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Re: Hearing aids

Author: sdr
Date: 2007-05-04 20:23

"This happens even when I'm concentrating and wide awake. In fact I often try to lip read as well in order to make out what they're saying.
In my last test, I had the typical middle age decrease in the upper frequency range, but no other problems."

In my previous post I was referring to people with normal hearing who have trouble discriminating voices in noise. People with high frequency hearing loss ALL have this problem. In speech, vowel sounds tend to have there energy in lower frequencies and consonants have theirs in higher frequencies. As you lose high frequency hearing you are preferentially clipping out the consonants. Think about what you do when you want to listen to NPR on your car radio --- you turn down the bass and turn up the treble. It is the crisp consonant sounds that lift a voice out of the background. If you have high frequency hearing loss, you basically hear the bass and not the treble, so the voices are lost in the background. There is no good fix for this -- hearing aids are only partially helpful in noisy environments because they don't know what you want to listen to. You should find quiet restaurants instead of noisy ones.

-sdr

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