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That’s a great point. My hearing is fine but I have some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices in a crowd. My hearing is tested to be plenty sensi

That’s a great point. My hearing is fine but I have some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices in a crowd. My hearing is tested to be plenty sensitive. A hearing aid would be great in party environments for me. My father and my daughter have the same condition, so I’m reasonable certain it is inherited.

Kamq 4y ago
Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation? Or am I just being really dumb?
- tylerhou 4y ago
  I think they want a hearing aid that could selectively amplify just one voice. Maybe the loudest voice in the vicinity, for example, while muting the others. Not sure how feasible it would be to do this in real time, though.
  - berberous 4y ago
    AirPods Pro can do that: Conversation Boost for AirPods Pro helps you better hear conversations in crowded or noisy environments. Through computational audio and beamforming microphones, Conversation Boost focuses AirPods Pro on the voice of the person directly in front of you, making it easier to distinguish speech and follow along in face‑to‑face conversations.
    - foobarian 4y ago
      I always wanted to have those helicopter helmets when in a loud restaurant/bar. I don’t talk the loudest and those places are just so annoying.
      - arthurcolle 4y ago
        Yeah same this is one thing about Miami that is a bit obnoxious, I'm just minding my own business blowing off steam at happy hour somewhere and like so many normal city bar type spots have like a DJ set up and I wanna be like "hello sir or madam, my phone decibel meter indicates that this is way too loud." ~points to spectrogram on phone screen flashing 97~
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      I have AirPods Pro's and they are very disappointing. My pair of $500 hearing aids are far superior. The AirPods provide no gain for external sound, and not nearly enough equalization to compensate for hearing loss. The "beam forming" effect is nearly non-existent. I have a pair of Bose Hearphones (sadly no longer sold), and those really had effective directional capability. Apple has all the tech needed to get this done, even in their existing product. I'm hopeful they will now feel they can release it. All I need is compression (amplification of soft sounds without over-amplification of loud sounds), equalization, and an app that allows me to make the necessary adjustments - with separate controls for exterior sound and the iOS audio chain.
      - pstuart 4y ago
        I'm betting they'll come up with something "good enough" eventually. The pending Pro supposedly has significantly improved audio capabilities so that may help make it happen.
  - grumpitron 4y ago
    I don’t think it needs to selectively amplify just one voice, it just needs to quiet down the background noise. For reference I had a friend whose hearing aids were doing this 15-20 years ago. He was able to have a conversation just fine in a crowded bar, whereas I couldn’t hear a thing over the din of background conversation.
- tartoran 4y ago
  I have a similar issue which I learned to live with by avoiding very loud environments (lots of people talking in a tight indoor setting). I sometimes mishear dialogue while watching movies and have to rewind here and there. However, when listening using headphones the problem goes away almost entirely. The amplification seems to help in this case. Similarly in semi crowded environments it should help as well. It never bothered me enough to try hearing aids but if barriers to acces dissapear Im willing to give it a try. OTC and prescriptionless should help since I don’t have a medical insurance at the moment.
- eru 4y ago
  > Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation? If everyone was using a naive version of what's described: maybe? If only a handful of people were using it: probably not. And I'm sure you could exploit human psychology to engineer some way to keep the party as quiet on average as before. (Slightly related, I heard of some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay. The effect is said to be so unnerving that untrained people stop talking altogether, or only haltingly. It's apparently been used to shut down protestors.)
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    > some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay I wonder if it would be more disconcerting with a varying delay. Long ago I saw a proposal to eliminate "feedback" in a Public Address system by putting in a delay line with variable delay.
orev 4y ago
You might try earplugs. There are nice sets that are made for concerts that preserve the tone, they just reduce the volume (and background noise). Even regular foam ones work pretty well. You can still hear people close to you, as they mainly take care of the background noise.
- teeray 4y ago
  For loud bar earplugs, you’d probably want ones that would blunt lows and highs pretty aggressively, but preserve a band around 2.5 khz. I attended a presentation from Bob Heil about EQing for understandability on HF, and that was more-or-less his recommendation.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    Yup, just filtering out everything except the old-school telephone frequency range will make human voices much more intelligible in a noisy environment. EQ alone is quite primitive though compared to the computing power that we have available. If you're capturing audio from both ears, it wouldn't be hard to filter out anything other than directly in front of you. If you're sitting across a table from someone in a loud restaurant, you could let all the audio in normally, vibe to the music, but duck the volume on all the background noise when a human voice is detected directly in front of you.
    - teeray 4y ago
      Doppler Labs[0] was getting there with their Here buds. I have a pair that I miss dearly at concerts (they were sadly bricked when the company shut down and yanked their iOS app). They didn’t do “virtual sidechaining” like you describe, but possibly could have with the DSPs in the earbuds. I’d love to find a replacement for them. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_Labs
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        Just get yourself an Android device and install the app on it: https://m.apkpure.com/here-one/com.dopplerlabs.hereone https://m.apkpure.com/here-one/com.dopplerlabs.hereone Run it through VirusTotal if you're in sight about the APK's provenance, Don't let this type of planned obsolescence rule your access to your devices. That is, assuming the app works without some sort of cloudy backing - but then I guess it should of it was to be used in places where network access can be spared or non-existent?
8note 4y ago
I'm imagining good glasses might help?
userbinator 4y ago
It sounds like you need the opposite of a hearing aid --- as in, your hearing is too sensitive.
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  It may not be the hearing, as such. In my case, at least, it's "Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD)", which is somewhat of a catch all. For me specifically, I have a heck of a time picking out one voice when there are more than one going. Parties are just noise to me. My hearing itself is well within normal sensitivity when tested (well, it's getting worse, but even that's normal as I age). It's just whatever processing people do to turn sound into parsed language is difficult for me. Even people's houses that have a TV going 24x7 are problematic for me to have a conversation.
  - nocoiner 4y ago
    Huh, didn’t know this was a thing. You’re pretty much describing me exactly. My hearing is basically normal but parties, or even dinners with more than, say, four people, are hell for me to keep up with. If I focus on a single person, I can usually have a normal conversation with them and them only, at the expense of blocking out literally everyone and everything else. So, could be worse, but it would be nice to be able to keep up in crowded rooms more easily.
steve_taylor 4y ago
I'm skeptical about this. I also have trouble understanding what people are saying in a noisy environment. Almost every google search result for this type of thing is a business selling hearing aids, all saying that it's a sign of hearing loss. But my hearing itself seems fine. I suspect that it's more of a brain thing. Some people are better than others at understanding (or pretending to understand) what people are saying in a noisy environment.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  This is a common problem with cheaper hearing aids too. So they might not even fix it.
- paxswill 4y ago
  High frequency hearing loss is associated with decreased intelligibility, and some of the harder situations to discern people is in a group or noisy environment. I had a fairly rapid decrease in my high frequency hearing (basically my ears aged 20 years in a few months), and the biggest indicator to me was how much harder it was to understand dialogue in loud shows. I was turning on subtitles and/or turning the volume up where before I was fine with a fairly quiet volume.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  You can get a hearing test. If everything comes back nominal, you might have a mild form of auditory processing disorder. It's not too uncommon, and is tremendously common among people with ADHD, dyslexia, and people on the spectrum. Whatever it is, I definitely have it. One thing that helps me a ton is just focusing directly on people's lips when they're talking in a noisy setting. I can't read lips (at all), but the extra little bit of visual information helps me a great deal with comprehension.
  - plainhold 4y ago
    At the moment there is no real reliable procedure to diagnos APD. It is the, we tried everything else but we can't see anything wrong with you type of diagnos.
nico 4y ago
“some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices” Is there a name for this? When I was 15, something similar started happening to me but even during one on one conversations. Someone would say something, I would hear the sounds, but wasn’t able to really make sense of it (and reply) for a few seconds. When tested, my hearing was perfect. I never dug too much into it, and eventually it got a lot better. It still happens sometimes in some situations though. Would be great to learn more about it if you have any additional info.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Auditory processing disorder! There's no point in getting formally diagnosed because there's not really any treatment so save the money, but it's sometimes just nice to know it has a name and something to Google.
gedy 4y ago
I have same issue, try these if you can find them on eBay, etc: https://www.hearsoundly.com/guides/bose-hearphones https://www.hearsoundly.com/guides/bose-hearphones
raindear 4y ago
"Perhaps 5% of children and younger adults (<60 years old) with “clinically normal” audiograms (i.e., tone thresholds better than 20 dB HL from 0.1 to 8 kHz) have difficulties understanding speech, particularly in noisy, reverberant or otherwise challenging listening environments" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325255/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325255/
intsunny 4y ago
> My hearing is fine but I have some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices in a crowd. My hearing is tested to be plenty sensitive. You may have ADP/KKS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder Learning about this helped me immensely deal with my own struggles of hearing voices with background noise.
RickJWagner 4y ago
I've got that, totally. In my case, I believe it's from operating a stump grinder without ear protection. (Doh!) I've been tested, there is a narrow range where my hearing is impaired. Otherwise, I hear very well. Put me in a restaurant, I spend about half my time lip-reading and context matching to figure out what the person across from me said.

Kamq 4y ago

Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation? Or am I just being really dumb?

tylerhou 4y ago
I think they want a hearing aid that could selectively amplify just one voice. Maybe the loudest voice in the vicinity, for example, while muting the others. Not sure how feasible it would be to do this in real time, though.
- berberous 4y ago
  AirPods Pro can do that: Conversation Boost for AirPods Pro helps you better hear conversations in crowded or noisy environments. Through computational audio and beamforming microphones, Conversation Boost focuses AirPods Pro on the voice of the person directly in front of you, making it easier to distinguish speech and follow along in face‑to‑face conversations.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    I always wanted to have those helicopter helmets when in a loud restaurant/bar. I don’t talk the loudest and those places are just so annoying.
    - arthurcolle 4y ago
      Yeah same this is one thing about Miami that is a bit obnoxious, I'm just minding my own business blowing off steam at happy hour somewhere and like so many normal city bar type spots have like a DJ set up and I wanna be like "hello sir or madam, my phone decibel meter indicates that this is way too loud." ~points to spectrogram on phone screen flashing 97~
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    I have AirPods Pro's and they are very disappointing. My pair of $500 hearing aids are far superior. The AirPods provide no gain for external sound, and not nearly enough equalization to compensate for hearing loss. The "beam forming" effect is nearly non-existent. I have a pair of Bose Hearphones (sadly no longer sold), and those really had effective directional capability. Apple has all the tech needed to get this done, even in their existing product. I'm hopeful they will now feel they can release it. All I need is compression (amplification of soft sounds without over-amplification of loud sounds), equalization, and an app that allows me to make the necessary adjustments - with separate controls for exterior sound and the iOS audio chain.
    - pstuart 4y ago
      I'm betting they'll come up with something "good enough" eventually. The pending Pro supposedly has significantly improved audio capabilities so that may help make it happen.
- grumpitron 4y ago
  I don’t think it needs to selectively amplify just one voice, it just needs to quiet down the background noise. For reference I had a friend whose hearing aids were doing this 15-20 years ago. He was able to have a conversation just fine in a crowded bar, whereas I couldn’t hear a thing over the din of background conversation.
tartoran 4y ago
I have a similar issue which I learned to live with by avoiding very loud environments (lots of people talking in a tight indoor setting). I sometimes mishear dialogue while watching movies and have to rewind here and there. However, when listening using headphones the problem goes away almost entirely. The amplification seems to help in this case. Similarly in semi crowded environments it should help as well. It never bothered me enough to try hearing aids but if barriers to acces dissapear Im willing to give it a try. OTC and prescriptionless should help since I don’t have a medical insurance at the moment.
eru 4y ago
> Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation? If everyone was using a naive version of what's described: maybe? If only a handful of people were using it: probably not. And I'm sure you could exploit human psychology to engineer some way to keep the party as quiet on average as before. (Slightly related, I heard of some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay. The effect is said to be so unnerving that untrained people stop talking altogether, or only haltingly. It's apparently been used to shut down protestors.)
- a9h74j 4y ago
  > some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay I wonder if it would be more disconcerting with a varying delay. Long ago I saw a proposal to eliminate "feedback" in a Public Address system by putting in a delay line with variable delay.

orev 4y ago

You might try earplugs. There are nice sets that are made for concerts that preserve the tone, they just reduce the volume (and background noise). Even regular foam ones work pretty well. You can still hear people close to you, as they mainly take care of the background noise.

teeray 4y ago
For loud bar earplugs, you’d probably want ones that would blunt lows and highs pretty aggressively, but preserve a band around 2.5 khz. I attended a presentation from Bob Heil about EQing for understandability on HF, and that was more-or-less his recommendation.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Yup, just filtering out everything except the old-school telephone frequency range will make human voices much more intelligible in a noisy environment. EQ alone is quite primitive though compared to the computing power that we have available. If you're capturing audio from both ears, it wouldn't be hard to filter out anything other than directly in front of you. If you're sitting across a table from someone in a loud restaurant, you could let all the audio in normally, vibe to the music, but duck the volume on all the background noise when a human voice is detected directly in front of you.
  - teeray 4y ago
    Doppler Labs[0] was getting there with their Here buds. I have a pair that I miss dearly at concerts (they were sadly bricked when the company shut down and yanked their iOS app). They didn’t do “virtual sidechaining” like you describe, but possibly could have with the DSPs in the earbuds. I’d love to find a replacement for them. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_Labs
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      Just get yourself an Android device and install the app on it: https://m.apkpure.com/here-one/com.dopplerlabs.hereone https://m.apkpure.com/here-one/com.dopplerlabs.hereone Run it through VirusTotal if you're in sight about the APK's provenance, Don't let this type of planned obsolescence rule your access to your devices. That is, assuming the app works without some sort of cloudy backing - but then I guess it should of it was to be used in places where network access can be spared or non-existent?

8note 4y ago

I'm imagining good glasses might help?

userbinator 4y ago

It sounds like you need the opposite of a hearing aid --- as in, your hearing is too sensitive.

banana_giraffe 4y ago
It may not be the hearing, as such. In my case, at least, it's "Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD)", which is somewhat of a catch all. For me specifically, I have a heck of a time picking out one voice when there are more than one going. Parties are just noise to me. My hearing itself is well within normal sensitivity when tested (well, it's getting worse, but even that's normal as I age). It's just whatever processing people do to turn sound into parsed language is difficult for me. Even people's houses that have a TV going 24x7 are problematic for me to have a conversation.
- nocoiner 4y ago
  Huh, didn’t know this was a thing. You’re pretty much describing me exactly. My hearing is basically normal but parties, or even dinners with more than, say, four people, are hell for me to keep up with. If I focus on a single person, I can usually have a normal conversation with them and them only, at the expense of blocking out literally everyone and everything else. So, could be worse, but it would be nice to be able to keep up in crowded rooms more easily.

steve_taylor 4y ago

I'm skeptical about this. I also have trouble understanding what people are saying in a noisy environment. Almost every google search result for this type of thing is a business selling hearing aids, all saying that it's a sign of hearing loss. But my hearing itself seems fine. I suspect that it's more of a brain thing. Some people are better than others at understanding (or pretending to understand) what people are saying in a noisy environment.

bcrosby95 4y ago
This is a common problem with cheaper hearing aids too. So they might not even fix it.
paxswill 4y ago
High frequency hearing loss is associated with decreased intelligibility, and some of the harder situations to discern people is in a group or noisy environment. I had a fairly rapid decrease in my high frequency hearing (basically my ears aged 20 years in a few months), and the biggest indicator to me was how much harder it was to understand dialogue in loud shows. I was turning on subtitles and/or turning the volume up where before I was fine with a fairly quiet volume.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
You can get a hearing test. If everything comes back nominal, you might have a mild form of auditory processing disorder. It's not too uncommon, and is tremendously common among people with ADHD, dyslexia, and people on the spectrum. Whatever it is, I definitely have it. One thing that helps me a ton is just focusing directly on people's lips when they're talking in a noisy setting. I can't read lips (at all), but the extra little bit of visual information helps me a great deal with comprehension.
- plainhold 4y ago
  At the moment there is no real reliable procedure to diagnos APD. It is the, we tried everything else but we can't see anything wrong with you type of diagnos.

nico 4y ago

“some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices” Is there a name for this? When I was 15, something similar started happening to me but even during one on one conversations. Someone would say something, I would hear the sounds, but wasn’t able to really make sense of it (and reply) for a few seconds. When tested, my hearing was perfect. I never dug too much into it, and eventually it got a lot better. It still happens sometimes in some situations though. Would be great to learn more about it if you have any additional info.

Spivak 4y ago
Auditory processing disorder! There's no point in getting formally diagnosed because there's not really any treatment so save the money, but it's sometimes just nice to know it has a name and something to Google.

gedy 4y ago

I have same issue, try these if you can find them on eBay, etc: https://www.hearsoundly.com/guides/bose-hearphones https://www.hearsoundly.com/guides/bose-hearphones

raindear 4y ago

"Perhaps 5% of children and younger adults (<60 years old) with “clinically normal” audiograms (i.e., tone thresholds better than 20 dB HL from 0.1 to 8 kHz) have difficulties understanding speech, particularly in noisy, reverberant or otherwise challenging listening environments" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325255/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325255/

intsunny 4y ago

> My hearing is fine but I have some brain thing that make it hard to understand voices in a crowd. My hearing is tested to be plenty sensitive. You may have ADP/KKS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder Learning about this helped me immensely deal with my own struggles of hearing voices with background noise.

RickJWagner 4y ago

I've got that, totally. In my case, I believe it's from operating a stump grinder without ear protection. (Doh!) I've been tested, there is a narrow range where my hearing is impaired. Otherwise, I hear very well. Put me in a restaurant, I spend about half my time lip-reading and context matching to figure out what the person across from me said.