[Elecraft] Off Topic Hearing Aids

[David Woolley (E.L)]

Quote 1:

That style rings alarm bells, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Quote 2:

Unless you have a pure conductive loss, which is relatively rare, and 
tends to be early in onset, hearing aids that "sound natural" are not 
doing their job.  Hearing aids have a similar job to that of noise 
reduction in the K3, with the added complication that they have to cope 
with a possibly very limited dynamic range between threshold of hearing 
and threshold of pain.  They have to both stress the frequencies needed 
for speech comprehension and apply frequency selective dynamic range 
compression.

Although modern hearing aids use a lot of echo cancellation to stop 
feedback whistling, deep in the ear ones so not have the level of 
isolation between input and output to allow for high powers and still 
maintain feedback suppression. The probable advantage of the deep 
positioning is that the feedback is less affected by the external 
environment, so you there are less occasions on which you have to wait 
for the feedback canceller to retrain.


k6rb at baymoon.com wrote:
> As a hearing-impaired operator, I wanted to let you all know about a
> fairly recent hearing-aid technology. It is manufactured by a company in
> Newark, California, and the device is called a "lyric."


> The difference is nothing short of dramatic. Sounds are much more natural
> sounding. There are no whistles like one gets with a partially in the
> canal device.
> 



-- 
David Woolley
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