Inexpensive hearing aid for vets

o making music sound good again. You will never get back your lost high fre quencies and may accelerate your progression to deafness by trying. "

The problem with me is it seems like my high frequencies are down expanded. My stereo has respectable sound, nice and old from the 1970s when they rea lly sounded good. However I am using alot of treble boost to get to hear it right, something like 18dB I would say from about 5K and up, not shelving. At 10K I am sure it is 18K but at 5K not so much.

Still I hear almost no highs until I get the volume high enough. Then, I fi nd it amazing how much detail and timbre I can hear, when with it turned do wn everything is muffled.

So what I would need is for the highs to be up compressed.

What is strange is that sometimes after listening loud it seems my hearing actually improves temporarily. Is it possible that maybe there is more bloo d flow to my ears or something like that ?

Another thing is that for decades I abused my ears, along with the rest of my body of course. I mean REALLY. I went to concerts where the speaker said "STAND TWENTY FEET BACK OR HEARING DAMAGE WILL OCCUR" and I was right next to it. I have been in band practice in a small soundproofed attic with rea l drums and amps that kept up with them. The band owner was a master at kee ping the feedback down, I have no idea how he did it. It think the band is no more, lead singer died, the one guitarist got busted with like 52 guns i n his car. Don't ask how I find these people. I also had headphones that wo uld do 136dB, and an older pair that would do even more. I always jumped ou t the resistors in the amp to the headphone jack. I had Sony MDR-CD5s that did the 136dB, the Sansui SS-10s did even more, you could use them as speak ers. I shit you not, just sit them down on the table and you can really hea r them.

I always liked good loud sound and could never stand distortion. I think di stortion is very bad for the ears, just like it is for tweeters. Much of th e time I had a scope on the speakers to watch for distortion, you can't alw ays hear it no matter how good your hearing is. And I'm a bass freak, I am pretty sure that bass is not as hard on the ears as higher frequencies.

I have some hypotheses about hearing loss, I can only partly support them r ight now but here goes;

First of all, the same mineral deficiencies that are responsible for hair l oss are supposedly also involved with hearing loss. The cochlea in the ear detects sound with tiny hairs in a fluid goop type of stuff. Over the years these hairs break off and impair hearing. There is absolutely nothing they can do about this obviously.

However, it is my assertion that they grow back on their own. For example, everyone loses some hair but it grows back. Hair loss comes when you lose m ore than you grow back. I think the same thing is happening within the coch lea. As you age and your body loses more minerals and its ability to metabo lise minerals in your food (if sufficient) is impaired and causes a bunch o f problems.

This hypothesis could explain why one person can run a punch press for fift y years and come out with perfect hearing, but another, like my Mother who has worked in an office all her life, never been to a rick concert, never l iked loud music and only heard gunshots about six times in her life (and th ree of them were me) is quite hard of hearing. And her Mother, she worked a s a housekeeper type and the only possible job she could have been exposed to loudness was at Union Carbide. Back then they mainly made batteries, how loud can that be ?

My hearing loss didn't come until ten years AFTER all the major exposure. I t directly followed a bad bad exposure to mold that almost killed me. For m any years I didn't even have a hundred watts per channel. And my speakers w ere never efficient, always air suspension and dome tweeters, not horns. We ll I have had horns but got rid of them. For a while I had some Peavey T121

0 columns but that was 20 years at least before any hearing loss occurred. And, the hearing loss occurred right at the time my cataracts did. It is li ke the mold put 20 years on me.

I will state again, my assertions here are only partly supported by actual known science, some of it is personal observation. But I got no reason to l ie. And I put no spin on science, though I might have to admit to a bit of that in politics. When I detect a liberal agenda I go into a different mode , but this is not politics.

So take a couple of grains of salt and think about it. I researched nutriti on for decades and know more about it than most doctors or dieticians. Try me. Try them. You'll see.

I think I'm right.

(yeah I know, who doesn't ?)

Not quite, usually. Yes they do pay in a way for the exposure at a desirable location but it is usually in the form of a rakeoff on the wholesale price.

And yes, it is literally sold by the inch. And the vendor sends reps to look see that they are getting the exposure they want and the shelves are adequately stocked. If not they bitch.

Maybe some do it differently but around here that seems to be how it is. Of course this is no longer a major market. (Cleveland, OH)

was very deaf, and whose mother is deaf.. Hence (a) I have personal experience (b) my family has personal experience (c) I do have a clue about the subject. "

Good friend of mine (until a tree jumped out in front of his car) had deaf Parents. His Father was always deaf and his Mother went deaf because of sul fa drugs for I think meningitis. He had a bunch of ear problems and had to have one ear "rebuilt" by one of the best guys in the state. He took some c artilage or some shit from the leg and fashioned a new system the drum, ham mer, stirrup whatever, I don't know the exact details. This was back when p eople paid their own medical bills.

They weren't broke. Dad made dentures and partials, later got the kid a job . Then later the kid went to Florida and started a business after getting t he CDT license. I went down there and he gave me the tour of his operation, kinda cool. They get the impression from the dentist, then he has to choos e the teeth and arrange them. Then make the things. That's what the licensi ng is for, that part is not trivial.

I have had ear infections at times. He came up to Cleveland and of course w e went out. At the bar we are sitting there and he is having a problem with one ear and I am having a problem with the other. We are sitting there tal king and switched seats to put the good ear towards the other. What a trip eh ?

He did tell me once, like the Aerosmith song, when he cried in the night no one came. A very headstrong individual to say the least. He made like $20K in about 1983 at a regular job no overtime, when he lost the battle with th e tree he was making ten grand a month.

But I digress. Thing is, his Mother was only deaf because of the sulfa drug s so that would not bother him. His ear problems came from his Father.

Many things are hereditary. Like my ex-boss of years ago, died of lung canc er having never smoked, then we got these 80 year old guys in the bar smoki ng Lucky Strikes and drinking rot gut whiskey who are in fine shape.

Some people are apparently made of more solid shit than others.

You know, there is another thing about this, at least for me.

I don't really want to stick things in my ear, except a Qtip sometimes. I wouldn't mind headphones. Just like I put on glasses to read, I could put on headphones to listen.

And now we got people walking around with these bluetooth thingies. Drive you nuts. They talk but you don't know they're on the phone and you think they're nucking futs or something.

The VA turned down my application for a $300 death/burial assistance payment for my late father, a WW2 Army staff sergeant and combat veteran. said he didn't meet the qualifications. /shrug

It seems like people are doing that less than when the things came out about 10 years ago. I see some middle-aged guys still doing it, look like finance guys in suits, walking around the Starbucks lobby throwing out numbers "Yeah we gotta close that mil deal, Larry!" mostly to seem important I think.

I think most reasonable people were told by some other reasonable person that they look more schizophrenic than cool.

I knew this one guy at the local public house who used to whip out his phone and pretend to be a big shot whenever cute girls were around by having a fake conversation even - "Ya absolutely buddy the band's flying in tonight, we gotta be at the studio at 7! Yeah they got set up in the penthouse suite down at Copley the afterparty's at 11 oh yeah there'll be _good stuff_ there wink wink..."

he was kind of a lowlife.

in the way that most nightclub promoters, "band dudes", and low-level music biz groupies and hangers-on are.

Thanks for the input Tom. Not sure what to call it, but hoping to give them away. I certainly believe that any veteran who lost his ears serving his country shouldn't have to pay a single penny.

in this minor battle, but there is a war still to be fought. I was in a gu n magazine loading 80 pound projectiles and 35 pound gunpowder charges. The re are many others who suffer hearing loss from flight line or engine room besides those of us sentenced to the battle field.

expensive hearing aid. The target is zero cost, but I would be willing to p roduce at $40/ea. I am looking at various technologies.

have some type of audio equalizer and an audio input to interface with othe r products and an output for ear buds or external speaker. Besides a heari ng aid it could take the output from a transistor radio and do equalization and then output to ear buds or external speaker. The point is that it cou ld make music sound good as well. It would be compatable with cell phone c harger and perhaps USB or bluetooth as well

ype of implementation. I am old time analog guy, but that isn't to say I w ould be the person doing design. A few pots would probably be ok. A dsp m ight be able to take hearing test data and program with a pc.

ot there are plenty of good people who would provide some pro bono work for this cause.

other ideas as far as direction to make this a real product.

Maybe a device to enhance listening to birds.