Off Topic Hearing Aid

[Edward R Cole]

My current hearing aids are top of the Phonak line (22-channel DSP)
and are OTE (over the ear) style recommended by my audiologist.  I
had Resound in the ear cannal style, before.  With either I have no
problems with feedback "whistles".  Those are generally an indication
of a poor fit by the ear bud.

The over ear model could offer superior noise cancellation because
they can separate the front and back microphones sufficiently.  When
I upgraded to the new hearing aids it took some adjustment to all the
sounds I could now hear.  I had to lower the volume a bit.  Rustling
paper sounded like a sheet of aluminum.  Tapping pencils by bored
employees in a meeting were irritating to listen to.  The street
noise outside the conference room covered up voices.  They were all
new sounds that my brain had to re-learn to filter (i.e. reprograming
the wet-ware).  The new hearing aids work automatically to shift
between four sound programs that include shifts in noise reduction
routines, noise cancellation, and audio equalization.  One program
that I can manually select is for music-TV which renders nearly flat
frequency response.  I like it for ordinary listening as it produces
crisper, flatter highs making voice easier to understand.  Some of
the other sound programs make voice muffled due to noise reduction.

I would not say the hearing aids make hearing sound normal.  Normal =
not hearing anything!  Wearing hearing aids means using DSP all the
time.  One has to give the brain time to assimilate and adjust (about
2-3 weeks for most folks).  My hearing loss is >30-dB in both ears.

I know this is very off-topic for the list, but may be interesting to
some of you normal hearing folks.

A few rules for talking to hearing-loss folks:
Slow down your speech a bit - our cpu's are often in search mode for
best fit of a sound to a word in memory
face the person you are speaking to
don't cover your mouth - many of us lip read with our eyes (not
always a concious process)
Don't shout - sometime we only missed a critical word to make the
conversation make sense - but speak clearly. enounciate.
listen to what we ask - we don't usually need you to repeat everything said
this is similar to sending traffic on ham radio - noise bursts and
low power or other factors cause missed words.

------------------------------

Message: 8
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:26:11 +0100
From: "David Woolley (E.L)" <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Off Topic Hearing Aids
To: [hidden email]
Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Quote 1:

That style rings alarm bells, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Quote 2:

Unless you have a pure conductive loss, which is relatively rare, and
tends to be early in onset, hearing aids that "sound natural" are not
doing their job.  Hearing aids have a similar job to that of noise
reduction in the K3, with the added complication that they have to cope
with a possibly very limited dynamic range between threshold of hearing
and threshold of pain.  They have to both stress the frequencies needed
for speech comprehension and apply frequency selective dynamic range
compression.

Although modern hearing aids use a lot of echo cancellation to stop
feedback whistling, deep in the ear ones so not have the level of
isolation between input and output to allow for high powers and still
maintain feedback suppression. The probable advantage of the deep
positioning is that the feedback is less affected by the external
environment, so you there are less occasions on which you have to wait
for the feedback canceller to retrain.

[hidden email] wrote:
 > As a hearing-impaired operator, I wanted to let you all know about a
 > fairly recent hearing-aid technology. It is manufactured by a company in
 > Newark, California, and the device is called a "lyric."


 > The difference is nothing short of dramatic. Sounds are much more natural
 > sounding. There are no whistles like one gets with a partially in the
 > canal device.



73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45
======================================
BP40IQ   500 KHz - 10-GHz   www.kl7uw.com
EME: 144-QRT*, 432-100w, 1296-QRT*, 3400-fall 2010
DUBUS Magazine USA Rep [hidden email]
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