Anyone seen the comet in the West yet? Up and left of Arcturus by now I think.
Too cloudy and light polluted here so far.
Hoping the skies clear.
Same here.
Pictures like this appeared on our local Facebook page at which point the person posting them was told they were fake
1 Like
Completely dismantled my Fraim, disconnected everything, cleaned, dusted, fitted narrow rear legs to all six shelves, reassembled, reconnected and powered up and, thankfully, everything worked first time…… unlike my previous clean where by misconnecting the system automation cable, the NC 250 threw a not inconsiderable hissy fit!
Now relaxing with that nice Mr. Shostakovich 
, feeling somewhat shattered and not a little self satisfied 
.
ATB, J
This is fantastic news to read and I’m very interested. Do please keep us in the loop on how it works out.
Also you will have lots of questions about heating aids in due course and sadly I know lots about them from my own experience, including how to tweak the settings oneself. Indeed there is a forum that you might be interested in, in due course.
Thanks David. Appreciated.
A mould has been taken of my ear and I’m expecting to have another hearing test before the aids are programmed.
This should get the levels right, I can only hope that the distortion, caused by the tumour sitting on the hearing nerve, reduces or goes away. The distortion is what causes me difficulty with understanding what people have said, some peoples voices are harder than others.
The distortion is like very bad stylus mis-tracking.
You may find initially that the distortion is made apparently worse by being amplified by a hearing aid. But it’s worth persevering because your brain will need to learn how to interpret what it is once again hearing. This takes a long while, think in terms of months or more rather than weeks. Or to put it another way, don’t get too despondent if it seems to take ages, because it can indeed take ages.
Also the initial adjustment of hearing aids is usually not right to someone who is conscious of how things should sound. So don’t be afraid to go back and ask for adjustments several times.
2 Likes
Boiler serviced a few days ago with pump changed. All was OK. Then this morning lukewarm hot water and cold radiators downstairs. Troubleshooting the boiler up in the attic, all looked OK. Then bled radiators (seemed OK) and rebalanced all radiators. Voila - the last seemed to do the trick.
What a pain - Friday morning listening time scuppered !
The distortion has existed since about 2019 as the tumour began it’s interference but it got slowly worse.
My Starkey aids were good when I got them but after just under two years they simply no longer helped and I ended up with some NHS ones that I found much more refined but I had to return them when my hearing plummeted from poor to zero in a week - on Monday I could hear the switch-on jingle and by Friday I had no way of telling if they were on or not!
I went through several steroid treatments where they inject a steroid through the eardrum into the middle ear to no effect. An MRI scan showed the tumour was swollen, a course of tablets was prescribed to reduce the swelling, this worked but didn’t help my hearing.
The long to medium term prognosis is that my hearing will go and not come back so I’ve been told that I will stay under the care of Manchester Royal and if the hearing aids don’t work out or cannot cope with the hearing loss then it’s back to the cochlear implant. 
The choice has been put into my hands 
If you go for a cochlear implant, then that will probably take any residual natural hearing in that ear away, so it is a one way street, so to speak. And of course the cochlear implant relies on the auditory nerve still being functional.
The implant is left off for a period of a month or so before it is activated and then you discover what it sounds like. People talk about a period of up to a year while you train it, for example by listening to audio recordings of books etc. But if you stick with it, then it can be highly successful and people report good word recognition scores. But music doesn’t really work at all. But then music may not work at all for you at the point you go for a cochlear implant.
Anyway I’m not that knowledgable about cochlear implants because I’m not a candidate at all currently. If you want to chat with people who have done it or not done it even though it’s been offered, then the Hearing Tracker forum is the place to go. It’s a bit US centric, but there are quite a few UK members. It uses the same Discourse platform as the Naim forum, so you would immediately know how to use it. There are a few differences in the choices that Hearing Tracker and Naim have made, for example two members can private message each other in Hearing Tracker but can’t in Naim. And Hearing Tracker has a simplified membership structure. There are a lot more Rooms. But it’s much the same for all that.
1 Like
Yes, the implant is one way only. It’s not reversible. It’s well worth seeing how I get on with the aids. 
There’s no music now or for the last 18 months. I can’t even hear the telly, even now I have to rely on subtitles. I can make it loud enough to hear but not to understand the speech.
I have to assume that I’ll never be able to listen to music again.
2 Likes
That is very hard.
We feel for you.
4 Likes
Give the aids a go before writing off future music completely! And modern hearing aids have tone controls!
Of course it won’t be hifi like most people in the forum understand it, but music is the thing, not hifi. And even hearing that doesn’t give you good understanding of speech is still hearing that can give you pleasure (cf your light switch story).
It was getting a new pair of hearing aids that suited me much better that kick-started my interest in Naim in about 2015 after many years of having given up on listening to music much at all. Mind you it turned out to be quite an expensive discovery!
2 Likes
Last night we were out photographing the Aurora.
3 Likes
400 mile+ round trip today setting off quite early through some glorious countryside with some ground frost and mist/mild fog, coupled with colourful sunrise and sunsets.
It’s made me realise how little I get out of the house/locality, how much I actually don’t enjoy living where I do these days (but am stuck for various reasons), and probably how much my views on probably everything have been rather negative and jaundiced for far too long primarily I think due to many years of trying to deal with parental ill-health. I had plenty of relevant knowledge of their issues but it didn’t really change a thing. Feeling powerless to helpcan be utterly demoralising.
1 Like
It was fine for University and jobs for both myself and Mrs AC years ago. House was quite central for both our opposing direction workplaces, it worked. After the kids got settled in school movement would have been quite difficult so maybe a case of grin and bear it, but travel today reiterated again I’d prefer to live in the country rather than a city.
I can relate to that it’s much more relaxed in the country. Guess the ultimate would be to have a place in the country to hide from all the goings on and a pad in the city. We have a few friends that are fortunate enough to have both.
2 Likes
Update………my wife only had the flu jab, which she paid for. She has spent all yesterday in bed with flu like symptoms from the jab, still tired and aching joints, but out of bed. Unlucky i guess, but not the only one from what we hear.
Our pharmacist also mentioned that the covid test kits for the latest form of the virus seem to be reading negative when people have full symptoms, when they subside……it reads positive?
2 Likes
Sorry to hear that, hope she feels better soon.