I thought it might be informative to run through my hearing aids experiences for anyone that's thinking about getting them to improve their music listening.
First I'll say up front that yes, definitely, the hearing aids make a massive improvement. They fill in the frequencies that are missing and do that remarkably well. But, and this is the big one, they MUST be set up properly to do that.
The audiologist you go to will test your hearing, tune the devices and then measure what they are putting out, but that can't measure how your ear / brain is receiving that new input. And unfortunately some tend to not listen when you say the hearing aids don't sound right and dismiss it as something you just need to get used to.
I believe that when I got my first pair back in 2014, the audiologist (who was older and very experienced) knew that you can't just go by the numbers, and may have dialed back the high frequencies enough to avoid all of the problems I ran into years later. So when they were set up, they sounded perfect to me. Everything was clear and undistorted.
Fast forward to 2021 and I want to be retested and see if any improvements can be made. I was building my new listening room at the time and thought I should try to get my hearing as good as it can be. As outlined in this video, that started me down a path of frustration while I went to 15 different appointments over the next two years.
After the first round in 2022, I gave up, and settled for the "close enough" settings he had made. The only issues were that the limiter was set too low and the right ear was quieter than the left. They still sounded very good - he was able to get them close to the way they were set up originally in 2014.
So, 7 appointments over 3 months to ultimately degrade the quality.
Ahead to the winter of this year (2023) I decided to try again. I made an appointment at a different place and basically went through the same thing over again.
The new audiologist tested my hearing and then I told him the problems I had before, including the limiter and balance issue with my old hearing aids, and made a point (several times) of saying that the old ones sound great, other than the balance and limiter.
Of course he quickly ignored that and just went about doing it the way he was trained to do it.
I would have thought, even just for the sake of curiosity, to start he would look at the settings on my old hearing aids to get an idea of what they are doing and go from there.
But no, it would be 4 more appointments and two new models of hearing aids before I basically forced him to do that. And even then he couldn't resist "tweaking" those settings, by adding too much high frequency boost, and meaning yet another trip back for yet another adjustment.
In the end I'm still using my old hearing aids, but he successfully got them back to what they used to be when they were first set up back in 2014. Full circle with no improvement, in other words.
New hearing aids have a bunch of bells and whistles such as active noise management that seems to mess with the sound too much, ruining the pure quality you get from just straight amplification. Or at least that's my impression from using various newer models over the last 3 months.
None of the ones I tested sounded as good as the ones I already had. In fairness that might be the fault of whoever set them up, but good luck finding someone that can get it right.
Most of the older audiologist that have years of experience have retired, leaving it to younger people with a solid understanding of the process, but very little practical experience.
They can run the measurements and set up the hearing aids according to those measurements, but don't seem to realize that that's only half of the equation. The other half is how the ear / brain is receiving and interpreting the new input, and the only way to "measure" that is to listen to what the customer is saying.
"It sounds like nails on a chalkboard!"
"Oh, you'll get used to that."


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