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Reply to "retro radios for speedster"

IaM-Ray posted:

Well, now that amplification resides a lot closer to your body and in your car it brings other challenges.  

Optometry is much simpler but hearing hair cells damaged are much more complicated to fix. 

Having been involved in this area for many years and having family members spend their life in it,  I thought I would share this info. 

STan for what it is worth, many times hearing guys go for text book hearing ie: following the audiogram loss and plot your hearing replacement to your slope.  

Amplification does not discriminate and simply amplifies all sounds including noise and you start to lose the ability to tune out noise so again ASP and AGC circuits are put in to try to fix this.   

Then there is the one year at least period to retrain how you hear the speech sounds so that you can play a better game of scrabble in daily life. 

I challenge continues when a major hearing loss occurs and to reach the higher frequency losses the choices sometimes is to block the ear canal. 

Unfortunately, while there are many factors that come into play probably one of the most important is your ear canal and that blocking it with a plug, or mold, or a small aid, causes you to lose the 20db of sound which then has to be replaced by amplification.   

Sometimes in the search to match the curve your ear canal is plugged and you lose the bottom frequencies that you normally hear and then you feel like your in a barrel and to take care of that a vent system is enclosed. 

Why is this going on so long?  

Well I have seen so many be given what the clinician feels is the best to match the curve forgetting that even a 50-75% better solution where you have an open basket mold... see below, would allow you tolerate your amplification devices in 2 hours, not a year, allow you to have multiple programs to bend the sound amplification curve and allow you to have a #13 battery or even better a #675.  a BTE, behind the ear rather than a ITC, in the canal aid also would mean less visits to return the unit to the manufacturer (2 week return for some) 

One of the nice features is you will hear the normal bass sound around you while the aid, usually a high frequency boosting amplifier will compensate for the speech sounds and get you functional again in discrimination of speech. 

All in all the hearing industry sometimes is not providing you all the information for you make a sound decision in what you will use.   

Hope this helps someone. 

 

Well that was a fine mouthful, Ray. Very informative. What do you have for tinnitus ? 

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