Hearing aids can’t cure hearing loss. While their main purpose is to help the person hear better, it is not a way to reverse hearing loss. Once a person removes their hearing aid, the hearing loss is still there, the same way a person who is vision impaired uses eye glasses to help them see better, but once the glasses are removed, they still have trouble seeing. But hearing aids don’t just simply increase a person’s ability to hear things, amplifying sound and making things louder. Hearing aids serve several other purposes with the end result being that the person using them has a clearer understanding of what is going on around them.
Tone control is an important aspect of what hearing aids can do. People suffering from a loss of hearing quite often have a hard time hearing higher register tones. If this is the case, simply making all tones louder will not help you to hear the higher registers at the same volume as lower tones. So through tone control, the higher registers that you are having trouble hearing can be amplified at a higher level than the lower tones, making things more evenly heard.
People who have some degree of hearing loss also have a smaller decibel range in what they can hear. Because of this, there are certain situations where the wearer will want to turn the hearing aid up or down. This can be done manually, but it can also be accomplished through slow-acting automatic volume control, which is more convenient for the wearer. The volume is turned up to hear weaker noise and down when the sound is stronger.
While slow-acting automatic volume control reacts to the general environment the wearer is in, fast-acting automatic volume control reacts to each individual noise, adjusting itself accordingly and taking direction from the constant changes in sound and noise levels.
Directional microphones allow the wearer to focus on noise and sounds that are directly in front of them, filtering out sounds that are coming from other directions. This is of particular use if you are at a loud party, sporting event or restaurant where you are surrounded by noise and sound. The only drawback is that it focuses directly in front of you, so if the person you are talking to moves to your side or if someone comes up behind you and starts talking to you, you might not hear them.
Because some everyday sounds have very different acoustic characteristics from a person’s speech, hearing aids with adaptive noise suppression are great for adjusting tone controls to deal with such things as traffic. The only problem is, if someone has the same low tone as traffic, you may have a hard time hearing them. So while adaptive noise suppressions may not improve the clarity of the speaker, it will make listening to what is going on around you more comfortable, which in turn could make following the conversation easier.
Feedback cancellation is another useful thing that your hearing aid can do. Because the microphone and hearing implementation in hearing aids are so close together, you can sometimes get a high pitched whining feedback. Not only does this feedback make it almost impossible to hear anything else, it is also extremely unpleasant. Feedback cancellation will work before the feedback occurs or within seconds of it happening. If the feedback is occurring because of a poor fit, wax in your ear or component failure, feedback cancellation won’t help and you’ll need to go in for another consultation.
While hearing aids do increase sound so that you can hear better, they do so much more than that. By having the proper hearing aid in and settings that are customized to you and your hearing loss, you can better hear what’s going on around you.