[Elecraft] Headphones

[Edward R. Cole]

Lew and Bill,

You are both lucky if you can wear headphones without using your 
hearing aids to copy signals well.  I am nearly deaf without 
mine.  Increasing volume does not add comprehension.  My hearing is 
<35 dB in both ears with roll off to nothing above 800-Hz.

But I use a pair of Sony stereo headphones MDR-V600 that have a soft 
cuff the covers the ears completely.  My hearing aids are Phonic 
Silvia over-the-ear models with two mics for noise cancelling (spendy 
- cost $2600/ea.).  But they do not feedback when I wear 
headphones.  When I fly I wear a pair of Bose nose-cancelling 
headphones.  They do have a T-coil mode for use with telephones but I 
find that it does not work well.  At home we have Panasonic 5-GHz 
cordless phones with speakerphone.  That works very 
nice.  Fortunately, I do not work the 5760 MHz ham band.

My problem is if I wear the headphones for hours there is some 
physical discomfort from the headphones pressing my ear and hearing 
aid, so I often remove the hearing aids when flying.  Of course then 
my hearing is about -60dB and I hear nothing.

I have followed the critiques on the reflector for headset-boom mics 
but have not bought any.  Mostly the reports are on audio performance 
and not comfort.

73, Ed - KL7uW
------------------------------

Message: 31
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:12:35 -0700
From: Lew Phelps K6LMP <k6lmp at me.com>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Headphones
To: Elecraft Reflector <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Message-ID: <18FDEDDB-AF29-4B5B-A6A6-8ACD07DED2E5 at me.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

I recently began wearing hearing aids myself, so I know what you're 
going through. You have to remove hearing aids to use conventional 
headphones, or else you get audio feedback screeching. When you 
remove hearing aids, if you're like most people, you lose ability to 
hear higher frequencies, which is the range in which consonants 
reside, and from which we discern the meaning of speech. (vowels are 
about 300-600 Hz, but we don't extract much meaning from vowel sounds.)

As a first step, adjust the audio receive profile to give a some 
boost to frequencies up to 1kHz and a lot of boost to higher 
frequencies.. This will offset the increased hearing loss at higher 
frequencies that most people with hearing loss experience, and 
restore ability to discern consonants.  Unfortunately, this also can 
increase background noise levels.

IF that doesn't do the job, other possible solutions include:

1. Hearing aid compatible headphones such as the Geemarc CLA3 Hearing 
Aid Compatible Headset (haven't tried)
2. Bluetooth adapter. Many modern hearing aids have Bluetooth 
connectivity, so you can use them as headphones with a Bluetooth 
headset dongle. Google on "bluetooth audio dongle 3.5" and you'll 
come up with quite a few, ranging in price from about #$20 to $40, 
that will plug into the headset jack and convert the audio output to 
a Bluetooth signal, which you can hear directly through any Bluetooth 
enabled hearing aid.  I haven't tried this, but I plan to do obtain 
one very soon.
3. Have you tried speakers and hearing aids combined? If that doesn't 
work, your hearing aids probably need adjustment or replacement.
4.  If you want to use conventional headphones without your hearing 
aids, put a small stereo amplifier inline between line out  output of 
your rig and your headphones. Preferably, use an amp with equalizer 
controls, and boost the higher frequencies commensurate with your 
hearing loss profile.

Hope this helps.

Lew K6LMP




73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45
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