Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'so to speak'.
-
About six years ago I discovered I had significant upper register hearing loss and was led to buy top of the line Siemens hearing aids, which had three different built-in programs/settings -- so-called universal (i.e. normal speech), noisy places, and music. Noisy places works by narrowing the sonic information from 360 degrees to what's right in front of you, music works by boosting bass and treble -- each program being fitted, via a computer chip, to compensate as much as possible to the pattern of your individual hearing loss. My old hearing aids aren't working so well any more, especially when it comes to normal speech (I'd been told when I bought the aids that six years or so was their normal life span) so I went to an audiologist who tested my hearing anew and gave me a demo model of the new top of the line Siemens aids to try out, these having been programmed to the current pattern of my hearing loss. Pleased to find that I could hear normal speech much better with these new aids, I was dismayed and also bewildered to discover that the music setting was just awful -- much less frequency response than before, soundstage had shrunk significantly, no "air" around the sound, etc. By comparison, the music setting on my old Siemens aids continues to be excellent. How, I wonder, could the personalized programs on these new aids be so good for speech and so bad for music, especially when the speech program on my old Siemens aids no longer fills the bill at all, while its music program remains excellent? Could Siemens, for some damn reason, have changed the nature or style of their music program to suit some generic idea of how most people listen to music -- from, say, a relatively "audiophile" approach to one that's like a mediocre car radio? Sounds that way to me. Anyone have any thoughts or advice?