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Hard of Hearing


Illuminatio

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Hi gang, I have a problem which is puzzling me. I work in a college where I am responsible for a number of dance studios. Each studio has an identical rack-mounted sound system, consisting of two speakers, an amp, a mini-mixer, a CD player and a minijack cable for the connection of phones, iPods, etc. The equipment gets very heavily used and mistreated, so it is all low quality for cheap replacement.

 

 

One of our dance teachers is profoundly deaf and uses a hearing aid (I'm not sure what kind). She says she can hear the systems perfectly in some studios, partially in others, but in one she cannot hear anything, not even low frequencies.

 

 

Any ideas?

 

The aids are Phonak, digital, Nathos S+ UP W

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Might be worth asking what programme she's using - Nathos have a programme select button which allows you to use an induction loop, otherwise it doesn't go through the hearing aid. (Do the rooms have loops installed?) Also maybe get her to ask her audiologist to mute the microphone on the loop programme, default is a blend of loop audio and ambient mic audio but can be adjusted to suit the user....

 

Or would the college stump up for something like a Roger pen for her?

 

(I use 2 Nathos Auto M so happy to help if I can...)

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@ J Pearce: interesting question; I shall try to find out, although in one studio she doesn't seem able to hear any part of the spectrum at all. The studios are acoustically very different, which may have an impact.

@ Ninjadingle: I can ask. I'm not sure what she is hearing, and she still relies heavily on lip-reading. She used to play the sound very loud and rely on feeling the bass, but I have installed new speakers with a poorer bass response and set lower levels generally because the building isn't sound proofed and it was impacting heavily on other classes on the floors below. I may try some pink noise and see what's coming back. I have also contacted the hearing aid manufacturer.

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I suspect that the room response and loudspeaker behaviour will have a major bearing on this...

 

Modern hearing aids are so customisable in terms of frequency response, dynamics and various bits of trickery (nose suppression etc.), that it's likely the aid manufacturer won't be able to help in any meaningful way - the audiologist would probably have much more information, but they're not going to discuss patient hearing profiles with you!

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I suspect that the room response and loudspeaker behaviour will have a major bearing on this...

 

Modern hearing aids are so customisable in terms of frequency response, dynamics and various bits of trickery (nose suppression etc.), that it's likely the aid manufacturer won't be able to help in any meaningful way - the audiologist would probably have much more information, but they're not going to discuss patient hearing profiles with you!

 

 

True! the manufacturer was not much help - "I can sell you one of these..." It's almost as if there is some noise cancelling going on.

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The thing I've discovered quite recently - with my ancient mum, is that having a hearing aid means you blame the thing for everything, yet can't explain the problem to the audiologist in words they understand. I've sat in the room with mum when I can hear the tones really loudly and she can't with the headphone on. I've heard her talk about them vibrating and being muffled. They were unable to help her. I took her to a private clinic to have wax cleaned out before her NHS appointment, as they don't do this any longer, and after he did it she mentioned the problems with her hearing aid "because it's an old one" - he said it was actually rather a good one, so he pressed a few buttons and up popped the details, which he thought looked a little odd. She told him about the vibrating and while she was wearing it, not sitting on the bench connected with wires as in the NHS audiologist's room, he dragged the nodes on the screen and spoke to her - "vibrating now?". He asked me to speak, and on her yes/no answers mades changes, then he brought in the reception lady and on hearing her, made more changes, and her improvement was immense. No more 'vibrating', and male and female voices now not brilliant but workable. Communications is the key feature - a good person both ends who can work together. In the case we're talking about here, it seems the person at the hospital, not the machinery is the key.
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The fairly standard approach is to apply the inverse of the hearing loss curve. However, this may not take into account the bits of spectrum that the ear - brain mechanism is deriving the most intelligibility from, and some simple speech testing can help correct this - as long as the audiologist can keep the gain in check and not stray dramatically from the loss curve.

Even those who do have a vocabulary for audio can find it difficult to tell the audiologist what to do... imagine trying to mix a track when someone is altering a huge bandpass filter on your monitors - when your fixed point of reference sounds completely different, you no longer know what is "right",

 

Aid users trying to make corrections without knowing what to ask for or what it should sound like are at a distinct disadvantage. Even if they do make an improvement in near perfect conditions of the audiologist's office, that often doesn't translate well to real world situations with background noise.

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Sounds like mum Simon. She had a marked loss at the bottom and the inverse was making the thing rattle at high volumes. The softening of the curve really helped her. I was surprised how the individual test frequencies were quite widely spaced too.
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