounds the same to me, my ears and brain, as it did years before. Although I am told that I am missing that "air" associated with that last octave.

    When you are real young, I remember hearing the HF whine of the flyback transformer's in CRT TV sets, but as I aged, that went away, and of course, those types of TV's have gone by the wayside.

    Everything still sounds the same to me today, because most fundamental music is well below 8K and there are a lot of harmonics still present up through 12K, where I can still hear fine, and above, but I neither hear, nor do I miss them.

    While I never in my life like harsh sound of any kind.

    Today, I have absolutely NO tolerance for harsh sound. My highly efficient horn loaded Altec Lansing A7 cabinets even have JBL babycheek's super tweeters on them with a crossover at 6K, due to the natural roll off of the 902-horn drivers, mated to the 511B horns. And, with tube amplification and the properly matched source material's that have proper mixing and mastering, there is little to no harshness at all and I can listen to them 24/7, without encountering listening fatigue.

    But, take the tubes out of the picture and run them with SS amps (that I have used my entire life, up and to just a few years ago) and I'm climbing up the walls.

    Today, I have eight tube amplifier's, counting the monoblocks as a single stereo amplifier. With tube amplifier's, I require plenty of redundancy!

    I simply would not go back to ever using SS amplifier's on the A7's, where I could, and always did in years past.

    In younger day's I enjoyed going out to nightclubs with really loud music. I enjoyed the extended treble high frequencies and the chest thumping bass slam. today, I don't know if I could even stand to be in some of those venues for even five minutes.

    But, even today, when I want to crank up the volume, I do! But, I have things sounding far better now than I did back then. I will turn things up as loud as I so desire and play what ever, when ever as loud as I damn well please, because, at my core, I am an audio guy, I have been one all of my life, and I will leave, being an audio guy.

    Two things;

    1) While I have no issues turning up the volume, I don't maintain it at high dB levels for extended periods of time. (never did in my youth either).

    2) As my understanding and expanding my horizon's, grew along with a place and lifestyle that provided me with the opportunity to explore the audio universe, with far greater depth, than I ever had before in my life, I find that I can now reproduce sounds that are fuller, more natural and still be dynamic, at far lower sound levels.

    Look at the popularity of efficient speakers, mated to numerous flea-watt amps. Not to mentions, how much they cost.
     
  5. HearingGuy

    HearingGuy Member

    Location:
    Miami Florida
    Yes they do. They're actually quite good when it comes to the hearing aid market in general
     
  6. HearingGuy

    HearingGuy Member

    Location:
    Miami Florida
    Hearing aids are designed to enhance speech more so than they're designed to enhance acoustics and music :(
     
    Huck likes this.
  7. jtw

    jtw Forum Resident

    Still hoping to find an audiophile audiologist in the Houston area...
     
  8. Doug Sclar

    Doug Sclar Forum Legend

    Location:
    The OC
    When I get to the point where I need hearing aids, I'll build my own to my standards. I don't care what the heck they look like. I'll probably use a good set of ear buds or perhaps even large cans like the Sennheiser 600's and use a pair of small microphones, a quality preamp and eq if needed.

    My mom wanted her hearing aids so small that nobody could tell she had them. Of course that makes it almost impossible for them to work well. Sure enough, when she would swallow or turn her head at times they would howl. Talking on the phone was even more problematic as the phone altered the acoustics of the ear cavity. It's just physics. If your speaker and microphone are in close proximity you have to rely on all kind of tricks to get them to work or keep the volume level low.

    I tried to convince her to go with the two piece models, with the microphone and electronics on the outside of the ear with a ear piece connected with a short cable. She wouldn't dream of having such a thing because people would notice it. So it's better to not be able to hear well? She even tried to tell me that nobody sold those types of hearing aids any more, yet they're all over the place. The company she went to didn't carry them and preferred to oversell their more expensive products.

    The funny thing is that she tried to tell me I didn't understand how the hearing aids worked since I didn't work for a hearing aid company. Uh, what the heck was I doing when I was mixing monitors for live acts back in the 70's. Seems to me those were brute force hearing aids.

    She did have me talk to the rep from the company she bought hers from, and that agent tried to convince me how great her aids were, but soon recognized that I knew a lot more than she did about audio technology, She wanted to put me in touch with the design engineers, but she was still trying to sell my mom things she didn't need for big bucks.

    I had no interest in talking with their engineers. I just wanted her to stop trying to push her crap on my mom who obviously thought she was an expert and assumed she would know more than I did about her products. She no doubt did, but I didn't care about any of the features of her product. All I cared about was my mom's ability to communicate and enjoy watching TV.

    I firmly believe that the hearing aid business is largely a scam. They told her that each year there were major advances in hearing aid designs and she needed to upgrade yearly to the tune of $4k. Unfortunately she went for it several times, telling me how great they sounded until a week later when all the troubles reemerged. Older people with a bit of money are often desperate to regain some of their youthful capabilities and thus can be easy prey. After a while I just gave up realizing that mom would never take my word over a professional hearing aid company.

    Btw, my dad always insisted that I didn't know that much about audio, or anything for that matter, so no doubt that had some influence on her. He had a PhD in physics and when I didn't follow in his footsteps, it was proof to him that I was going to be a failure in life. Fortunately I quickly realized what was going on and never let my dad's negativity hold me back. After all he was just treating me how his dad treated him.

    Oh, once my mom degenerated to the point where she didn't argue so much, I bought her a pair of inexpensive hearing aids for $30 each at the local CVS. Guess what? They worked far better for her than the big buck models as I figured they would. They were very simple and just had a volume control adjustment. Turn them up if you need the extra volume and turn them down if they start to squeal.
     
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  9. jtw

    jtw Forum Resident

    How are they?
     
  10. Larry Johnson

    Larry Johnson Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago area
    I used them for a couple of months and then had a tube put in one ear, which improved my hearing in both ears and haven’t used them since. In the meantime Hear One has unfortunately gone out of business. The buds worked as advertised. After taking a hearing test on the Hear One website, they adjusted for the needs of each ear. Very good noise cancellation in noisy restaurants. I didn’t have to ask folks to repeat what they said,as I could here them the first time. Didn’t use them for music listening as I just increased system volume to compensate. They are largish and not overly comfortable and needed frequent recharging after 2 hours.
     
  11. Socalguy

    Socalguy Forum Resident

    Location:
    CA
    Friend of mine just dropped $5k on a supposedly state-of-the-art pair. He said it's taking him a while to get used to hearing things like squeaky shoes and the sound of himself peeing.
     
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  12. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Yeah, that's a thing, for sure.

    I'm five months into my relationshio with my pair of Costco Signature's, and here are my observations...

    1) No, the one thing your wife wanted you to get these for, they don't do: you STILL can't hear your wife three rooms away, when she's mumbling into her book, and assumes you're hanging onto her every word even though you're absorbed in whatever you're doing three rooms away (Congratulations, Hon - you just made me pony-up seventeen-hundred dollars to prove it's all you, not me!!).

    2) It's not your ears, apparently they are built so you invertently cram one of 'em sideways into the ear canal consistently; make sure your bathroom has a mirror you can see the side of your face with from the front mirror....you have to teach your fingers which part you are holding onto...

    3) Come back anytime for an adjustment. A lot.

    4) Replacing the domes and using that little pokie-thing to get the teeny wax guard out, WILL make you 20 minutes late for your dinner reservation.

    5) The audiologists don't get how you keep hearing "doppler" when you hit pure notes on your car sound system.
    5a) Nor do they understand why you think this is a "non-starter". :rolleyes:

    6) Months later is usually when you finally realize, it's a royal b*tch when your glasses are so tight they pull your hearing aids right out when you take off the specs. Stocking-style winter caps, too! Then you have to put them back on, then you have to poke that one over and over into the ear, because, you know, it keeps wanting to go sideways in there....
    6a) Also, your glasses can never decide whether they want the hearing aid behind them over the ear, or in front of them over the ear...so, sometimes you have to make do with both ways, one on either side. :shrug:
    6b) But, don't feel self-conscious, most people really don't even notice you're wearing them after all!

    7) And to your embarrasment, my god, how did your wife put up with you needing to make the TV that loud, all these years...!
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2018
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  13. riddlemay

    riddlemay Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    I'm not sure what you mean, but I wonder if it's similar to an effect I heard when I had some high-end hearing aids during a trial period. (Which also was a dealbreaker.) On my grand piano, notes starting in the octave at C-above-middle-C took on a "blurry," detuned sound, almost like a tack piano. My tuner keeps my piano in good shape so I'm sure this wasn't a case of my "finally hearing what it really sounds like." Instead, I'm reasonably sure the out-of-tuneness was an artifact created by the hearing aids. I have no idea of the technical explanation that could account for this, and neither did the audiologist. (Or, at least she claimed not to know what could account for it.)
     
  14. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Think of a whistle, riddlemay. When you whistle, it's a pretty "pure" tone. Now, think of whistling that same "pretty pure" tone into a fan.

    And now that's what it soounds like when I drive. Can't even enjoy whistling.
     
  15. riddlemay

    riddlemay Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    That does sound like it could be related to the artifact I heard on my piano.
     
  16. wgriel

    wgriel Forum Resident

    Location:
    bc, canada
    It's hard to know, since hearing aids (especially high end ones) do quite a bit of signal processing aimed at improving speech comprehension among other things. It's possible that could result in some artefacts like what you describe.

    Since these things are programmable, it's possible to have an audiologist set up a mode for music listening that eliminates or minimises that processing. At the very least, it's my belief that these devices are so expensive because you are paying for the expert service of the audiologist and you should feel free to return as often as needed to get the settings right for your hearing. And that may take quite a number of visits.
     
    billnunan likes this.
  17. BBF

    BBF New Member

    Location:
    San Diego, CA
    Hey Dillydipper,

    I've had my KS7 hearing aids for just a little over a year now and my experience with them have been slightly different.
    I'm in my really late 40's and my family has a genetic history of hearing loss, so I got hearing aids pretty early on with only "minor" hearing degradation. I was having problems understanding female speech if they were talking quietly. But could still hear things like the "fake" click of the turn signal in my car (the audiologist said that most men that come to get hearing aids from her for the first time are usually in the "my wife's about to kill me" category.)

    Here are my comments to your observations.
    1) no comment
    2) I've had no problem sticking the In Ear Receivers in the correct orientation. They're long skinny rectangular boxes with a soft plug (I have the open domes) at the end... I just had problems shoving them in far enough to stay put the first few weeks.
    3) I had to go in for adjustments 3 times after the initial fitting. Haven't been in for about a year, but should go in the get an updated test to tune for any changes in hearing loss.
    4) I don't replace domes at all by myself. Didn't get an extra set with the hearing aids. I've not had to change the ear wax filters, yet. Don't know why I would want to either, especially right before a dinner date. I do all my maintenance before I put the hearings in the charger at night. (I purchased the rechargeable batteries and charger for my aids.)
    5) Never had "doppler" effect with pure tones. However, in my car, the road noise is terribly amplified by the hearing aid, so I ALWAYS have to turn on the Noise/Party mode.
    6), 6a) I agree.
    6b) My coworkers think that they're some type of blue tooth headphone device when they see the fine wire on the front top of my ears.
    7) No comment. ;-)

    Sound Evaluation:
    The amplification for live music is negligible, I usually just take them out for live performances. If I'm at my desk at work, I'll leave them in when I put on headphones and don't really notice much difference with them in or out with the >=192kbps MP3 music I listen to. For normal TV viewing they're no really noticeable sound quality wise, but definitely allow the TV volume to be at acceptably normal levels.
    Defintely helps me to hear female voices much better (I have a notch out of my highish frequency hearing that is smack dab in the middle of most female voice frequencies.) Men, not much of a difference.

    Bluetooth / AUX In Quality (Requires a $200ish "Help Me I Can't Get Up" Style Pendant that goes around your neck):
    Completely sucky compared to real headphones.
    Terrible quality with the open style domes on the in ear receivers. No lows, weak mids, normal highs. If you stick your fingers in your ears the mids and lows improve considerably, but still nowhere close to inexpensive but quality headphone level.
    With a set of closed domes, I bet the sound quality would be a lot better. (My ear canals need to breath, so they're not an option for me... I know because I have silicone IEM's that get uncomfortably sweaty after only about an hour.)

    Battery Life:
    With a fresh good set of Zinc Air batteries, I get about 7 days* of use with streaming bluetooth audio about 1 hr a day.
    I've had as little as 5 days*.

    Rechargeable Batteries:
    The NiMH batteries are expensive at $20 a pair and last at MOST 14 hours* on a charge which is barely usable. And after a year, I've gone through 3 sets already. The 3 "dead" sets only last about 5-8 hours on a charge, so are unacceptable for every day use. I think the super expensive "charger/dryer" dock unit supplied for about $200 is terrible at charging and abuses the batteries because if I leave my hearing aids in there for more than a day (if I forget to wear them on saturday) the batteries will ALWAYS only last a few hours (<4 sometimes not even 2) when I take the hearing aids out of the "charger". The poor overall wear life of the batteries is probably also attributable to the extremely small size of the cells, and that fact that every time I use them, they are pretty much fully drained before recharging, which is worst case scenario for battery wear.

    * usage times vary based on amount of hearing loss needed to compensated for, music transmission usage, how noisy the environments you visit that day are, etc. etc.

    Overall Summary:
    Audiophile Usefulness: neutral
    Everyday Life Usefulness: wouldn't / shouldn't ever go back to not having hearing aids
     
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  18. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Good report, BBF! You should know what, since making that post, there have been developments.

    I finally went in to ask if something could be done about the quavvering sensation, and nobody in the department at Costco had gotten this from any other customer (and they'd sold about 2500-3,000 7.0's by this time); so my guy made a call to his tech support office (dunno if that's the support at the factory who supplied them, or the "concierge" geekdom-department within the Costco empire. But, apparently there is a little-known tweak that greatly diminished the effect (think of it as a "firmware update"), which they did in-store. Steve is assuming a lot of people are percieving the effect, but they're not as careful a listener as somebody who's spent half his lifetime in studios and under headsets.

    Came away pretty happy...but then notice I was getting some chirps on the left-hand side of my head unlike what was still going on in my right. Hit the left's volume-up, for instance, and you got a whole different chirp...and not always the same one. So, back in I go, Steve calls Support again, and we learn this configuration no only automatically switches listening programs according to the percieved environment, but...now I have two switchable programs: the one I was used to...and another one specifically for careful listening (orchestra halls, for instance), with a lot more detail. So, on the 7.0 model, if your right-side aid keeps using the buttons for volume-up / volume-down, but the left gives you different chirps, that's to tell you which program you have switched into. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

    BBF, I'm guessing your impressions don't exactly match my own, because we have totally different hearing issues. My deterioration started somewhere in-bweteen high school and college (at first they were thinking otosclerosis), with various losses throughout my life: I've always said, put a set of cans on my head and run a sweep tone through them, and I would hear the compromised sound travel back-and-forth in my "inner-soundstage", tracking the patterns of my losses. Hadn't hurt my ability to work in, and tweak, in production studios or on-air, the effect is far too subtle (yet, accellerating and becoming more complicated as I age). So essentially, like Art Garfunkle's hairline, my hearing losses began earlier in life than most average mail drop-offs in hearing quality, and kept going.

    I do get about the same mileage with normal batteries as you have seen, and I'd never considered rechargables at all, because the wearing-out is inconsistant, compared to the 7-8-day consistency of the regular batteries. No 5-day early run-out for me, so far. And yes, the hearing deficiencies the hearing aids are more effective with, are in the conversation-range, not improving audiophile conditions at all.

    Thanks for sharing.
     
  19. jepomat

    jepomat New Member

    Location:
    Geneva
    I have. It was nearly completely resolved by creating a music-dedicated program in the ReSound LiNX2 hearing aids, which has all the feedback loops off and amplifies the three ranges of sound volumes nearly exactly the same manner (I believe your hear aid specialist will know what this is). In essence, the hearing aids were attempting to eliminate non-voice-related frequencies whilst I was listening to music with its very different range of frequencies and needed to hear all of them. The combined effect was to detune Argerich's (and others') Concert Grand (or similar). Unacceptable. I'm now looking into a different approach altogether: using an advanced software equalizer so I could fix my frequency-dependent hearing loss at pre-amp stage and do away with the hearing aids to listen to music.

    Anyone used a software equalizer to fix her/his frequencey-dependent hearing loss ?

    Thanks everyone for your input and support.
     
  20. TeflonScoundrel

    TeflonScoundrel Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    In my experience, Costco typically staffs hearing aid specialists, and not audiologists. There is a significant difference in training between the two.
     
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  21. jtw

    jtw Forum Resident

    Yes! But I still don't have agreement on whether adding a bunch of boost to 'fix' diminished hearing at 5k, for example, will damage hearing in the ranges where you are normal. Some say that the nerve cells are frequency dependent. So, if your hearing measures normal at 1k, and down 30dB at 5k, you would need to boost a pure 5k tone quite a bit to be able to hear it. But would that hurt your perfectly good ability to hear 1k? Haven't had this definitively answered.

    Headphones and in ear monitors come in a very wide variety of sound signatures. I have diminished high frequency hearing. I found some in ears that younger folks review as being too harsh and having a noticeably tipped up high end. They were $30. To me, these sound better than ANY speaker on the market.
     
  22. riddlemay

    riddlemay Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    This is enormously helpful. Thank you. It tells me two things. 1) That I wasn't crazy and/or "imagining things." I wondered about my own perception, because I hadn't heard anyone else report this artifact, and my audiologist looked at me like she'd never heard of such a thing before. 2) That it wasn't a case of my now hearing reality better than I was before, i.e., that my piano really was out of tune all along but my hearing deficit had disguised this from me. That was also a possibility--which I'm now pleased to be able to dismiss, thanks to your reply.

    The upshot of this experience was that I returned the hearing aids and got a refund. I haven't yet got the courage to "go back into the water" with a different audiologist, so am existing with my hearing deficit unaided, which is mostly all right but sometimes frustrating when I realize how much music I'm not hearing.
     
  23. jepomat

    jepomat New Member

    Location:
    Geneva
    Glad to have been of help, riddlemay. I didn't mention it in my first post, because I thought I'd be able to unearth the link, but as I didn't I'll just have to indicate it without a reference : One other person did write somewhere that piano solos (e.g. in concertos) did sound off-tune when he (she ?) had hearing aids on. So, there's not just the two of us... I hope your next audiologist will be able to help you with this. Keep us posted on your progress, please.

    All the best !
     
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  24. jepomat

    jepomat New Member

    Location:
    Geneva
    Sorry... Forgot to say that before I stumbled on the other person's testimony, I thought I should ask a piano rental shop to detune, say c4, until it sounded right. I was ready to pay them to do it. Yes, I was not far from being distressed.

    Take care !
     
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  25. chili555

    chili555 Forum Resident

    I also wear hearing aids. After years of replying to every word from my wife and son with, “what?”, I finally dragged myself to an audiologist and got tested.

    The test revealed a gentle slope in my hearing response above 1 kHz and, by 9 kHz, was down about 20 dB! This was characterized as a moderate hearing loss.

    I was told that a basic hearing aid, not the most expensive, would be quite adequate. The hearing specialist programmed a rough approximation of my prescription into demo aids and put them in my ears. I was asked to try them for 10 minutes or so to see what I thought.

    It was a revelation. I felt that the two big, soft pillows that had been pressed on my ears were finally removed! I bought the hearing aids with, of course, my final prescription. The specialist performed what I consider to be the most important part of the process, a real ear measurement. This is essentially a hearing test and further adjustment with the new hearing aids inserted to be certain that what is prescribed is what you are actually hearing.

    My enjoyment of music has increased immensely. My enjoyment of conversations with family and friends has improved immensely. My enjoyment of TV and movies has improved immensely.

    Is my hearing perfect? I doubt it, but then I haven’t a clear auditory memory of what my hearing was like 50 years ago. Moreover, one has to come to grips with the fact that literally nothing works as well in our 70s as it did in our 20s.

    I know this: I hear things in recordings that I never, ever knew were there. I think some of the reason is that my current speakers and associated gear far surpasses what I owned in my 20s and, of course, I now use hearing aids.

    Do I want my hearing to be at what I estimate at 40% of what it was when I was young without hearing aids or 80% with hearing aids? Well, 80%, of course. Would I reject the whole process and suffer at 40% because it isn’t possible, given today’s technology, to achieve 100%? Certainly not.
     

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