Hearing Aids

I had a hearing test at Falkirk Community Hospital a couple of months ago which confirmed what I had suspected for a while – that I have some partial hearing loss. For the most part this doesn’t bother me and it turned out that the main part of my hearing that is affected is high sounds about 4KHz – roughly where my tinnitus kicks in. Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult but I can still make out clear sounds (and, thankfully, music) quite well.

They did ask me whether I would want to use a hearing aid at any point and, to be honest, it really doesn’t appeal to me. For one thing, I really don’t like having anything stuck in my ears and the cost of the contraptions (which can be in the thousands) doesn’t appeal to me when the only thing that really bothers me is hearing speech on the television properly. As such, I decided to go for my own hearing aid device. This is it:

Now this isn’t exactly light and discrete as the makers of those clever, digital, in-ear devices would claim (in fact it took two guys from DPD to lift them into the house) but the sound is absolutely fantastic. In fact, in some ways it is a little too good because it really shows up the difference between Dolby Digital and stereo broadcasts quite markedly but the best thing is that big centre speaker which is something like twice the size of the old one; it makes all speech crystal clear.

Now my hearing is fixed I’m rather tempted to go for glasses which are the size of the Hubble Space Telescope…