Don’t just buy hearing aids , get a proper hearing test at Specsavers, boots or similar.
The problem with getting an amp with tone controls or a graphic equaliser ( god forbid) and no electric ears. Is that if listening with others it will possibly be 1 , too loud, 2 , The frequencies lifted or cut will make it sound terrible.
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Not possible to do under the current climate unless your a key worker. I need new glasses but cant get tested at the moment at all.
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Well it’s taken 70 years to get to this state, I can wait a few more weeks. The crucial question was do I buy a Uniti Nova… or not ? (whilst some good prices are out there)
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What good prices, I’d love to move to Nova from my Atom but it’s always been too high price for me.
My hearing is deteriorating, too, can’t hear much above 10kHz, but my problem is mainly due to sinus congestion, which comes and goes so sometimes I can hear better than others, so this thread is a great help.
I think that, having a great quality system already, I would keep it, and investigate electric ears before spending on a “downgrade”. Most of my listening is via phones, so more of what’s produced is audible.
I agree that while you may not be able to hear discrete frequencies above 9kHz, I have a test record by JBL, where they cut frequencies above 20kHz, usually inaudible anyway, but the effect is very noticeable.
But, so much information on potential HAs, for the future, and hope you resolve your issues suitably. I’m approaching 76, and spent 50 years in power stations, so my hearing has been damaged slightly, but for many years I wore full cover protection, so not too bad now.
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I find that using hearing aids with headphones causes the aids to whistle through feedback. Mine are closed back as I found that open backed were uncomfortable pressing on my ears .whereas closed ones fit over my ears so not pressing on the aids.
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I, too, am a hearing aids wearer (Phonak). In a different thread contributors were dismissive of wearing them. They were wrong. I, like many of my age, have hearing loss at higher frequencies. Hearing aids have made a big difference without spoiling the music. Go fo it!
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I’m betting on a “Hearing Cure”
Frequency Therapeutics near Boston MA is now in the middle of the third trial of a drug called FX-322 which the FDA recently designated for Fast Track approval. The drug, which is injected into the middle ear, is designed to activate progenitor cells in the cochlea to regenerate damaged auditory cells and improve hearing function. In the Phase 1/2 study, “FX-322 demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in key measures of hearing loss, including clarity of sound and word understanding”. The firm is now well capitalized with Astellas Pharma acquiring the worldwide rights to market the drug for $80mm and Frequency Therapeutics completing a $100mm Initial Public Offering earlier this year. The restorative modifying treatment also has potential to help people with Multiple Sclerosis.
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Hi Davo, welcome to the forum.
What you say is fantastic news !!
But there are two problems from where I stand…
Firstly, I stand in Liverpool, UK - a long way from Boston (I know this 'cos I’ve worked there). Even if I was able to get to Boston and sample FX-322, the UK government wouldn’t allow its use over here until it had been tested & approved in the UK (you see, we Brits don’t trust Americans any further than we can throw you… ALTHOUGH if you guys come up with a Covid-19 vaccine before us, we might relax that rule).
The second problem is this - I’ll be dead & burried by the time FX-322 becomes available.
What IS still fantastic, though Davo, is that this new drug has the potential to help my kids who are fast approaching my age. 
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I would tread carefully… there is more to the frequency range to the quality of our audio … there is timing bandwidth… this is the timing between sounds and this gets better in terms of resolution with better audio equipment, I suspect significantly so.
I seem to remember reading in various AES research papers that timing resolution didn’t reduce any where near the same extent as frequency range with human hearing and age.
So I would keep your ND555 and ND552… and just get used to your evolving way of hearing.
With digital audio there is a closer correlation between frequency and timing, but that is just a manifestation of how we digitally encode audio… however we shouldn’t confuse the two.
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It does depend why you have a hearing loss too. The drug you mention wouldn’t help me much because my problem lies elsewhere. That will be true for some other people with hearing loss too.
The advantage of hearing aids is that you can take them out if you want and also modern hearing aids are highly adjustable via a smart phone app. And, COVID 19 aside, they are available now. And the private providers will let you trial them for a couple of weeks for free, so it’s worth exploring before taking the decision to downsize a system.
Best
David
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Here’s my problem answering your question, @CrystalGipsy… if there are a thousand forum members, there will be 1,000 different ideas about what’s a ‘good price’ for something.
For a Nova, today, my idea of a good price was an earlier auction at around £2,500. 
For interest, what would be your idea ?
RJ
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thats a good price, the retail price at £4100 is not. Its funny never had an electronic device thats actually gone up in value, as I got my Atom new for £1750 and new now they are just over £2000 new but they do get the HdmI thrown in these days, mines still without.
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Well, a BIG THANK YOU for all the advice I’ve received.
I started out this morning expecting to get some comparative ideas about how good, or not, the Uniti Nova is.
What I was not prepared for was to discover just how many folk use ‘electric ears’ listening to their Naim setup.
And what surprised me even more, not one person agreed that downgrading was the way to go, in fact everyone advised ‘go ahead and get hearing aids’.
Could be the beginning of a new lease of life, back in the real world of music and sounds.
Again, thanks for all your advice. All I need now is freedom from Covid-19 and the audiologist to re-open their shop.
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You need 2 of those for stereo!!!
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I started to go down this road - that’s me with a highly modified NAC 32.5 & NAP 250… and with a 50dB hearing level with treble drop off of another 10-20 dB
I have a pair of NHS hearing aids, I spent much of the 2nd half of last year comparing 3 or 4 top of the range aids (Oticon opn, Phonak Marvel 90’s, Widex etc) but for the clarity of speech at least, I could nor get my audiologist to set them up any better (in fact they were worse!) than how my NHS aids were set up. So im sticking with them - but while they are good for understanding voices well, the NHS audios have difficulty optimising them for music. They say I’m complaining about nothing. …
In the meantime I have ordered a pair of Nuraphone earphones as part of their set up is that they tailor the sound to your hearing loss. Has onlyone on heare any comments of how to get the best out of them?
@SamClaus, you mentioned that another forum member told you how to improve your Phonaks. Could you explain how? Of all the aids I trialled I preferred the Phonaks but they just were not good enough for speech especially in meetings etc for me to plunge in and fork out a great deal of money…
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I must admit I didn’t try other hearing aids; right from the start I told the audiologist that I listened to a lot of music and went to concerts, and he suggested Phonaks Audeo M (this was two years ago). They were ok for speech, but I just couldn’t listen to music with them: a solo violin would sound unbearably shrill, and I think this was because, although hearing aids are supposed to be able to detect automatically when you’re listening to music and not ordinary speech, they’re sometimes not very good at discriminating between the two… There are silences in music, and I suppose the Phonaks would then revert to the default position. The audiologist finally decided to create a special permanent setting for music (the correction is far more gentle), and I can switch manually between the two main settings.
I don’t know if I should mention the name of the forum member who gave me that advice, I haven’t seen him on the forum in a long while.
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Hi, I’ve now had my NHS Oticon hearing aids for well over a year now. I’m assuming they also do cheaper ones as this make has been mentioned a being expensive to buy. The NHS staff were great with me and tuned them a couple of times to match my sound preferences - basically reducing the amount the high frequencies were boosted.
Two bits of learning from this, the first - it’s our brains that hear, not our ears- the pass on the electrical signals, but our brains interpret them. Makes sense really - we like the sound of Naim, others prefer the sound of other amps. One of my friends really can’t tell the difference in sound between a B&O smart speaker and either one of the Musos! It’s not about cost and he really likes music. I think his B&O speaker sounds a bit plodding.
The second bit of learning it that, despite my hearing loss, I could still hear loads of differences in the sound of my system when I tried new interconnects - I now have Morgana between my amps ( 282, HiCap,250 DR) and CD player. So I wholeheartedly support those who have advised that reducing the quality of ones sound system is not the a good idea just because you have some hearing loss.
Best wishes Amer …
I SAID BEST WISHES AMER
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This was probably me.
I only tried two different types and music was the deal breaker for me. With the help of David Hendon I asked the audiologist to have a separate music setting but to stop any extra processing which brought life Back to my music again without any shrillness.
Again with David‘s advice I got the remote control which gave a volume setting and in meetings I simply increased the volume if I was having difficulty hearing.
The only thing David and I disagreed on was the choice of optimal hearing aids for music but I suppose that makes sense that different people have different types of hearing loss and will prefer different sound signatures.
To the OP, absolutely – keep your wonderful hi-fi system and investigate hearing aids.
Another option is to use parametric equalisation in Roon to boost the frequencies that you are having difficulty with.
I use this setting occasionally when my hearing aids are upstairs and I’m too lazy to go up and get them or particularly listening to music through headphones, this really doesn’t work for me with HAs and the equalisation in roon is a godsend.
.sjb
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One thing that all of us with some hearing loss should realize is that those degraded ears are the same ones that go to concerts and live performances. If you like what you hear live, and each will hear it differently, then our home systems should have a similar sound. In fact if our systems were perfect, we would hear the same as a live performance.
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