OT: Switch telephone to VoIP

Why on earth would you want to? My hearing aids fit behind and into my ears. I wear them all the time I'm out of bed. They pick up hearing loops and Bluetooth, so I can change the settings (volume and source) via my phone. And, in case you think I'm a youngester - I'm 84.

Hearing aids can have a shaped frequency response.

They can characterize your hearing, and increase the gain for the audio bands where you don't hear any more.

That's the modern day sales pitch.

This means the hearing aid can be customized for the individual.

At one time, the old aids just made all the sounds louder, and it used to howl... but the user couldn't hear that frequency. The howling was feedback. Even a modern hearing aid, can still howl (but they should not).

And what you mostly want from hearing aids, is speech frequencies. To prevent isolation, you want the customer to be able to hear human voices well enough to understand conversation. Some people, their hearing slips enough they can "hear mumbling", they know they are being addressed, but without a sufficiently broad range of frequencies incoming, they can't make out the words.

In the private market, hearing aids are ridiculously expensive. You should thank your lucky stars you have NHS ones to use. As they're priced closer to the cost of the hardware Bill Of Materials. The private market profit, is 10x to 20x the price of the goods. In Canada, a high pressure salesman can offer a hearing aid from $4000 CDN to $7000 CDN.

It's my personal opinion, that the "customization" is a fraud. By the time you can't make out speech any more, you're down to 2KHz low pass or so. All that the heading aid has to do, is boost speech frequencies (up to 3.5KHz or so), and you don't need complicated electronics to meet such a need. It's not like the customer is trying to get a "ruler flat response to 20KHz" using the hearing aid. The hearing aid is there, so they can hear speech or a car horn or a train whistle. It is basically a "solution of last resort". After that, comes the sign language.

Paul

Mum says her behind the ear hearing aids are uncomfortable. She lives alone. So she doesn't wear them unless she wants to listen to something. I'm pretty much the same with my headphones, having them hanging around my neck is comfortable and I can put them in my ear at a moments notice. When mum puts her hearing aid in, she has to find it and it seems to take time to fit.

Mum doesn't have a mobile phone, and getting her to do anything technical is difficult. You are a lot younger than Mum, and were probably a lot more technical to begin with.

Mum is also very unhelpful in diagnosing why she is having problems. I was trying to test her VoIP connection yesterday. On my dialling her, she didn't appear to hear me speaking and hung up. When I eventually got through to her, and asked her questions, she got flustered and gave the phone to her carer. I was trying to test if she could hear the VoIP connection as well as the old connection. Later she complained she couldn't hear her phone in general and it was too complicated. It is very hard to know how to help. Give her a hearing aid and she won't wear it, etc.

It is hard to say that dementia has caused her difficult behaviour, but it has made her pre-existing difficult behaviour patterns worse.

The change to VoIP is only a side effect of me getting her faster internet so I can put cameras around her house and remotely remotely administer her stuff.

I totally agree. You can at best get a little more treble, but in people who are really having trouble without an aid, it is exactly as you say, they cant hear much above 2kHz and the roll off rate is massive.

Worse, they start to suffer intermodulation distortion which means their ability to pick out a single voice in a crowd is almost nonexistent

At best a hearing aid can help a bit in marginal cases, or in cases where volume alone is the problem, but the people going deaf I have known don't have that particular problem

In general you need a massive boost over 1-2kHz and then forget about anything over 4Khz

As a hearing aid user, I know I have serious notch at 4kHz. My (private) hearing aids can deal with that, whereas 20 years ago I was told that the NHS aids could not help me, because they simply amplified all frequencies. The tests only go up to 8kHz, but I can hear above that. I suspect that full bore rifle shooting as a teenage before ear defenders were invented might have caused my problem.

My aids cost £2500 for the pair and are well worth it..

Just an observation. I went to Santapod (drag racing) a few weeks back and I wore foam ear protector plugs in the pits and during racing. Even with my failing hearing the noise from a top fuel car starting the engine in the pit area, and standing a few metres away, is painful.

I could hear the commentary from the trackside speakers very clearly with the ear plugs in but on taking them out the general noise from the crowd completely masked the commentary. Speaker commentary was mainly low frequency, crowd was mixed frequency but probably in the higher bands.

What was disheartening to see was the fairly large number of parents bringing young children to the meeting and not providing their kids any ear protection.

see my previous post. My aids provide a 40dB boost at 4kHz

My hearing aids, NHS supplied, will connect to Bluetooth giving me access t o my apple MacBook, my iPadAir and my smart TV. I don't watch TV, but all the rest are great. PeteFJ

The two I am using bluetooth each other so you can control the volume using the switch on either. BFD. Whether they do more bluetooth than that I neither know nor care.

The auiologist told me he was supplying me with units that cost £2k or so if obtained privately. He also said that the NHS gets them for £70 or so each.

No idea what you are referring to.

In my case the audiologist tuned the frequency gain curve to match the high frequency loss he'd found when testing my hearing response. So everything is pretty much back to how it used to be.

I'll look into switchable ringing. I find it a drawback because I don't get the opportunity to check who is calling, and reject the call if it's a junk caller. There are a lot of them about these days.

I let the answer phone pick up most calls unless it's from someone in my whitelist and the phone displays their name.

For very many months I've only had a small smattering of cold calls, which usually hang up as soon as the outgoing message is played BUT in the past couple of weeks its been around two a day! Randomly checking a few of these numbers on the "who's called" web site confirms that they are spam calls also reported by hundreds or thousands of people.

One semi genuine caller was very annoying. It was BTs text to voice service. When someone sends a text to a "landline" number via BT it's converted to a voice message. Unfortunately when BT computer rings your phone it has no programming to deal with a answerphone. The result is my answerphone indicates a call but no recorded message. The BT computer seems to detect an unanswered call, possibly because a "press 1" etc. response is required. The BT computer will continually try and deliver the voice message but the same will always happen when encountering the answerphone.

We still get one only once a month or even less. I suppose it might help that we've always been ex-directory.

Does that mean the answerphone memory eventually runs out and even non-BT calls will not be recorded? Is it possible to add the BT text-to-voice service to a blacklist and prevent the phone answering at all?

The answerphone doesn't care where the incoming call comes from and will record anything left as a message. In the case of the BT text to voice service it appears that their computer doesn't realise that there is answerphone outgoing message and hangs up before the machine is ready to record. It doesn't fill up the memory because the call has ended before the answerphone would record.

The number is now in my blacklist