181–190 of 223 posts
I have a related question. What is the best thing for people with no hearing loss but need help in noisy environments? My partner and I both have difficulty listening to conversations in crowds. Logic tells me that there must be some noise cancelling devices with directional mics that let you hear just what is in front of you, but querying staff in stores gets me the same bemused look as when I asked about Arm laptop…
I finally got (very expensive) hearing aids, and made several trips back to the audiologist to have them tuned. Then I wound up not wearing them, because most people think they're speaking English, but it's some kind of mumbly slobbergobble with incorrect, missing, or mispronounced words. The aids just turned "mufuh dogga baytaaa" into "MUFUH DOGGA BAYTAAA."
Yeah, I heard that just fine without electronic assistance.
Paying attention to how often people with "normal" hearing said "what?" to each other was a revelation. Yes, I have a problem. But it's a small problem; the big problem is that a large number of people may as well be trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing, because "the words what are coming out of their mouth" are mostly gibberish.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the same problem, but I always assumed it was Apple's fault. I don't know why the HAs/Airpods have the final say. I don't think there's a way around it on the iphone, but I was able to cobble a fix for my macbook at least. It uses Shortery to run a Shortcut whenever my HA connects. The Shortcut runs a shell script that uses https://github.com/deweller/switchaudio-osx/ to determine the built-in mic and switch b…
Interesting, wouldn't the MBP microphone be even further away than the HA's microphone?
HA mics are not designed/oriented to pick up your own voice; if anything, they might be tuned to avoid it. After all, you know what you're saying.
Conversely, I'd expect laptop mics to be highly sensitive to the voice of the user.
In practice, before I got my scripts set up, people would complain I sounded distant, muffled, or tinny, when the HA mics were being used.
I’ll chime in with a sidebar: Anyone got any experience using hearing aids for the "hearing in noise" issue (aka. King-Kopetzky syndrome or lack of cocktail party effect [0], part of a whole bunch of things also called adhd for ears). Essentially I have filtering issues, as soon as multiple people talk, I can’t really understand anyone anymore, unless they very directly speak into my ears so they are significantly lo…
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…
I was at a meeting earlier this month where the Zoom live captions were displayed on-screen. This is not something I ever use or had much need for but they were quite good. It handled different English speakers, with some distinctly different accents, very well. It got a couple of words wrong here and there, usually proper names or acronyms but it was generally quite impressive, and much better than the "text to speech" efforts last time I really tried them years ago.
Weird - in an incredibly similar situation and my RICs are overdue an upgrade (Oticon Opn 3). I've been keeping an eye on developments for some time, and I've been looking for something ideally CIC, though I do like the RIC Opns. However, nothing has had the feature set I wanted - bluetooth, auracast, Apple MFI and being CIC. Oticon just announced/released their 'Zeal' product - a non-custom CIC, with seemingly all t…
My Phonaks are like that, and I will say, rechargeable-only has been a boon for reliability, at least. They're more water-resistant, and the battery well never gets dirty, which required some repairs on previous models.
Though now that it's been 5 years, they no longer hold a charge all day, which is annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in a similar age range (HAs since 1991 I guess). I also have fond recollections of the pre-digital HAs' sound. I'm using a pair of 8 yr old phonak BTEs, which have various levels of directionality focusing. (Actually, I'm down one HA; 8yr old on left; 13 yr old left one one on right ear... getting new ones in January) I too prefer a lower level of directionality as my default. I assume your HAs are doing bluetoot…
I use Bluetooth with my phone and sometimes my laptop. My current hearing aids can stream directly from devices with Bluetooth LE audio; no relay dongle necessary. But at home I often use telecoil. It's one of the killer features for hearing aids that no one seems to know about. Short-range (inches to a few feet) baseband analog radio. I have a transmitter set up in the living room. If I come within a few feet of the…
https://hackaday.io/project/1406-bluetooth-headphones-for-he...
Sadly, it seems modern Phonaks (and probably everyone else) no longer makes DAI "boots" for their BTEs.
I'll probably be ok with the transition, but it's going to annoying having to recharge hearing aids during the day. Right now, I can get 6+ hours of music/podcast/meetings/phone calls on my (5+ year old) headphones batteries, and can take those off and charge them when not using them. (and other perks...)
I'll have to refresh myself on telecoil to see if it's of use. (My BTEs still have it, iirc)