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Can't you just turn up the volume?

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Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#141

Post by GotAnyMegadeth »

saalweachter wrote: post #93
zenocon wrote: post #5

"Why can't I just turn up the volume on my iPhone?" is something I ask myself everyday and shake my fist toward Cupertino. Seriously, the gain on the phone is severely limited. Try listening to a voice call on speakerphone in even a moderately quiet environment with just a twee bit of ambient noise. It is maddening that I can't get any more volume out of this device without jailbreaking it.

I actually have the opposite problem: the minimum volume on my iPod is too loud. In some contexts (late at night, listening to something while falling asleep) it's slightly too loud, but they don't give you any more gradations between "off" and "slightly too loud". I find it especially bothersome because on older, non-digital radios, I was able to lightly tune the volume to somewhere just on the threshold of audible,…

I had this with my Moto X too, I downloaded a EQ app and lowered all of the dials by an equal amount and that seems to have worked.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#142

Post by HCIdivision17 »

72deluxe wrote: post #119
HCIdivision17 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wondered if that high pitched sound was real! No one else heard it, and it makes so little sense I always figured it was my hearing.

Do you hear that high-pitched sound all the time? That's tinnitus. Or do you only hear it from dogs?

It turns out I have really decent hearing. So it's unlikely to be tinnitus; at worst I have a sort of hearing after-image when a tonal frequency suddenly cuts out (and now I'm guessing that's an effect of the ear actively filtering - I can't wait to watch that video).

But yeah, I did hear it on the dog. It's so anomalous to hear a high pitched noise coming from an ear that I was willing to question my own hearing/sanity. The best I could manage to guess was that there was some sort of small gas pocket leaking, which made a little bit of sense since my dog (samoyed) had a bubble on his ear (that eventually gave him a sadly adorable floppy ear when it eventually drained - prolly an aural hematoma); the bump never actually seemed to deflate due to the noise, though. At the time I was an early teen just sort of beginning to learn analytical techniques, so that reasoning was the best I could muster. These days I tend to trust/understand my senses more.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#143

Post by ogig »

Dwolb wrote: post #31
analog31 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that a simple way to eliminate the feedback issue is to separate the microphone from the speaker. Hearing loss runs in my family, so I've watched my relatives struggle with hearing aids, and I've decided that when it's time for me: 1) I will build it myself and figure out the details, to hell with the audiologists and their racket. 2. I will carry the microphone and amplifier in my shirt pocket. No mor…

I'm not a hearing aid expert but the microphone and earpiece may currently be tightly coupled because it has to be. That is, human ears are very sensitive to phase shifts and time delays. Placing the microphone in a location that is not your ear may throw off your hearing somewhat (possibly ability to locate from where a sound originated).

Short after losing one of my ears audition I was laying on a beach at the Mediterranean. Holydays, sun, good times. Then I felt a strong buzzing sound, it had to be a gigantic flying insect, so close to my head!. I jumped out of the towel and run some meters flapping arms around my head. Crowded beach and my own wife were perplexed at me and my flapping arms strategy did nothing for the sound that was still as loud an close.

Then my brain recalculated. Sound stopped and started again and the pattern was obvious then. I confused for some good 5-7 seconds a halfmile away boat siren with an insect around my head.

By first hand experience: It's amazing what the brain does triangulating the two ears input, and it is indeed very sensible to the quality of the inputs. On the other hand the brain is also great at adapting to new, lower quality sensors. I don't see that same scene happening now, after several years of one sided hearing.

My wife still recreates that moment from time to time.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#145

Post by randlet »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #139
randlet wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't see the elderly changing but our generation just might." I'm youngish (mid 30's) and recently had my hearing aids replaced and realized I had a strong preference to stick with fairly visible behind-the-ear units rather than something more "discrete". I want them to be visible so that people I'm interacting with will be more sympathetic about repeating themselves and may make an (possibly unconscious) effort…

> fairly visible behind-the-ear units I've had hearing aids like that for almost a year, and "fairly visible" is a stretch; they're pretty blasé and don't stand out.

You're right, they're still fairly subtle and probably not the first thing someone would notice about me, but if I turn my head slightly, you're bound to notice my ear moulds/tube.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#146

Post by jimktrains2 »

randlet wrote: post #145
jimktrains2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fairly visible behind-the-ear units I've had hearing aids like that for almost a year, and "fairly visible" is a stretch; they're pretty blasé and don't stand out.

You're right, they're still fairly subtle and probably not the first thing someone would notice about me, but if I turn my head slightly, you're bound to notice my ear moulds/tube.

True, I do wear glasses as well, so they kind of blend into that as well.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#147

Post by R_Edward »

hibbelig wrote: post #118
adrianhoward wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect that hearing aids are firmly within the second category, which means getting people to wear them "openly" should be doable." You suspect wrongly. Having seen the attitudes to my father change when he wore one. Ranging from outright verbal abuse, to assumptions of stupidity & senility.

Maybe it's related to age? I've been wearing "behind the ears" aids since I was 7 and I never sensed any perception like that. (I have no idea what is the correct term for "behind the ears", I hope it's understandable.)

17 years ago, I worked for a hearing aid manufacturer. The common terms in use there were BTE and ITE, for "behind the ear" and "in the ear." Frankly, I thought the initialisms were poorly conceived. ITE is three syllables, same as "in the ear," and less meaningful for the uninitiated. BTE only saves you one syllable, again at the cost of meaningfulness. But either which way, your terminology is both understandable and correct.

Off-topic: While I was there, they asked employees to submit ideas for a new hearing aid marketing slogan, with the incentive of a free vacation to Vegas going to the person who submitted the one they used. For some reason, I did not win the vacation with my suggestion: "Stick It In Your Ear!"

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#149

Post by bentcorner »

stolio wrote: post #80
anigbrowl wrote: post #29

What’s the solution? Multi-Band Compression (MBC), a technique that’s been used by the $6 billion hearing aid industry to solve this specific problem. An MBC uses intelligent design instead of a one-size-fits-all method. With the right data about your hearing pattern, it can mash the full sound into your range so that you get all the information you need. Audio engineer here. That is patently untrue. MBC is a super-u…

I thought the bear picture was maybe the best part of the article. Compression is tricky, multiband even more so, and the type of multiband compression they're using is even harder to wrap your head around (there are two ways (that I know of) to do what they're doing but I doubt they want to talk about which one they use.) It's a great layman's explanation, but if you have a better one I'd love to see it.

I think the point of the bear picture isn't that you can't see half the bear, but rather that (to continue the visual analogy) you can't see half of the bear's colors. How do you fix something that you can't perceive? You can change the missing colors to something that you can see, but you end up distorting the original image.

In the soundcloud samples, if I can't hear anything above a certain frequency, making them louder isn't going to help. You can drop the frequency of those things, but my guess is that it's going to sound pretty ugly. It would be interesting to listen to a sample that has everything above a certain frequency pitch-shifted downwards.

Re: Can't you just turn up the volume?

#150

Post by itgoon »

Could you add a "hearing test" to your app, which does at least rudimentary tuning? Call it "headphone calibration" and I bet you'd improve the listening experience of people who don't know they are hearing impaired.
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