Hearing loss... "What?" I SAID...
Posted by: Huge on 23 April 2016
It seems to me that a significant number of members on this forum have a degree of hearing loss or related conditions (age related hearing loss and tinnitus mostly). So as they are incurable, what are we to do?
It strikes me there are two places to look to ameliorate the problem
1 Our playback equipment
2 Our ears (or rather placing hearing aids in front of them)
A third possible solution (turn up the volume), doesn't seem to be a real solution in practice, particularly for those of us with tinnitus.
In my research, it appears that the most significant effects that reduce the usability of the remaining hearing seem to be those that require an increased level of brain activity used to process the sound and to selectively extract the signal in which we are interested (speech or music as appropriate). Thus the goal should be to present as clean a signal to the ears as is reasonably possible.
So as one who has age related hearing loss and tinnitus, I'd be interested in the approaches taken by others to address these problems.
Looking through the forum, it seems that there are two changes to equipment that are commonly described as increasing the perceived clarity of the system, although they are often described in different terms such as "reduced noise floor", "inky blackness", "increased detail", "increased resolution". These terms all imply increasing the differentiation of the wanted signal from the background clutter.
The first upgrade I've noticed to tend to get this type of response is upgrading the power supply to the pre-amp.
The second is upgrading the source component. Interestingly upgrading the power supply to the source component is somewhat less likely to be described in these terms.
Lastly I have no knowledge of hearing aids or how well they work with music.
So, any comments, recommendations or observations?
By sharing experiences we may be able to help each other to better deal with this intractable problem.
Moderated Post: Huge, so the thread and any replies don't get constantly caught in the moderation filter, I've made a small alteration to your thread title. Hope that's OK for you...