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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

I have age-related hearing loss: bass frequencies are ok, but high frequencies drop off. When I first got hearing aids, I thought that what they did was boost the frequencies as necessary as (I think) described by this author. But hearing is not a linear system. The hearing aids do boost the frequencies where I am deficient, but by an amount much smaller than the difference between my audiogram and normal. I think that the objective of hearing aids (for mild hearing loss like mine) is to boost frequencies just enough for them to be audible to my brain, at which stage the non-linear system in my brain processes the signals to sound normal.

I have not confirmed this speculation with an audiologist, so I would love comments on this from someone who works on hearing-aid software.

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> boost the frequencies as necessary

The trick is figuring out what's necessary. The first half of the post made me nervous, because it simply applied a gain of threshold - basedB. As he discovered, that's too loud.

What you want is a compressor. The second half of the post boosts the signal just above the threshold, but it's a little more complex than that. I haven't really studied this, but for starters you want to take into account things like the Fletcher-Munson curves.

I am intrigued by these types of projects. As my hearing gets worse, I'd like to be able to listen to music and watch movies with nice headphones, but with the assistance that comes from hearing aids.

You have the classic "ski slope" hearing loss, which is common with age. Your hearing aids should be boosting the high freequencies to fit your loss profile and not somewhat less than you need to make you work for it. I would go back to your provider and ask for an increase in the high freqs. Alternatively, lots of hearing aids these days come with a smartphone app which lets you set base/mid/treble so you could alter them yourself but you don't get the flexability the provider would.

Sorry, I did not mean to mislead - my high frequency boost works well for me. It just that the total DB increment is not the difference between my audiogram and normal.

I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

You should: I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.

> I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.

I started wearing hearing aides in my mid 50s and had no issues, and the positive effect on my hearing was immediately obvious (night and day, in fact). However, I think if you were much older and losing manual dexterity and visual acuity there might be problems - e.g. they can be quite fiddly to put in and clean on a daily basis. Cleaning the tube that goes in your ear is like threading a large needle with a fat wire. Steady fingers and corrected eyesight helps.

It's not really the age as such, but how long you've left an untreated hearing loss for that can be an issue.

> Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

Yes, yes, definitely do. I put my exam off for years until the effect of hearing loss began to affect my work. I literally couldn't hear questions asked by quietly spoken people or in conference rooms with noisy aircon. Also, because my mother-in-law refused to wear them (she was severely deaf) and I knew how much this annoyed my wife.

I wish I had gone several years earlier! It is just great to be able to follow normal conversations, listen to birdsong, and even hear the rattles in the car. I wear mine religiously, even when on my own on the house. Just to hear the little sounds that the world makes as you interact with it.

Very occasionally I notice people looking at my ears when they have seen the aids for the first time, but this is frankly nothing compared with the embarrassment that can be caused if you ignore someone because you haven't heard them, or attempt to guess what they have said and get it wrong.

Check for ear wax, once I got it cleaned out and was like the treble knob of the world went from -2 to +2.

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