In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me that I don't hear something, I ask the person to repeat only to not hear it again, usually because they repeat it at the same low level (considering the circumstances). Missing jokes and throwaway comments is even worse ("hey what are you all laughing about, I didn't hear it, could you repeat it for me like three times until I hear it").

After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hearing was beyond great, it was at the level of a 5 year old. The bad news: I could hear so well I was unable to differentiate sound; my hearing hadn’t gotten worse, my brain’s ability to separate sound had. The good bad news is that my hearing would inevitably deteriorate, as all ours does, and for several years I’d be able hear in public places!

I think part of what has made this worse is that restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing.

I’ve stopped patronizing these places if only because I literally cannot maintain conversations.

Recently listened to a really good podcast about this phenomenon https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288?... (or pick your favorite podcast app)

Couple takeaways I remember:

- "Silence is the new luxury" -- restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap. Upscale restaurants are starting to differentiate themselves with sound design

- The modern clean aesthetic (glass, concrete, stainless steel, minimalism) promotes loud, echo'ey spaces

- "You're not having a good time unless your ears are ringing" was an intentional design choice popularized by some restaurant guru in the 90's. Growing awareness of the problems is starting to create a backlash

- Loud restaurants are damaging for the waitstaff's health. You can work for hours in an environment so loud that OSHA would demand hearing protection.

- The luxury sound design studios can be so good at isolating ambient noise that they also sell an "anti-noise-cancelling" sound system that actually selectively re-amplifies crowd noise for when you do want to tune up some sense of busy-ness (with too much sound dampening in an unfilled room, it starts to feel too isolated... being "out and about" is some of the reason people go out dining)

I should preface by saying that I have some existing tinnitus that developed from playing drums in rock bands in my 20's without proper ear protection. It's manageable and quiet enough that it can be largely ignored.

Recently I visited Las Vegas, and I ate at the well known restaurant Tao. It was so incredibly loud, for a sustained period of time, that it triggered the tinnitus in my left ear to such an extent that I was essentially deaf in my left ear the next morning. It gradually receded to loud ringing, and then was back to my "normal" level of tinnitus after a couple of weeks.

I guess I'll have to bring my own hearing protection to restaurants now. Kind of a sad state of affairs.

With, floors hardwood is a hard surface (so only mildly sound damping) so they're not too bad for cleaning and health stuff, but are expensive to install and take a lot to maintain if the worn-in look doesn't fit the aesthetic. Low-pile carpets can be shampood inexpensively for medium-term maintenance and replaced comparatively cheaply in the long run, but take a lot more effort to keep clean when someone drops a catering tray full of crème caramel and something with a port wine reduction.

Artwork: anything that you'd want hanging on your walls is either going to need to be a print or covered with glass or plastic because it will get ruined otherwise.

Acoustic panels are usually pretty ugly, difficult to clean, not resistant to pests, are a fire liability if coated in grease, etc.

Curtains definitely are definitely viable, but if you've got enough of them to really impact the sound level, they probably need to be expensive ones, and expensive curtains can't just be tossed in the wash and pressed on an ironing board.

It's not like they aren't effective, they're just not nearly as easy to deploy or maintain as they are in homes or offices.

I've proudly convinced so many people to not go into that business, though I've also convinced a few people to give it a shot. It's not a good choice for most people, but some people can't really do much else and be happy. In many ways, its especially tolerant to neurodivergent folks with different skillsets being downright useful in different roles. It's hard as hell though. There's a good reason that CIA (the school, not the spies) requires 6 months of full-time back-of-the-house restaurant work to get admitted to their degree program.

They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.

Essentially, the louder the noise floor, the louder the signal has to get to be intelligible at every table, which raises the noise floor, creating a feedback loop. Good acoustic design in a space accounts for this by minimizing how much acoustic energy is present in the room - both by removing it (with acoustic treatment), spreading it away from sources (by isolating tables/booths, using hard surfaces to reflect sound away, etc), and preventing it from being created in the first place. For example, keeping bus stations behind galley doors and training staff not to clink silverware/glasses/dishes when filling bus bins and avoid playing loud music, etc.

In my experience, most restaurants fail at this because all the people who do it well are in the high-end restaurant business, which most restaurants are not. If the key to a space that isn't too loud is to limit the number of patrons, have dining room space allocated to treatment between tables, have highly trained staff with consistent management, and a big enough kitchen space with heavy enough doors to isolate the sound within - your only option is to be a high end restaurant.

But the high end places fail at it because they don't care and want to maximize the guest throughput because their margins still suck.

dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant

Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.

Ideally carpet the floor too - and if you use carpet tiles then when a customer spills something uncleanable on a tile it's a 5 minute non-expert job to pull up a tile and put in a new one.

Super dangerous and illegal, too.

The reason that professionals don't do this is because no one will permit it, not because there's some scam on acoustic foam and diffusers... well there is but it's not the acousticians' fault. It's a massive fire hazard.

You mean we haven't figured out a material that both dampens sound and is fire resistant?

Being as how the former quality is pretty easy, I find this hard to believe.

In fact, if you ever DIY some acoustic gobos or panels, rockwool insulation is about the best material you can find at the hardware store. But like another comment mentioned there are other concerns in commercial spaces, like cleaning/dusting.

The way the building code is written doesn't explicitly ban any material from walls/ceilings, but rather sets the constraints on the performance of the material when exposed to heat. There are higher limits for walls/ceilings than for floors because flames climb. Wall coverings (including wall paper and its glue) have to be flame retardant to meet code. There have been some infamous fires in the past, which is why this code exists (building codes are written in blood, as they say).

Most carpet doesn't go on walls, so it doesn't meet code, unlike wallpaper. And building inspectors are conservative people that are unlikely to permit you to do anything weird, even if you can prove by the letter of the IBC that some material is up to snuff.

(1) https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2021P2/chapter-8-interi...

Scroll down to see the details on wall textiles, specifically.

I’m not from the US but I visit often and could not understand this trend of party restaurants where you eat at club level sound blasting all around you. It’s the worst of both worlds, since you can’t talk with the loud music nor can dance since you’re sitting down.

Paraphrasing the great Donald Glover, I’m too old for this $hit!

I’ve had it since I was a kid because I always passed the hearing tests but every other kid had no trouble listening to music and understanding the words and so on so I put two and two together.

Anyway, I have never been able to understand anyone in any loud public space which absolutely blows when you’re not a home body.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

The Wikipedia page seems to really describe my condition, except for the potential overlap with ADHD. For example, the "difficulty following oral instructions". I can read something and retain it forever, but if someone speaks to me, it will often go in one ear and out the other.

I sometimes wonder if this could be a result of being a very introverted child who started reading at around 3 or 4 years old. (Because reading is so awesome, why bother listening to people -- and improving your auditory neurology -- after that?)

I think I've probably just adapted to the condition. It doesn't seem like any sort of problem or disability. But I suspect others around me find it much more annoying than I do. ;)

while I am doing something -- inability to switch attention to someone speaking to me if they do not first ask for my attention (excuse me / hello / myname / cough / knock) before diving into speaking in sentences.

very often by the time i start paying attention to them speaking -- they are 4-5 words into their sentence and I have missed the context of what they are talking about and i have to ask them to stop and repeat from start

This has happened with me in multiple settings (work and personal life)

Not sure if this is a common thing along with APD - which i recognize some symptoms of in myself

Consumer stuff is also getting better really quickly though

Theory: The bars and restaurants want young patrons, so the poor acoustics are a selection mechanism. Only young people can converse there, so older folks stay away. The place gets reputation as “young and hip.”

Whether by conscious design or “natural selection” for establishments, this seems to be the case.

My issue with foam earplugs is that they're too good at attenuating. I end up wearing them partially inserted, which is ok as long as you're staying still. If you are at a concert, or you're eating, or you have long hair, you'll disturb them.

[1]: https://www.offshorenorge.no/globalassets/dokumenter/drift/s...

It has been a long time since I worked tangentially with frequencies, but IIRC it physically isn't possible to block/dampen all frequencies of sound. Although due to different physical phenomena, this is why everything has a color and nothing is truly black - it is impossible for a material to suck in every wavelength of light.

I also have poor vision without glasses, and I’ve always found that when I go swimming (and can’t wear my glasses) my hearing also gets significantly worse. Or at least the cocktail party problem gets worse, as my brain seems to get overwhelmed by every single background noise. I think some of this is explained by many indoor pools being big echoey spaces, but it still happens at outdoor pools as well. I suspect that when one sense (sight) is degraded, my brain tries to compensate by focusing on another sense (hearing), and the end result is even worse due to APD.

I'm not sure what you mean by "only if you've learned some helplessness." I'm not a complete idiot, I can generally guess what someone is saying based on context, but if I'm having a conversation with Group A in a loud environment, and someone from group B turns to me and says something, I don't have much context as to what they're saying.

(Also, a PSA: if someone who didn't hear you says, "what", or "can you say that again?", don't just repeat the last three words you said. Please repeat the entire sentence. I know that usually, the last few words provide enough context to reconstruct the sentence, but if you just tell me "this Sunday?" it's usually not enough, you have to just say, "Are you still planning on reconfiguring the encambulator this Sunday?")

Behavioral training like LACE can be helpful for people who started doing things like that to cope with a hearing problem, but an audiologist should be looking at a filter (with APD you can be prescribed a filter for one ear even if you have no hearing loss, depending on your diagnosis.)

Neither case had anything to do with intelligence as demonstrated in every area of their life outside of hearing processing.

I and these others have auditory processing disorder as well.

My pet peeve about asking people to repeat isn't that they won't repeat enough, but that they'll repeat in exact the same volume and enunciation as they originally spoke. I'm not sure why they expect to do the same thing again and get different results. The only thing that I've found that works is to tell them what it sounds like they said, no matter how crazy ("Did you say, 'the elephant is painting the room'?") and only then will they speak loud and clear. (Which I'm sure is annoying for the other person, but what else am I to do?)

I find that I have trouble focusing on one conversation if others are happening around me, but that has much to do with where my focus lies as my brain being overwhelmed.

My solution to this problem is to carry on my keychain a pair of concert rated hearing protection earbuds. It's not a perfect solution, but you'd be surprised at how helpful it is to have some highs and lows filtered out.

Only downside beyond not being perfect, is people tend to think I put them in to block sound entirely. So I usually end up fielding questions about what they are, with a resulting 'man that's a smart idea'

Ymmv

I also have trouble discerning sounds in crowded spaces. Thanks for sharing your diagnosis, really interesting to think about.

That function of being able to mentally 'filter out' specific voices within a crowd is (semi?) common signal of autism. More accurately; I'm like that and I am autistic, I've read that it happens to a lot of others.

I can still manage to do these things but it takes longer, requires more effort and I'm generally never as good at it as others seem to be. I've always suspected these two things are related to each other and to my ADHD. There's a related audio issue I suspect is also tied to ADHD. When I'm mentally focused on a task, if someone interrupts me, I often miss the first couple words they say. Fortunately, when it happens I can usually derive the missing context from the rest of the content. Interestingly, it's not that I didn't hear the sound of the words, it feels more like a lag in mental context switching to parse the sounds into meaning.

I never considered ADHD affecting my visual processing but it very well could be.

> Interestingly, it's not that I didn't hear the sound of the words, it feels more like a lag in mental context switching to parse the sounds into meaning.

Happens to me all the time, I'm listening but sometimes my brain blips. I hear the words, but I no longer remember them by the time I'm trying to understand them.

You know, until you mentioned it, I'd never thought that that experience might have an ADHD-related component to it. Interesting.

I simply don't understand it, why the hell would I want a noisy place where I can barely hear anyone to have MORE noise!? it's not even good quality noise, it's usually top 40 from 10 years ago being blasted over shit speakers.

It sounds like that audiologist still wasn't specialized enough - otherwise I feel like your story would have extended differently; high demand mainstream audiologists, including the mainstream audiologist profession, don't seem to have a certain lineage of knowledge that I dramatically benefit from first when I was 23 (now 41), when I was in essentially a high-functioning Asperger's state - to where my hearing had devolved into a hyperacusis state - a severe hypersensitivity to sound - but where prior to that I had the same symptoms of difficulty with conversation, and busy rooms with lots of noise was extremely mentally draining-fatiguing, not realizing it was putting my mind on overdrive drying to actively focus and hone in on sounds vs. it autonomously happening.

Have you ever heard of Berard AIT (Auditory Integration Training/Therapy) or the Tomatis method? There's a book on the sound therapies called "Hearing Equals Behavior: Updated and Expanded."

There's a non-standard audiogram to check for imbalances in the hearing. The standard audiogram is they just pick say 30 Dbs volume and check various frequencies in each ear at that frequency, and if you can hear that - then "great!" The non-standard audiogram checking for imbalances checks for HOW LOW-QUIET of a sound you can hear at different frequencies, and interestingly, with 100% accuracy you can predict a set of behaviours that a person will have if they have an imbalance at certain frequencies like 1000 Hz; not all frequencies have associated behaviours with them.

An example of an imbalance would be if at 1000 Hz in your left ear the lowest sound you could hear was 15 Dbs, but in right ear you could hear at 10 Dbs - an imbalance of 5 Dbs, but where the idea is that the body-brain-mind is a system of finding homeostasis and equilibrium, so it should be able to have it so sounds are heard at the same level - evenly, save for actual physical damage. This is just a simple example and there can be high peaks and valleys that show up in the non-standard audiogram.

I have a similar story as yours. My issues with sound were almost identified in Grade 2 when going from a kindergarten setting, where there were no real performance or attention expectations, to Grade 2. The teacher noted I was having trouble paying attention. They thought maybe I had hearing issues, it was a private school and so they brought in an audiologist. My hearing was fantastic! So indeed, unfortunately, 30+ years ago especially they didn't consider that my hearing could be "too good" - where sound was overwhelming me; so I was hypersensitive to sound, arguably hyposensitive to touch and other senses, and it was medications in my late teens and early 20s that caused my hearing to get super hypersensitive - to the point where I was in what I consider a torture state for 8 months - where even the sound of blinking was painful, or at least that was the sensory I was associating the pain with - until I was forced to do my own research and eventually stumbled into Berard AIT.

There's also pre-care questionnaires that some practitioners offer - a checklist for behaviour of a child, and also of an adult, where I had ~80% of the behaviours both as a child and as an adult, e.g. preferred to sit in the back or corner of a classroom, essentially as there'd be less directions noise would be coming from, had trouble relaying a story or following instructions, etc.

Adult checklist: https://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care_adults.php

Child checklist: https://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care.php

NOTE: these places started offering "home programs" to send some audio equipment and the specially modified music, however I won't personally trust them until I've had the chance to do what I'd consider to be thoroughly done research to compare the original high-quality sound equipment that would produce the absolute highest quality of frequencies vs. what the rentable-shippable equipment produces.

Someday I need to write a chapter of a book or perhaps a whole book on my experiences of it all - the before and after state, the blocked development process (e.g. autistic state) that got unblocked and the development process that began to unlock - essentially I was blocked from processing emotions properly, so I arguably had a lifelong backlog of unprocessed memories with emotions associated with them needing to be labeled to be organized, as well as PTSD from many very intense traumatic years.

Not sure if audiologists phoning it in will know how to test for the latter

I actually find foam earplugs make voices easier to hear. I can have conversations during concerts with them somehow, in fact. So I figure if foam earplugs can do that for me, then earplugs designed to block only unwanted noise are probably even better.

Case in point, I was recently at a Swans concert—-they play very long sets, like 3 hours—-and my back got tight, so I started stretching. I heard someone 20 ft away talking shit! They said, “yeah, I guess you can do your Pilates here.” I finished the stretch and then heard, “oh, I guess he was just stretching.”

> I don't get why people go there and leave money, cause I wouldn't go there even for that money.

That's a problem with lack of empathy and understanding on your part, not with the group dynanimcs of that person's friends.

I thought I was the only one with this problem! Someone would make a joke and I would have to pretend to laugh because I didn't even catch what he/she was saying and asking them to repeat it the 3rd time would be awkward.

Even worse, it isn't always a joke, so even calibrating the laughter level is hard. Ugh.

My family will often have the TV on, games playing on phones, and talking too - I just can't hack it.

Equally the option to work from home has revolutionised my productivity - without having 10 things to filter out, I can just focus on getting the task in hand done. In an office I often get lost and distracted, and have to power through the noise.

My Mother has had poor hearing for decades. She listened to a radio as a kid she held it next to her ear at a loud volume. Now she often says she "can't stand noise" but it's because she can't hear in loud environments anymore due to hear hearing problems. I've noticed she misses the start of a sentences like if I said "I'm going to get some milk" she heard "got some milk" (as in I just got it). Or she interrupts people because she can't hear the first part of someone starting to speak most people tend to speak low at the start of a sentence.

Every time I looked into this, it seemed to push the link with autism and/or adhd - back in 2008 I wasn't diagnosed so I poo-pooed the idea somewhat. Now I'm diagnosed as AuDHD.

1. Don't speak fast. Speak slow. Enunciate and articulate all the consonants. And do it very slowly. Give the vowels lots of room to be noticed.

2. Don't speak lightly.

3. Don't mumble.

Aayyeee hHHaaaVVE TTOOO GOOO NNAAAoooUUU

They're not perfect, but the fact that I can move smoothly from "I need my ears open but still want to hear my headset" to "I need to block out sound and hear my headset perfectly clearly" with just a finger or a pair of earplugs is great.

Stick a shotgun mic (that's the term for a mic with tight directional cone, right? Not an audio guy) on the side and this would be really cool.

That's so you can lean in and get a little bit more friendly. Or go out for some fresh air together.

Other person: *mumble mumble* SOMETHING CLEARLY SPOKEN

Me: I'm sorry, what?

Them: "clearly spoken?"

Me: No, the first part.

Them: "something?"

Me, giving up: *smiles and nods* Yeah!

(quietly hopes I didn't just agree that putting hamsters in blenders or something is a cool idea)

This is one of those frustrating gaslighting things that is half true in that half the time I also pretend to hear what someone else is saying even though I couldn’t just because it’s not really important and making a big deal about it (ie asking them to repeat it at continuously louder decibels) can get awkward.

I recently had a test at an ENT doctor who told me my hearing is fine and insinuated I was wasting his time. The test was listening to high-pitched beeps over white noise, which isn't representative of the problem. Distinguishing one particular tone over several similar ones would be more like it.

I wrote about my experience with this last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897515

I did exactly the type of diagnosis you're talking about. It was quite good at how it simulated a noisy environment with a bunch of background chatter and then a single voice you were meant to listen to that would repeat various patterns of words with various combinations of lower speaking volume and/or higher background noise.

One thing I wish I'd made a point of at the time was the fact that, despite being an apparently soundproof booth with headphones on, I could definitely hear people talking in the waiting room and another audiologist in an adjacent room. Though I'm not sure it would have materially changed their lack of diagnosis (they'd already detected I could hear into negative decibels).

I still don't have a diagnosis, but I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that maybe it's not that my hearing is bad but that I actually hear too much. What I'd previously thought was my unability to hear people speaking on the radio in the car when everyone else clearly could wasn't because I couldn't hear the radio, it's that I can't hear it over the top of all the tyre and wind noise I'm also hearing and trying to process out. I don't think the other passengers in the car hear the rest of the noise, they only hear the radio.

I bought various types of Loop earplugs and have found them fantastic for live music events. I can now hear my friends when they're talking to me! Unfortunately they greatly amplify my perception of the volume of my own voice when I talk which has the undesirable side-effect of making me talk even quieter so I feel like I'm having to yell when I want to talk to people. I've also not found them as useful as I'd hoped in restaurant-type settings.

go and look the up the price, they are deeply expensive, even for basic "make it louder" type aids.

Worse still, because they interfere with your ear, you tend to loose the ability to "steer" your hearing. This means that you can't tune out other conversations/noises or stuff.

The one good side effect of facebook spending billions on its (probably) futile search for practical and popular AR is https://www.projectaria.com/glasses/

Which is a (cheap) platform to do experimentation for AR type actions.

However it has eye tracking, microphone array and front facing cameras, so it can be fairly easily modified into being a steerable microphone.

My Phonaks have the ability to automatically switch programs to some extent, and to fine tune the program using a companion app.

I can function and even have conversations to some extent in noisy environments, something that would have been impossible for me with hearing aids from a decade or so ago. I'm very grateful for this of course.

The pair costs roughly $2000. Luckily, it's covered by the national healthcare system[0] (which I of course pay for through my taxes) so I end up paying $50 every five years or so.

I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to not just amplify and filter (even if it's in very clever ways) but to isolate and enhance/reconstruct voices in noisy environments.

Meanwhile, I hope the trend of playing louder and louder music in cafes, restaurants and bars dies out. It's an accessibility nightmare, especially (but not only) for people with hearing loss.[1]

0: https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/en/about-us/healthcare-for-vi...

1: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...

I don't hold out much hope because as far as I can tell it's done to make everyone "shut up and drink". I could believe it adds at least 50% to sales because when you can't hear a word anyone says, all you can do is smile and nod and take a swig. And if the place is already full anyway, they don't care if you leave, you'll be replaced. What matters is whoever is in there taking up a space is drinking as fast as possible.

Of course, people who get substantially drunk (which is to say, customers who spend) also don't care because they're not really listening closely or making conversational sense anyway and their pain tolerance is way up, so it's just a good time to them.

Even more cynically, it also keeps the place "cool" because all the old, past-it fogeys like me don't even bother going in. From this sample of one, someone who thinks the music is too loud is un-hip, isn't adding to any hookup appeal (either not in the market or pushing the creepy end of the age range) and won't even spend much because they can't get really hammered because the hangover will take them out for two days and they can't afford to lose a weekend.

There was a musician (fairly accomplished in his field) who woke up one day and started hating all music because he realized you cannot escape it. He wrote a book about it but I forget his name.

As an aside, I searched for "musician book can't escape music" and your comment was on the front page of the Google results in sixth position. In fact it was in nearly every search I tried. I couldn't find such a book with moderate trying, just a BBC Point of View transcript on the same thing.

It's personally not a problem I've really noticed in my day to day (for example, today I would only hear music on my headphones at work and as part of TV others in the house are watching at home), though I probably don't spend my time in the same places a musician would.

I don’t see any reason proper hearing aids can’t already be doing it now though I am sure some of them are but probably the even more ridiculously priced $8k+ models.

Nuheara is also in this space but marketed and designed more specifically to be a low budget hearing aid replacement. With a similar pride to AirPods Pro.

I thought it's well established that they're doing it entirely on purpose. Restaurants, cafes and bars don't make money on you chilling out and having a good time with friends; they make money on you buying food and drinks. They want you to order and consume ASAP until you're full and leave, freeing the table for the next group of customers. Loud music that prevents you from having conversations is how they make this happen.

I can't make out any conversation in a noisy environment so usually switch to try-to-filter-noise-and-fail plus some amateur form of lip reading which works ok for a casual conversation but not for a more serious one. Hearing is "ok" enough though when testing, so no clue what it is.

It helps a lot when the ambient noise level reduced by a few db and tuning down the music helps a lot.

Edit: but OTOH I see people having actual conversations in those same environments, so I guess it doesn't affect everyone in the same way, and it's not either something fully related to how my eardrums are capable of working...

I’ve had my hearing tested. It’s within normal ranges across all frequencies tested. I have to assume it’s some kind of discrimination or processing difficulty in my brain.

I’ve noticed the same effect can be triggered even in a white environment by only two or three people trying to talk to me at the same time. I can’t understand anything any of them are saying and can’t listen to just one.

Most people definitely do not have it as badly as I do, or they'd never go to a noisy bar and try to talk. It's simply impossible for me to do anything but pay full attention to the person talking, and even then I often have to guess many of the words.

I even went and got my hearing checked (and my wife did at the same time), but the clerk assured me that we don't definitely have hearing problems and joked that we needed marriage counseling instead. :/ It's funny now, but I was a little pissed at the time.

Anyhow, my point is that some of us do indeed "hear" worse in noisy environments, even if our ears are amazing when it's quiet.

I think the two aspects might be related. Possibly the average brain is more finetuned to recognize speech specifically, which comes at the cost of recognizing other sounds, but improves speech recognition. Ours are less finetuned, with the opposite effect.

It's funny how for some problems the path to the solution is blocked by deadlock

My current pair are about 6 years old, working fine still, thankfully... But in a recent visit to audiologist, they had me test out a newer pair... but they had a single button instead of rocker + button, and bluetooth/app was touted.

I dread the touchscreen phase of HA as a young person with functional fingers (vs elders with dexterity issues) and a preference for physical buttons (a la my 2009 car).

The idea of autoswitching the programs outside limited cases (direct audio input cables and increasingly-rare telecoil situations are the only things I would accept) also doesn't sound great! :)

Connecting to the app takes forever and frequently fails. It seems to clash with the Android device pairing somehow. It's not great. The only workaround I've found (if restarting the things by opening/closing the battery compartment doesn't work) is to remove the pairing and set them up again.

I also would prefer to set up the programs once and then switch them with physical buttons. I had my audiologist do something like that with my old pair. New audiologist now that doesn't seem as flexible, or maybe it's not possible.

The bad app experience is honestly a reason for me to look at other brands for my next pair.

I'd like to think that a bit of a learning curve is okay for something that's basically an extension of your body, but everything seems to be getting stevejobsified these days. (I'll be driving my 2006 Saab until my mechanic either retires or runs out of spare parts!)

While the latter is probably the preferred approach for dealing with the issue, I'll admit my mind first went to:

If you've got time for a side-project maybe consider reverse engineering the Android app's Bluetooth support... and, you know, "just" re-implement the same thing in some stand alone hardware. :)

There may even already be a project related to your device--I'm aware of multiple health/medical-tech/device related reverse engineering projects that were primarily driven people with programming/hardware experience wanting to avoid crappy vendor apps & have control of very personally relevant devices.

Shes older so that might be part of the technical challenge with them but i would have expected better given the huge price tag. Feels a bit like a monopoly running the development but that is merely a hunch.

I often see AI hopes expressed in this format. I would put it another way:

> I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to restore hearing to baseline average human level

Wishful thinking would be to enhance it beyond baseline. It's perfectly reasonable to think AI-advances can help researchers restore hearing in most cases, and reasonably within 10 years or so.

Otherwise the stuff you described in your comment around attention filtering starts to happen because of the sensory loss. Therefore the longer you avoid hearing correction once your hearing starts to become impaired, the more complex and expensive a hearing aid you need to re-do. This is because these expensive hearing aids do a poor approximation of the things your brain/auditory cortex was doing prior to the sensory loss.

BRB - better go book a hearing test.

I guess they're expensive because of relations with medical / health companies being complaint makes things expensive (eg. the same display but with certification to use in a medical facility would cost many times more).

The device is relatively simple to make so I asked my teacher why were they so expensive. He said that yeah, the engineering/manufacturing side of it is about 200 EUR, the remaining 9.8k EUR is spent on certifications/paperwork.

Obviously, wages factor into this but over time I've come to see how paperwork and paying lawyers do in fact account for the majority of the cost.

Expensive, yes. My hearing aids cost ~$2500CAD each but "how shit hearing aids are" is not my experience at all. My hearing aids (Widex) are awesome! The quality of audio in normal situations is fantastic. My only real complaint is that they're not completely waterproof so I have to plan ahead a bit if I'm going to be outdoors in the rain.

I don't think anyone would suggest them as a realistic choice today but I could see Apple going after that market and where Apple goes others follow.

Much like the market for prescription reading glasses has been eroded by off the self glasses.

You have two microphones already, spaced about 30 cm apart...

but you don't need eye tracking all the time, as most you can latch on to the location of the speaker without looking at them continuously.

The possibilities are rather good, but it needs someone willing to fund the research

I've noticed Americans like to bs their medical costs as bad as the system is, you can't compare some newest luxury devices to what an average person is using all around the world.

recent legislation in the US was meant to bring down hearing aid cost and to break the monopoly on devices. It’s seemingly worked so well that TV commercials for individual brands have started to show up for low cost aids (sub-$5k)

I was shocked, when I found out.

Of course, you aren’t just paying for the hardware. You are also paying for all the medical stuff surrounding the kit.

You can understand why vested interests fought so hard to prevent making hearing aids OTC.

Like I said, I suspect that gravy train may have derailed.

Having worn hearing aids for 3 decades (in the US), and not going cheap, the high end name-brand ones have always been about 4-6k for a pair. (and most of the time growing up, health insurance didn't cover it)

From everything I've ever seen or in any conversation online, 50k is either a misremembered or made up number for BTE or in-the-canal hearing aids.

I'm fortunate that I could reasonably plan to pay for it myself... the bigger hold-up/concern/issue has been the drastic change in "how I hear" that it would involve. (experiences are widely variable it sounds like, but loosely about a year for the brain to gradually learn and improve how it uses the new input?)

I haven't even opened the manufacturers' books given to me, or done more research on the possibility since that appointment though...

My moms hearing aids cost 3000€. They support bluetooth so she can use them with her iPhone. The price includes hearing tests, getting molds of the hearing canal, all the setup and configuration performed by skilled technicians.

Sure they are expensive, but there really isn't much of an opportunity for disruption. Customized hardware is expensive, there's no way around that.

I noticed that someone else posted a comment, saying that Americans exaggerate medical costs.

We don't.

Our doctors drive Bentleys.

I'm really glad that they have broken the monopoly. Maybe some politicians retrieved their souls.

It's absolutely insane how expensive healthcare is in the US.

But THANK GOD we don't have socialism! /s

It's not worth arguing about. This is not an area I'm anywhere near expert in, as I suspect, many other commenters are.

You mean the specific hearing aid searches?

It was a general comment on the state of health care in the US (not just hearing aids).

Before the new legislation, we couldn't just go to the corner drug store, and buy a hearing aid off the shelf. It needed to come as part of a package, including many tests and appointments with ENT folks.

But I cede the point. It was a low-quality comment that is likely to trigger folks with certain political views, and I apologize. Won't happen again.

Apple was working taking the platform even further at one point and I would not be surprised if we see some new announcements eventually.

Imagine if a $200 set of airpod pros outperformed top hearing aids.

Do people genuinely have that ability, to listen to a specific person and ignore the rest?

Asking because no matter how hard I try I can never understand a fucking thing if there's many people talking loudly in the background, it all mixes together into an incoherent whole.

Indeed! however like visual depth perception, not everyone has it. The human ear has a load of bits that allow removing noise from the signal. (I don't have a block diagram, sorry!)

In theory one should be able to locate a noise in 3D. You can test this by getting someone to hide your phone and then ring it. if you have 3d sound perception you should be able to work out if the phone is behind/front/up/down.That forms part of the "steering" ability.

Then there is filtering the noises that you don't want. Music is can be a good test for this, how many instruments played on this track, what instruments were they, what were the lyrics, etc. Being able to do this requires that you be able to filter out noises that you don't like.

Again like all human senses, there are levels of ability, and in some cases can be improved with "exercise"

But, hearing what people are saying against a loud background is really really hard, so don't worry too much. Plus voices have specific human social encoding, so they can be affected disproportionally

I wonder if some constructors could target this use-case by making aids that are very easy to self-calibrate.

On the other hand, the median hearing aid user is pretty old, has lots of disposable money and has never watched a youtube tutorial in their life, so it might be a small market.

Not to mention, it probably takes a couple of years to get the certification for a device. So, any device to market is easily 2-3 years old tech by definition.

Approval can be quicker for hearing aids as there are already works-alike devices on the market. 510(k) clearance takes less than 6 months.

If you can pick out audio from individuals, you could also send it through speech recognition and subtitle real world conversations for when hearing is worse or not there at all.

But it really needs mobile devices capable of doing the processing locally, as I think round trips to the cloud would make it less useful or potentially useless.

Still, the transcription part is already here today. The Google Translate app has a transcribe app that does this (runs locally; does not do magic AI "pick voice out from crowd"). My father-in-law has been using it for years. When I'm in a loud environment, the app I use on iOS is called Big, which just displays large text on the screen.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/make-it-big/id479282584

I'm in one of the biggest cities of my current country, and the RTT to google from me is 87-91ms. Well over 4 million people live within 100km of me, so I suspect they see similar latencies. On my cell, I see 191-207ms.

Looks like a good 60ms is nothing but buffer-bloat in the router, as when pinging directly from the router, the RTT is much less.

I would think this shouldn't be a problem as the correct hardware gets adopted in phones. As it stands now, you could probably run it on a Coral USB accelerator and battery run Pi (just an example of hardware, obviously we don't have the code).

Has a problem that I think the AI headphones wouldn't solve either: in a (non-quiet) group setting you still need to anticipate who's going to speak when and look at them for best results.

The direction bit is just biasing to preferring forward stuff (via two mics on each ear's HA).

Sadly, no backwards bias option for overhearing people behind you ;)

So something that would enhance the speech of whomever I'm looking at would be super cool. Apple AirPods already have some sound shaping abilities to react to environment and mode. They also support specific voice enhancement if you put your phone down in front of the person speaking. If they ever support directional voice enhancement, like in this research, directly in the AirPods it would help me so much with social interactions in loud places.

It's common to wear ear plugs at concerts, to avoid destroying your ears. Not imagine replacing those ear plugs with in-ear headphones that filter everything except your family/friends and the concert, while regulating the volume (if your SO talks to you make that one voice loud over the rest), maybe keep the "crowd noise" going with the flow but remove normal conversations for people around, etc ...

I'm not in ML/AI/etc ... At all but my understanding is that none of that is actually impossible with current tech ? Sure the battery and power limits exists, but this is a concert those headphone with a "band" going behind your head to keep them in place / not lose them if it falls makes sense. Would need some training for "your voice" but if alexa can do it in 10 seconds then a phone app can do that too.

Hell, if it existed for movies theater at below 200€ I would probably buy one right now and maybe go to the movies again.

Over 4 years ago nvidia released a feature that lets you remove arbitrary background noise in real-time.

Here's a video where a guy put a fan, vacuum cleaner and leaf blower right next to his microphone: https://youtu.be/Q-mETIjcIV0?t=535

It definitely chopped out a bunch of his natural frequency but it was clear enough to hear him without issues. Earlier in the video he did more normal tests like removing the sound of his keyboard in which case his voice's frequencies were mostly left untouched. He also banged a hammer on his desk while talking.

I don't sound fantastic on it, but i sound better than people using cellphone microphones and thrift store microphones. It also works if i talk loudly from another room, but won't pick up normal volume conversations in the same room, which means there's a noise gate in there, too.

I've heard a very abrasive sneeze sounds like "chew!", like a cartoon sneeze or something. I couldn't tell the difference in a blind test between a cellphone's noise cancelling with the sound recorder and the asus device vis a vis overall quality, but the gating on the asus is more aggressive. It also works better than the default discord noise reduction, but is about equal to the Krisp (iirc) implementation. Its gate is faster than discord if you have both krisp and the normal noise cancelling on.

I think they're discontinued. If i ever see one in the wild i'll be sure and buy it. I have never tried it with a decent microphone - and i do have a couple, including shure and marantz - because there's no need. I wouldn't use it for podcasting or doing anything where the overall quality would be noticed; but for discord / in game / PC telephony it works great.

Like others in this thread are saying, though, it would be an incredible boon for people who use hearing aids.

My understanding is that to "mute" a sound, you need to inject another wave that is exactly the opposite, with the exact same volume and in perfect sync, so that the two waves interfere destructively. However, in general but especially in AI, you can never guarantee 100% accuracy. If you use this technology to "silence" a background fountain, and something goes wrong, at worst you get a lot of noise that make you grimace and remove them. If at a concert with 100+ dB of music you get an error and your headphones start producing a similarly loud, but not perfectly aligned noise right into your ears, you probably won't have the time to remove them before damaging your hearing system.

In general, I think that having a tool that drives 100+ dB straight into your head is probably not a wise idea :-)