Hearing loss affects your life in many ways, including how you enjoy music. For example, if you love listening to live bands at The Showbox, hearing loss can make it challenging to distinguish between instruments or make out the lyrics. Fortunately, there is now a solution: Many of today’s hearing aids have special programming just for listening to music.
Amplifying Music Is Complicated
If you’ve worn hearing aids for many years, you know that hearing aids of the past left a lot to be desired when it came to listening to music.
Hearing aids are typically designed to amplify speech sounds. Because music has a much wider frequency and volume range than speech, very high and very low sounds are not amplified correctly, which is why older models tend to struggle.
In addition, environments where music is playing often involve a lot of background noise, like side conversations and dishes clinking at restaurants and bars, and screaming fans and feedback at larger concerts.
Many people make the mistake of turning up the volume to hear the music better, but this rarely helps. Music has a wide dynamic range, so all this will do is cause the music to sound distorted and put your ears at risk of additional damage.
Fortunately, hearing aid manufacturers have recently started making devices that are specially designed for music.
Hearing Aid Music Programs
Newer hearing aids offer programs specifically designed for music listeners in mind. With these devices, if you’re in a setting where you want to enjoy the music, you can use a remote or smartphone app to simply change the programming.
When getting fit for a new hearing aid, be sure to talk to your provider about the importance of being able to enjoy live music so they can select a device and create a program that works for you.
If you want to learn more about updating your hearing aid programming in order to better experience live concerts and shows, talk to the hearing aid experts at Evergreen Speech & Hearing Inc. Call today to schedule an appointment.