Everybody gets hearing loss in the higher frequencies when gettong older.
With an average loss of 35 dB in the speaking frequencies I started end 2022 with hearing help. Very soon it was claear that I neeeded the top segment for good hearing quality in all circumstances.
In the end was Oticon More very good for me, but Resound More 961 sounded better with music , also because of the app.: you can choose for different circumstances.
I think your favorite help is subjective like speakers, it’s very personal.
I am on my second pair of Resound. This has settings for all around, restaurant, outdoors and music. It allows one to add a favorite which I have set to optimize for our audio system., primary to cut treble brightness. You can also set it up for different favorite locations, such as a restaurant in your neighborhood. There are several settings for restaurant noise.
I also use mine for streaming phone calls and podcasts. I use wired Shure earbuds for music and for sweaty activities, because electronics and moisture don’t mix.
My company health plan pays for about 70% of the $5000 cost. I have a couple of friends who are retired Navy veterans who can get an even better deal from the VA.
These have been a great benefit to me and my wife, too. As an added bonus, you can hear the young women in your life much better, especially the young nieces. I knew I had a problem when I had a female client and could not understand her in her office.
I went to a local hearing doctor who was the office expert and he recommended the Resound over the Phonak. As with anything else, like a Naim system or a Porsche, get the best you can afford, and do it while you are young enough to make the most of it. It is better with the insurance coverage.
I went for the replaceable battery model. I just did not want to be tethered to a rechargeable battery when they are so cheap and easy to swap out, now and in the future.
What happened to the first, and how long did it last?
They have a warranty for four years I believe. That means four years of free service and tune ups, which is of great value. I bought a new pair when the warranty was up and rebuilt the old pair for $600. They are not interchangeable, but the second pair will be handy when needed.
Thanks for info, Skip. If you don’t mind my asking further, What was wrong with the first pair that they needed rebuilding? And the need for a second pair suggests that there are periods of downtime when not working - is that the case? Can you give any indication of how often and for how long at a time?
These hearing aids go behind your ears and require a new pair of batteries weekly. I am active and live in a humid region. My first pair worked well but I did not baby them. I wore them riding my bike, walking, etc. That might have been a mistake. They need to dry out when wet. I have moved to corded earbuds when walking and have been off the bike since 2020. That may be the difference.
Thanks again for the info. I didn’t realise batteries were a weekly thing! What sort of cost are they? (I’m just trying to understand commitments.)
You have an option for rechargeable or just change the batteries. I expect that the rechargeable is much more fragile. I did not want to be tethered to a recharger when I can carry a ring of batteries in my wallet. In my wallet, they fit right where the condom would go. The choice is yours.
I’ve never had (or heard of) a wallet with a condom pocket!
The batteries are a trivial cost. It depends where you buy them, but say between 50p and £1 each.
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My Oticon ones have rechargeable ones. I just drop them in the charger by my bedside at night.
Usually drop to about 40% during the day more if I go to a place with loud music,
But if at a live music concert I can turn them down which is an advantage!!!
Thank you for these reflections. I’m in my 70’s and for the last two years have used hearing aids, although not all the time. I opted for Widex mainly because a number of musicians use them. However, although Widex have many adjustments possible I still do not feel they totally represent the natural sound I like of live, mainly classical, music. I have tried using them in concerts but pretty soon abandoned them as, although I recognise high frequencies benefit with wearing them, I feel there is a subtle distortion of the natural sound.
I also experience this when listening to my Naim Uniti Nova and Spendor A9 speakers. Although my audiologist is very responsive, I don’t think he has much experience specifically related to music so this may be something I will need to research in the future.
I have had three different Widex aids but always found them hopeless for music. These days I am using GN Resound, which I strongly prefer. If you don’t think your Widex sound good, it’s probably because they aren’t!
Thanks for that information. It sounds like it’s certainly researching this topic more with regards to music and different makes of hearing aids.
The most important things of all is to have a music program set as one of those you can chose. And it’s well known that you should have as much processing as possible turned off, the feedback program should be set to music, the max SPL needs to be higher than for speech (so it doesn’t clip loud music) and at the end of the day if the sound is too bright or not bright enough, it’s perfectly fine to adjust the settings so it sounds right to you for music (and to forget about the audiologist’s normal quest of greatest ability to understand speech in noisy situations).
There is a load more I could tell you, for example the difference between settings for music streamed to your hearing aids and music that you listen to over loudspeakers or live. Any competent audiologist should easily understand all of this and find all the clues from googling, if they don’t already know it.
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Great advice here. I have tinnitus in one ear and the same ear has a mild loss of hearing of HFs. It is not bad enough (yet) to really need a hearing aid but when I listen to music on the move I notice the HF loss and the music is slightly shifted away from centre to the right (non hearing loss) ear. Does none have any experience or knowledge on in-ear bud headphones that have any programming capability that might improve things? I have read that the Apple pro ear buds do offer some “sound shaping” controlled by the Heath app that might be of use, is that correct?
I know the real answer is to probably get a decent hearing aid though!
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It depends how serious your hearing loss is. If it’s fairly trivial, then you could possibly provide enough correction in the way you describe. But generally speaking, it’s not regarded by the hearing care professionals as “necessary” to have hearing aids until your loss exceeds about 30dB. So the quietest sounds (maybe just at higher frequencies) need 30dB correction to be back to “normal”.
To correct 30dB needs 1000 times the power, so you can imagine that this is a lot of amplification. In practice hearing aids rarely could fully compensate a loss and you might in practice get half of what you have lost back. Most people who have hearing aids have a greater loss than that, as people are quite resistant to embarking on hearing aids, unlike glasses for sight loss, which are “normal”.
Another consideration is that although it depends exactly what caused your hearing loss, normally the loudest noise level that you can comfortably listen to is unchanged, or to put it another way, your dynamic range is reduced by 30dB. So the hearing correction needs clever compression, especially for music where you don’t want to be aware of the compression.
So some correction akin to the size of changes that conventional tone controls give could be viable in ear buds or headphones. But if really you need hearing aids, then the answer is hearing aids unfortunately.
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