Ooooh, trippy! But I think my house is haunted

MAAAAN, you ought to hear our place. it is panelized construction, so the walls come on a truck, with the wiring and windows pre-installed, they tip them up and nail in place. Then a crane drops the plywood box-beam into place and they set the roof panels onto the walls and center beam. Those big panels creep around with temperature changes and can make HUGE noises. Sounds like a giant is ripping the roof off the place. Down in the basement, it sounds like an elephant is dancing upstairs. So many times, while working in the basement, I went upstairs to see who was there, and there's nobody home.

(No hearing aids involved.)

Jon

If there is any other noise, (wind/radio) while driving my truck, I don't hear the turn signal clicker anymore. So I often notice I have been driving with one of my turn signals on. Mikek

My old Directv STB had a bug, it would turn on randomly. It turned on at 2 - 4AM a few times. And the volume was pretty loud too. Lots of hesitant tip-toeing ;) until it was sorted out.

Cheers

Sounds fun. Take your wife to the orchestra, or Jazz or something... a bigger world.

George H.

Do you have any control over the equalization? Would be fun to mess with, I think.

A technician I used to work with had pretty substantial hearing loss, particularly at higher frequencies. Once in the lab a piece of test equipment started a high-pitched alarm tone for some reason, and since it wasn't anything I was working on I was ignoring it, but was trying to converse with my partially-deaf technician. He seemed a little pained for a bit and then asked me, "Is there a loud tone or something going on right now?" I told him there was, and even though he couldn't hear it what he had noticed was that the AGC in his hearing aid had suddenly turned everything way down. He'd experienced that enough to know the probable cause.

That was probably twenty-five years ago. My understanding is that the DSP in hearing aids is pretty sophisticated these days, but I don't know how much control they give the user.

Don't get Oticon... too much highs that they can't tone done... like having a differentiator in the audio path :-(

What brand are the loaners? I'm considering trying other brands. ...Jim Thompson

Welcome to a club you didn't want to join.

If you have a look at manufacturer's catalogues, there are a vast number of different hearing aids, all of which are customised to your hearing loss and ear canal.

How to choose the "best" one for you is something I simply don't understand. The key issue is that the ear/bain combination is one of the most non-linear systems I know of.

A "nasty" of course is the replacement cost, because one way or another they /will/ breakdown or be lost (I know of people whose dogs ate their hearing aid!).

Whatever they do, it won't be enough! The ear/brain combination is astoundingly non-linear.

In practice it is sufficient to have half a dozen variations (speech, music, wind, sports, etc) - and then simply to cycle through them until the least problematic variant is found for that locale.

May well be true for your ears, and completely inappropriate for Tim's ears.

Generalisations are impossible in this topic.

Suck-it-and-see is the order of the day with hearing aids.

I can still hear quite well, but have learned not to listen or pay attention to anyone I find disagreeable.

I once lived in an old ranch house in east San Jose, CA. It was built during the 1920's by someone who didn't really understand roofing. One is suppose to use ring shank roofing nails: The idea is the nails do not slide in and out of the wood as the wood expands and contracts with the temperature. Every morning and evening, as the sun came up or went down, we would be entertained by the sound of the smooth common nails sliding in and out of the wood. The roof would squeak, snap, creak, pop, bang, etc until the temperature stabilized. We got used to it, although vistors would complain that the house was haunted.

I'm impressed with how well Rush Limbaugh does with his cochlear implants. I wonder how long it took him to learn to understand phone call audio. (possibly easier than regular speech with room noise) Mikek

I've talked to some people in the field and I've never gotten a good idea of just what is required to fit a hearing aid to the person. I get that the hearing loss is unique to each person. That is essentially controlled by an equalizer to tailor the frequency response to the user's hearing loss.

But what aspect of the ear canal needs to be custom tailored to? Are you talking about a mechanical fit issue? I don't follow that. My friend's hearing aids have replaceable ear pieces just like many bluetooth headphones. They are not tailored at all. Is it a matter of the ear canal affecting how the unit works with that person?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Just you wait until hearing aids come with unavoidable advertisements played on them at intervals.

Sylvia.

Good thing you weren't around when they were designing Google Glass. Probably everybody would be wearing them.

Mark L. Fergerson

I've never heard Limbaugh, but his reputation over here makes me wonder whether he needs to hear what his callers are saying :)

I'm seriously surprised that a cochlear implant can be good enough for an adult to regain hearing.

It appears that he has had one since 2001, and uses "a teleprompter and staff assistance to answer calls"

Indeed, but the equaliser is level dependent and horribly non-linear.

If the ear/brain wasn't so non-linear, audio compression wouldn't be anywhere near so effective!

Think in terms of resonant cavities, high gain amplifiers with the input near the output. It used to be that they had to keep the microphone on your chest to avoid howlback!

The audio assessment is obviously of the ear and canal alone.

During final fitting they insert a very fine tube into the ear canal alongside the aid, determine the transfer function in the canal, and apply the inverse function.

In this the upload information requirement is no more than a few bits per hour.

S.

I don't understand what you are saying. Do you mean the requirement for the equalizer is level dependent or that existing hearing aid equalizers are level dependent?

??? How does this impact a hearing aid?

Really? Different ear canals are acoustically that much different?

The requirement, since the system it is counteracting is highly non-linear.

It doesn't; it is an everyday illustration of the extent of the non-linearity.

Yes, they are sufficiently different: peering into half a dozen should convince you of that!

Another illustration is that many people's ear canal is too small for them to be able to use "in canal" aids.