hearing aid report

[johncomic]

On my third day of test-driving these puppies, I can still report that the world is a lot more clattery and scratchy and rattley and scrapey than I remember it being. Also a bit blarey at times.

And things like paper or plastic wrap or plastic bags sound like they are going to wake the neighbours....

Comments

[alisonebruce.livejournal.com]

Yyou just have to decide which you prefer, blarey or blurry.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

Do you get manual control over settings like EQ, compression, etc?

This seems like dialing in a guitar amp and pedals, to get a given tone in your head. Since nobody else is in your head, nobody else can do the job competently.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

The audiologist controls these -- she worked with me over an hour (“How's this? How's that?”) setting the EQ on them before I took them away. She warned me that things like paper and plastic would sound unnaturally loud for the first while. Boosting the high frequencies is the sole purpose of these guys, at least in my case.

I can control volume -- which boils down to how much boost the high end gets. I can turn them right down to zero if I want, in which case it sounds like I'm not wearing them. Right now I have them set at the lowest level that still gives me any detectable boost at all -- but paper is still surprisingly loud.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

The problem I see is that the audiologist asking you "How's this? How's that" is doing so in a completely unnatural environment (closed, super-quiet office setting).

So you have no frame of reference to answer her, because that environment is not similar to the environments where you originally noticed you had a problem.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps it ain't ideal, but she did trim a lot of the metallic clang out of voices, etc., while I was there. And what I noticed in her office is a pretty fair approximation of what I'm noticing out in the real world. Different environments haven't affected my overall results as much as I suspected they might. Last night we were in a grocery store -- I half-expected to be overwhelmed by racket, but in fact it sounded much as I remembered it pre-earplugs.

So I understand your caveat and wondered about it myself, but my experiences have not borne it out.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Also (I forgot): she mentioned that, once I buy my own set, for the first while I would be expected to return periodically with reports about how they function in other situations, to enable further tweaking and fine-tuning. So I guess they are aware that more feedback from real-life situations is needed in order to improve the EQ further.