3 ms·
My understanding of hearing aids is not that it makes sounds louder across the entire spectrum, but only selective frequencies? An audiologist should be able t
by julianlam 5y ago
My understanding of hearing aids is not that it makes sounds louder across the entire spectrum, but only selective frequencies?
An audiologist should be able to tune your hearing aids to amplify only those frequencies that need amplification.
(Although my understanding is that this is fairly new, and may not be available around the world)
- gedy 5y agoYes I have tuned hearing aids and unfortunately my SNHL still struggles with speech perception.
- rini17 5y agoYes hearing aids tuning is a thing, often must be done repeatedly because of discomfort. But the serious problem with hearing loss is the "bandwidth", meaning the damaged cells send less information to the brain even if attenuation is compensated by hearing aid, leading to bad recognition of sounds and speech.
- rhubarbcustard 5y agoWith most new hearing aids users, multiple tunings are required as they cannot handle the new volume and intensity of sounds that hey haven't heard for years. An audiologist will typically test someone, see that they need amplications across the range but send them away with a much lower amplification for a weeks to get used to things. Then bring the volume up as time goes by. People amy also need to get used to the aid's noise reduction algorithms as they can seem unatural at first and is a nightmare for anyone who used to wear an old analog hearing aid with no noise reduction. So, yeah, hearing aids are rarely plug-and-play from day one - the user needs time to adjust.
- navbaker 5y agoMy hearing loss got to a point where tuning the hearing aid to the point where it sufficiently amplified sound for me to distinguish speech made it so loud that it sounded to my brain like a normal speaking volume, but it caused physical pain in my ear.