hearing aids ?????

timboZ

New member
How well do hearing aids enhance your hearing.....in relationship to eyeglasses and bringing your vision back to 20/20.

Can a hearing aid give you a golden ear.:rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
Haha. No way.
Hearing aids are basically a microphone / amp / speaker.
As I'm sure you can imagine, that will color the sound a lot. But they will make your hearing more sensitive within the hearing aids' frequency band..
 
My son wears hearing aids, good ones. When I place them in my ears, the world sounds like a cheap a.m. radio
 
I've heard that hearing aids have to be custom fitted to the individual ear, and if you listen through someone else's hearing aid it won't sound the same to you as it does to them.
 
My mother has been through a few different types of hearing aids. Many of the better ones today actually have litlle multi-band compressors built into them, that the audiologist fine-tunes to the needs of that particular user. (It is for hearing aid technology that MBCs were first developed, BTW. I kinda like the irony that one of today's favorite home studio widgets owes it's existence to the hearing-impaired :D)

But no, even the fanciest hearing aids won't even come close to giving golden ears. Even with the MBC technology, they are just not designed to work optimally across the spectrum, but rather to help the listener get the necessities like speech. Besides, "golden ears" depend as much upon the listener's actual listening ability as they do their ear's design capability. That's in the brain, not the ear.

G.
 
The process is different. Lenses can correct some types of poor vision and restore perfect sight, but if you have cataracts, for example, then improvement cannot restore it to 'normal'. Hearing aids are in essence, an amplifier and eq device. If your hearing is deficient by a small amount at certain frequencies so your hearing frequency response is perhaps a wavy line, then fitting an aid can produce a flatter line - BUT - with lowish fidelity. A decent pair of in ear monitors and a graphic produce better 'quality'. However, your brain can compensate for the uneven frequency response quite well, and maintain full fidelity. If your hearing is very poor at speech frequencies, then these can be raised by the hearing aid, even if the actual quality is not that high - so you can maintain conversations. Listening to music is pretty nasty sounding. I've often wondered how somebody with a hearing impairment would get on with decent in-ears and a decent multi band graphic or parametric? If you look at the frequencies selected for the hearing tests, they are not remotely 1/3rd octave! and they don't even bother much about accuracy up the top.
 
The process is different. Lenses can correct some types of poor vision and restore perfect sight, but if you have cataracts, for example, then improvement cannot restore it to 'normal'. Hearing aids are in essence, an amplifier and eq device. If your hearing is deficient by a small amount at certain frequencies so your hearing frequency response is perhaps a wavy line, then fitting an aid can produce a flatter line - BUT - with lowish fidelity. A decent pair of in ear monitors and a graphic produce better 'quality'. However, your brain can compensate for the uneven frequency response quite well, and maintain full fidelity. If your hearing is very poor at speech frequencies, then these can be raised by the hearing aid, even if the actual quality is not that high - so you can maintain conversations. Listening to music is pretty nasty sounding. I've often wondered how somebody with a hearing impairment would get on with decent in-ears and a decent multi band graphic or parametric? If you look at the frequencies selected for the hearing tests, they are not remotely 1/3rd octave! and they don't even bother much about accuracy up the top.

You just responded to a newbie with bad english necro-ing a 7-year old thread! :facepalm:
 
How well do hearing aids enhance your hearing.....in relationship to eyeglasses and bringing your vision back to 20/20.

Can a hearing aid give you a golden ear.:rolleyes::rolleyes:

Hearing aids do not provide a "golden ear".

Hearing aids amplify sound, plan and simple. However, depending on the level of hearing loss, it may not "improve" sound. Hearing loss impacts defferent people different ways - normally loss of high end and clearity/definition are the first things to go. It does not really equate to eye glasses 20/20 vision, etc.

I've been wearing hearing aids for over a decade - with severe loss in my left ear and moderate loss in my right (largely the result of 40 plus years of gigging). I currently have rather advance aids $3,000 each) - with programmable EQ/Compression, Candidly, I still have problems with clerity and definition - I normally record and mix without the aids (I depend a lot of reference CDs as a point of reference.

Guy and gals - hearing loss absolutely sucks - not only in music but in as aspects of life. I strongly recommend hearing protection when you gig ........... once you lose it, it's ain't coming back!!!!
 
Hearing aids do not provide a "golden ear" - far from it!

Hearing aids amplify sound, plan and simple. However, depending on the level of hearing loss, it may not "improve" sound. Hearing loss impacts defferent people different ways - normally loss of high end and clearity/definition are the first things to go. It does not really equate to eye glasses 20/20 vision, etc.

I've been wearing hearing aids for over a decade - with severe loss in my left ear and moderate loss in my right (largely the result of 40 plus years of gigging). I currently have rather advance aids $3,000 each) - with programmable EQ/Compression, Candidly, I still have problems with clerity and definition - I normally record and mix without the aids (I depend a lot of reference CDs as a point of reference.

Guy and gals - hearing loss absolutely sucks - not only in music but in as aspects of life. I strongly recommend hearing protection when you gig ........... once you lose it, it's ain't coming back!!!!
 
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