I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments. I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in gl…
> Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Looks and seems great, always felt like a no-brainer use case for the smart glasses. But considering the kind of hardware they most likely are using, how is the captioning actually happening? I'm really scared of getting hardware that is 100% cloud dependent, as eventually the company gets bought or shut down, and then you end up having to repeat the process of figuring out…
Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
151–160 of 223 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#152I'll tell you what's not hot: cochlear implants. I wore hearing aids since the late '80s. I wear CIs as of about 5 years ago, and while my hearing is much better and stable than it used to be, I've found that UX for CIs is pretty bad. For one, unless you use Med-El's Rondo processeor, you're going to have a thin cable connecting your processor to the coil. Taking off your CIs and putting them back on (as one does eve…
https://www.etsy.com/listing/870982894/cochlear-implant-cabl...
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I trialed hearing aids a little while ago and ended up not committing, because the sound quality was bad, wheezy and tinny, and gave me headaches. Particularly bad in noisy environments, which is where I'd most need the help. Also the app sucked, Bluetooth pairing broke all the time and the controls were just confusing. They were Phonaks. I guess I'm glad to hear that it's not intrinsically a hearing aid thing, and I…
The tinniness is something your brain adjusts to and prices in, and if your hearing aid is properly set up, it is very likely that to start with it will sound tinny if your hearing is deficient with high frequencies. It is boosting those frequencies to make up for your lack in hearing. You probably need a good 2-6 months to adjust. Mine were exactly like this to start with and over time the effect goes away such that…
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#154I have the Widex SmartRIC 220, and would buy them again. They are comfortable, have musical audio quality (Widex works with musicians), very low latency (reducing comb filter effect), and in general look and feel very professional. As for technology, they use bluetooth low energy to connect to the smart phone, which works really well, with the caveat that the range is quite low and if it is in the pocket and you are…
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#155With that said, my recommendation are the new Phonak Infinio Sphere devices with with their "Spheric speech in noise" feature. It's a complete game changer in terms of speech perception in loud noise. Activating this program in a noisy situation feels like turning off the background noise, leaving only (nearby) voices.
The caveat is that to achieve this they use a separate, power-hungry processor and compensate by increasing the battery size (making the whole hearing aid bigger than other, similar hearing aids). The upside to this is that if you're _not_ using the spherical program, you'll have really good battery life. I use mine for exactly 16 hours a day and if I'm careful I can make them last almost three full days. The charger is much better than the previous ones; they use magnets to keep the devices in place instead of relying on plastic friction.
The Oticon Intent and new Starkey AI aids are also great. You should always try more than one model before you make a decision.
Happy to answer any questions!
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#156I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments. I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in gl…
Your recommendation has made me think I should finally take the leap on live-caption glasses, which I've been watching for a while now. It sounds like they've finally got to the point where they're effective.
A question: how do you find them in conversations with multiple people? Do the glasses help you distinguish speakers by breaking out text from different voices, or is it all just a stream of words? What if there are multiple conversations going on - do the glasses manage to "focus" captioning on the one you're closest to, or do other conversations creep in?
The captions on google meet have been useful for me as well, although I do wish they were more configurable, e.g. being able to give the captioning model a list of technical phrases, internal company terms, or acronyms that are likely to come up. There also seems to be a gap still between real time transcription, which is good, and after-the-fact transcription, which is excellent. (You can also use an LLM for the latter and prompt it yourself with extra context, although that may not be the best model.)
It's been great to see so much progress in this area in the past few years. I am hoping the current (over-)investment in AI at least has the side effect of improving the tech still further.
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only get a couple hours better life even with a belt pack to fit more battery?
Power requirements, moving mass and audio sampling and processing. Hearing aids run on tiny voltages (typically ~1.4 Volts). They are designed to amplify speech (a small frequency range) at moderate volumes. An IEM is designed to handle the massive energy of a live drum kit without distortion. To do this, the internal amplifier needs Headroom. It likely steps up the battery voltage significantly (internally convertin…
A fancy passive IEM quotes:
> Sensitivity: 114 dB-SPL (@ 0.1V)
That’s on the high side for an IEM. Let’s be conservative and say it’s actually 100dB SPL at 1mW (which is on the low side) and that the user has hearing loss and the IEM is actually outputting 90dB continuously (I’m not an expert but this seems high. Certainly I would not set an active IEM anywhere near that loud, even at a concert). That’s 0.1mW of electrical power to each IEM, for 0.2mW total. This part could run for days on a small battery pack.
A modern amplifier might as well be 100% efficient, although that body pack could easily be some wildly efficient Class A design.
Let’s suppose the DSP is processing 96kSPS (might as well minimize latency and the need for a complex antialiasing setup and let’s assume it’s using a duper-high-fidelity FIR filter that’s a whole 100ms long, i.e. 9600 taps, and that the FIR implementation is pure brute force, so there are 9600 times 96k FMAs per second. That’s about 2 billion FMAs per second for both ears. (Again, this is a ridiculous way to do this.) The fancy nonlinear compression stuff will be negligible in comparison.
From some quick Googling, you could easily spend a whole watt on the DSP. And there’s where all that battery charge goes :)
I bet that someone who really cared about optimizing this could put some software engineering into getting DSP power down below 50mW. Either use an FFT to optimize the filter or use a much lower complexity filter bank.
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#158I'll tell you what's not hot: cochlear implants. I wore hearing aids since the late '80s. I wear CIs as of about 5 years ago, and while my hearing is much better and stable than it used to be, I've found that UX for CIs is pretty bad. For one, unless you use Med-El's Rondo processeor, you're going to have a thin cable connecting your processor to the coil. Taking off your CIs and putting them back on (as one does eve…
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#159I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments. I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in gl…
> Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Looks and seems great, always felt like a no-brainer use case for the smart glasses. But considering the kind of hardware they most likely are using, how is the captioning actually happening? I'm really scared of getting hardware that is 100% cloud dependent, as eventually the company gets bought or shut down, and then you end up having to repeat the process of figuring out…
I'm rarely an apologist for subscription services vs outright purchase but those features sound like ones that are going to use cloud services instead of working on-device only. If it's associated with an ongoing cost it's perfectly justifiable to charge an ongoing fee, IMO. That said I’d much prefer an option tied to how much you actually use it.
Re: Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?
#160I have the Widex SmartRIC 220, and would buy them again. They are comfortable, have musical audio quality (Widex works with musicians), very low latency (reducing comb filter effect), and in general look and feel very professional. As for technology, they use bluetooth low energy to connect to the smart phone, which works really well, with the caveat that the range is quite low and if it is in the pocket and you are…