Hearing Aids

[Alan Day]

Be careful of the cheap small hearing aids being sold on FB .Plastic over a period of time age hardens (like brass) and the one I tried disintegrated at the place that holds the battery in position, rendering them useless.

Al

[bellowbelle]

On 12/17/2020 at 2:05 PM, gcoover said:

Well I suppose the recommendation is to get a loud Jeffries (or Herrington) so you don't need hearing aids, at least for concertina!

 

In my experience, the Eargo units can make the sound a little tinny if cranked up, and they also create some annoying minor feedback at seemingly random times for music in general. But other than that, they're rechargeable, work very well, are almost unnoticeable, and are an amazing piece of tech.

 

Since we play a Victorian instrument, maybe we should just get a pair of nice brass ear trumpets mounted on some sort of hands-free headset - it would fit in better with the whole Steampunk theme. Or perhaps an industrial size unit like the photo?

 

Gary

This is hilarious. What's this from? Was he trying to contact space aliens or something?

[alex_holden]

3 hours ago, bellowbelle said:

This is hilarious. What's this from? Was he trying to contact space aliens or something?

 

It was used during wartime, pre-radar, to listen for the distant sound of enemy aircraft. The listener would rotate it to find the loudest direction, then read the bearing to find the direction of the sound. Two or more bearings from different listening stations could be plotted on a map to triangulate the position.

[Ubizmo]

I was going to start a new topic on this, but here it is.

 

I have also noticed the tremolo that Clive mentioned in the original post. In fact, I noticed it before I got the concertina, when playing whistle, especially in a fairly close space, such as a small room or a car. This leads me to think that there's some constructive interference with surrounding surfaces. Or...it might just be a bit of latency causing it. In any event, my solution is to use my app to turn them off at sessions, or to take them out when practicing at home.

 

When I turn the hearing aids off at sessions, I leave them in. It's not such a bad idea to mute the sound slightly anyway. Sessions can get pretty loud, and if there are three or four high D whistles in the mix...

[fred v]

Hearing aids are not like glasses that give you 20/20 vision. Hearing aids better now but far from perfect.

I have some new aids from America Hears (Lucid made). They come with patch cords and a program for the computer to adjust them. There is a learning curve to go through and company contact is difficult. At $1700.00 they are a good buy and I am making progress with them.

Mine have 4 programs and I'm still using the "noisy" setting for noisy sessions. It does knock the background noise lower.

[Ubizmo]

I'm using Philips HearLink, from Costco. As a general thing, I'm satisfied with them, after less than a year of use. Costco follow-up service has been excellent. They are indeed not a cure-all and I'm still at a disadvantage in conversations in even moderately noisy restaurants, but they're better than nothing. I also recognize that the challenge presented by the playing of relatively high-pitched musical instruments is not exactly the primany use case for these aids, so I have to temper my expectations. It's a simple enough thing to turn them off, if the tremolo/distortion gets on my nerves. 

[fred v]

My biggest problem is hearing players name the tune they are going to play. Most times it doesn't matter as I pick it up as soon as it starts but sometimes hearing the name makes the tune come to my head.

[hjcjones]

There are audiologists who specialise in hearing aids for musicians., but of course they are not cheap. I haven't needed them because I'm coping with my NHS ones, but if the time comes when these don't work for me i may have to consider it.