People without hearing impairment might think that hearing loss is like turning the volume down on life, with total deafness being the equivalent of having the sound turned “off.” Yet things can still be plenty loud for a person with hearing loss, and even side effects like tinnitus can keep complete silence at bay.
In fact, hearing loss is more about clarity than it’s about volume. A common frustration shared by many with hearing impairment isn’t that things aren’t loud enough, it’s that they can’t understand what’s going on.
At Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates, we can show you the difference that custom-fitted hearing aids programmed for your hearing can make. You’ll regain clarity and comprehension, restoring your interaction with the world.
When you consider your ability to see, you know that you perceive a wide range of colors that span across the wavelengths of visible light. Your hearing is similar, as sounds stretch across audible frequencies, from low to high.
Changes in vision, though, don’t usually affect your ability to perceive color. Instead, things become blurry because you have focus issues that can be corrected with lenses.
When you develop hearing loss, it’s most common for you to lose the ability to hear certain frequencies. When you lose the ability to perceive frequencies that are crucial to understanding speech, conversations begin to sound muddled and hard to understand.
The audible spectrum for general human hearing ranges from 20 hertz (hz) on the low end to 20,000 for the highest. Of these 19,980 individual frequencies, most of human speech falls into a band that’s just 6,800 hz wide, only about 34% of the audio spectrum.
The frequencies essential to speech clarity cover an even smaller band that’s just 2,000 hz wide. These frequencies provide definition of consonant articulation, sounds like those made by the letters B, C, F, P, S, T, and others.
When you have trouble distinguishing between the sound of B and P, for example, conversation becomes harder to follow.
It’s easy to think of hearing aids as amplifiers, because they do indeed make sounds louder. However, the beauty of hearing aid technology lies in the fact that the devices are programmable, selective amplifiers.
Your TV or home theater system has a wide-spectrum amplifier that, in general, amplifies all audible frequencies. Hearing aids have amplifiers that can be intricately tuned to match the results of your hearing test, called an audiogram.
The audiologists at Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates can program your hearing aids to boost very specific frequencies to compensate for those you’ve lost. When these losses are in critical speech definition ranges, even small boosts can deliver huge improvements in clarity.
This is just the most basic of contemporary hearing aid programmability. Restored clarity can be fine in one-on-one conversation, but it could be overwhelming in noisy settings. We can program your aids to eliminate background noises.
Phone apps allow you to fine-tune your hearing aids in real time for particular situations, and Bluetooth® connectivity allows you to hear audio from phone calls or music sources directly through your hearing aids.
Learn more about all the ways that hearing aids can help you hear clearly by contacting Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates in Lawrence and Ottawa, Kansas. Call or click to book an appointment with our audiologists today.
