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Comment by mgerdts | Hacker News Reader

With my previous hearing aid I noticed that visiting a wide variety of web sites would cause a change in the amplification of environmental noise. I always assumed it was doing something with Bluetooth, and probably not for a good reason. This is with an iPhone 13 and one Kirkland/phonak hearing aid.

I haven’t noticed this recently, but I also now have two newer Phonak hearing aids and a few iOS updates have happened. Maybe the silent Bluetooth shenanigans are less disruptive to my new aids or the programming is different. Surely shenanigans continue.

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It's the Bluetooth; when Bluetooth connects most hearing aids reduce the environmental volume slightly so you can hear the streaming content. Some app has started to play audio (perhaps silently). I notice it on some websites.

How much HAs reduce environmental sounds when streaming is configurable by the way, but only by the audiologist if you don't have your own programmer. I don't like the effect and prefer to just turn down the volume manually.

Is this tunable per hearing program? When in an even moderately noisy environment I find myself switching to AirPods if I’m streaming. I would love for the HA to give separate controls for BT audio vs ambient like AirPods do.

I noticed my MBP had a periodic stutter sometimes: every 3 seconds or so the mouse would lock up for a few milliseconds.

I tracked it down to American Express's login page (auto loads if you leave the site idle) relying on Akamai's anti bot measures polling some web Bluetooth feature, causing Chrome to trigger a BT scan: https://castle.io/research/fingerprint-harvesting-in-the-bot...

Turning off Bluetooth solves it, but that's not a great solution when using a Bluetooth mouse... and it sounds like it might be causing your issue too.

I have the same on Android with my phonaks - not websites though, but both taking a photo and paying using Samsung pay appear to open an audio stream briefly, just long enough to jump into Bluetooth mode. It takes ~6 seconds to go back afterwards.

Quite frustrating as I'm often needing to hear the cashier at that point!

I wear Phonak CI processors. It's not just you. I've also experienced the volume drop on a few sites and apps. The Amazon iOS app does this. Each time I leave the app, ambient audio returns to normal.

They’re kindly turning down the background noise so you can focus on shopping and buying more stuff.

It'd be interesting to see what a lawyer specializing in disability law would think of that.

At least in the US, I could see that being something that the ADA prohibits.

It seems far more likely that your cheap hearing aids are sensitive to certain RF frequencies and the background javascript is causing different patterns of load on the phone's CPU.

I would suspect that this only happens when you're charging and it is likely the charger or cable not being properly shielded.

The cheap hearing aid cost $750 for one and is substantially the same as the same thing sold from standalone audiologists for much more. These are not cheap over the counter devices.

Charging only happens while in the cradle, not while worn.

> cheap hearing aids

I don't think you know what you are talking about

Audio is being generated and the BT device is prioritizing it by changing its internal mixer settings. Same as audio prompts over music in a car. This could be mitigated by detecting silence in the audio stream but this is anti-consumer behavior that needlessly drains batteries with excess transceiver activity.

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