Hearing Aids in Life in General

I have hearing aids now. I’ve been battling tinnitus for about a year and I’m trying to be more proactive in figuring it out, because it’s one of the major reasons for my depression lately.

I’ve had tinnitus for over 10 years, but until about a year ago, it was very low pitch and low volume. Really only noticeable in extremely quiet environments, and even then, wasn’t super annoying.

But about a year ago I had a bad sinus/ear infection which triggered really loud/high pitched tinnitus that never went away. I paced the house for hours crying when it happened because (people without tinnitus can’t understand) it’s completely debilitating. You can’t escape it. You can’t plug your ears and ignore it. It follows you everywhere.

Well I haven’t gone a single day since without thinking about it. The only way I could forget about it was to lay in bed and put headphones in my ears and just blast it away. Definitely not good for my mental health.

Of course, a lot of other bad shit happened this year (I’m never really gonna write about it because I want to only remember the good things and hopefully the bad stuff just fades away with time, so writing it down doesn’t seem like a good idea). But the tinnitus was always the constant bullshit that never went away.

Well anyway, recently my in-laws recommended I go see the audiologist that my F-I-L sees. I made the appointment and she checked my hearing. I do have some high pitch hearing loss, but it’s between mild and moderate. It doesn’t affect my ability to hear conversations or anything, but it may have been contributing to my tinnitus, because for some people, when you lose part of your hearing, your brain replaces the missing sound with ringing.

So I tried on the hearing aids she recommended and did like what I was hearing, it was unusual for me hearing so much high pitch noise, it almost gave me a headache. But apparently that’s normal hearing for people so I was like “well I guess I’ll need to get used to this”.

They are crazy expensive, but if they help with my tinnitus, I am game to pay for them. My parent offered to help with some of the cost which is really nice of them to do. I did buy them an expensive TV two years ago so I guess this is just them returning the favor haha.

Well before I decided to pull the trigger on the hearing aids, I found out that airpods have some hearing aid functionality. If you have an audiogram, you can enter it into the health app and your phone will adjust the output of the headphones to match your hearing loss, including the transparency mode.

Honestly, it was like a God-send. It felt like when you get a new eyeglass prescription and you walk outside and you’re like “holy crap I can see the leaves on the trees.” Like that, but now I could hear the leaves rustling, the noise of the cars on the street a few streets over… everything. For some that may be annoying and too much noise, but for me, anything is better than my ear ringing.

So I pull the trigger on the hearing aids and they come in a couple weeks later. She gets me fitted and tested, and I love them. They’re even better sounding than the airpods.

But then, my tinnitus spiked really hard a couple days later. It does happens sometimes, and the best way for me to deal with it is some white noise. And now I have these fancy hearing aids that I can play some noise into all day… right?

Not exactly.....

So these are supposed to be special hearing aids with built in sounds for tinnitus sufferers, but the sounds weren’t like white noise generators, they were like calming music and stuff. That doesn’t help me with my tinnitus at all. So I think “no worries, I have some great noise videos saved on youtube, I’ll just play one of those.”

Unfortunately, even though these hearing aids come with bluetooth functionality, I quickly learned how limited it is. It uses a special connection called MFi (made for iphone), and it’s like a super low power bluetooth connection. You don’t even connect these in the normal bluetooth menu on your phone, it’s in the accessibility options for that reason.

Basically, MFi is a workaround that hearing aids use instead of classic bluetooth to connect to your phone.

So why do hearing aids use this instead of just normal bluetooth? It’s all about battery life. These hearing aids last about 37 hours, and even if I’m streaming music, they still last about 20 hours. There are some hearing aids on the market that use classic bluetooth.. guess how long they last? about 3 hours max while streaming....

So it makes sense they needed a special connection, but it SUCKS for audio quality. Omg it sounds like you’re listening to music through a ham radio. Even podcasts are barely audible. I don’t have unrealistic expectations that hearing aids will sound as good as bonafide headphones, but this is really really bad.

Not to mention that I can hear phone calls in my hearing aids, but the connection is so limited that it can’t use the mics on the hearing aids to talk back. So I have to keep my phone near me for people to listen. I may as well just use speakerphone.

I honestly nearly bought the other hearing aids with the classic bluetooth (but shitty battery life) for this reason. I would rather have 3 hours of hearing aids with good streaming instead of 20 hours of unusable streaming.

But what stopped me? Something called “Bluetooth LE Audio”. It’s the newest bluetooth standard with full support for super low energy connections built right in. So hearing aids won’t need a workaround like MFi, they’ll just connect straight to you phone with bluetooth.

Now here’s the thing, it’s still a low energy bluetooth connection, so there will be compromises to audio quality I’m sure. But my hope is that it still sounds better than the current standard.

Unfortunately, it’s too new for me to do the research, because no one has really done the work yet to compare streaming quality of MFi to Bluetooth LE Audio (maybe I’ll use my influence on the internet to be the first one!) It’s so new, in fact, that even iPhones don’t support it. Only a select few android phones have it (very fortunately my old pixel 7 is one of them, so I’d just swap back to android for a while until Apple catches up).

And even better (he said sarcastically) only a couple of hearing aid devices on the market even support it right now. Seems like people estimate it will be about 4-5 years before it’s widely adopted. Maybe these few hearing aids that support it won’t sound as good as the ones I have, because my current hearing aids sound WONDERFUL when not streaming. I don’t know if I’d be okay sacrificing good ambient noise quality in exchange for better streaming.

Okay… so here’s the actual good news.

My audiologist actually sells one of the devices that supports it. She actually has samples in the store and said I can go compare them directly.

OMG she’s an angel, because if I returned the ones I have now and the streaming quality wasn’t as different as I thought, I’d always wonder if the old ones were better or not. Same for the audio quality of my environment. But now I’ll be able to compare them directly and know for sure.

So my appointment is on Tuesday. I’ll update then!

(sorry for the tech rambling but I mean this is what I’m into so it is what it is.)