Hearing Aids?

A friend of mine and my dad both just got hearing aids. Both were perscribed basic units ($500 or so). My friend is a music fanatic and went out on his own and bought a pair of the very expensive units with a little tube into the ear canal. He loved them. I pushed my dad, who is an md. to check on them. He hated and never wore his old hearing aides. He loves the new ones and hears things he hasn't heard in years.
I followed up with a great pair of sealed headphones for watching tv. Sealed headphones eliminate more of the outside noise. He liked the Sony Digital studio headphones much better than AKG 701's. All is good now. My friend likes the in ear phones with noise reduction by Bose.
Hope this helps.

I wear hearing aids in both ears, I was born with a nerve deafness, so, I have about 40% hearing loss in both ears and I'm 38 years of age. I am currently wearing Starkey Digital hearing aids - I have the CIC (circuit in canal- way deep in your ear canal) there are ITE (in the ear) and BTE (behind the ear) The BTE are more powerful and more flexible - if I were you, go to your local Costco and talk to that Audiologist and see what they can do for you - good luck - I have to admit, hearing aids have improved tremendously in the past several years!

call me naive or whatever you will, but i'm wondering...for those who do wearing hearing aids, how do you feel the sound compares to when you had your 'normal' hearing (addressing those, of course, who have lost their hearing 'somewhere along the line' that is life)? Is the sound simply amplified w/in the frequency range that you can hear, or does it improve hearing in all 'normal' audio frequency ranges? Perhaps I should just google this, but given that my father has 'good' (read: expensive) hearing aids, yet for some odd reason doesn't wear them, i'm intrinsically interested in this thread.

Any thoughts, views, perspectives etc would be appreciated.

As others have said, the technology has really come a long way. Most of the mid-range and high-end hearing aids now use digital signal processing (DSP) to "shape" the response of the unit based on each individual's exact hearing.

They also use a fair amount of technology to improve functionality in daily life. For instance, they are optimized to reduce background noise and heighten receptivity at speech frequencies. Unfortunately, this tailoring is exactly what you do NOT want for music. The good news is that you can buy units which have more than one program. For instance, you can touch a button on the unit (behind the ear unit) which will shift modes from speech to full spectrum. This is considerably better for listening to music! Pushing the button again can return to the everyday speech intelligibility functions. These same units have sub-programs for such activities as talking on the telephone, or listening in a noisy environment such as a restaurant.

As others have said, talk to a good audiologist and he/she can give you a better understanding of your options. A unit such as the one I described can cost between $1500 to $2500 per ear, so it's not a trivial expense. But to restore the joy of listening to music, it is well worth it IMHO.

HTH!

Just marking this thread for a friend whose on this path currently... he's a drummer by choice and professor by trade., and thought to pass it along to him.