[Michael Black[_2_]]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2017, geoff wrote:

On 24/04/2017 7:45 PM, Trevor wrote:


Secondly if we are to take your statement literally then nobody should
wear ANY hearing aid for fear of damaging what is left of their hearing
at any frequency!

I'm surprised people bother to make these comments without knowing
anything about hearing aids.


And despite me making no claim to know anything about audiology , it would
still vastly surprise me that the simple remedy for a loss at a particular
band is solely to boost the **** out of that band. 14k, 8k, 3k, or whatever.

What I remember is that the ear has two or maybe more levels of nerves to
detect sound, because otherwise the ear would be required to handle too
wide a dynamic range. I'm not sure how that translates to loss at higher
frequencies, but from what I was told, one could lose the ability to hear
low level sounds, but still hear loud sounds fine. This was decades ago,
and maybe it was a simplification for "the layman".

I don't think you can boost the high frequencies by too much, and expect
"perfect" hearing. One has to live with something in between "original"
and bad hearing.

Someone mentioned their parents or grandparents getting used to hearing
aids, and giving up. Apparently that's common, one adjusts to what there
is, so hearing aids can take time to adjust to. So I assume people adjust
to the level of improvement that a hearing aid can offer.

The electronics don't or didn't provide the same level of dynamic range as
regular ears, so AGC, automatic gain control, kicks in somewhere in
hearing aids, so that's another thing one has to adjust to.

Michael