Hearing aids at church, at the stadium, and at the dinner table

People ask whether hearing aids will work at church, and the honest answer is that it depends on the room and on what has been set up. These three environments are difficult for three completely different reasons, and each has a different solution.

Church, auditoriums and lecture halls

The problem is distance and reverberation. A speaker thirty feet away arrives quietly, and hard surfaces mean you hear each word several times, milliseconds apart, smeared together. Directional microphones help less here than people expect, because the reflections are arriving from every direction.

What actually works:

• A hearing loop, if the building has one. This is the single best answer and it is badly underused. A loop transmits the sound system directly to a telecoil in your hearing aid, bypassing the room entirely. It sounds like the speaker is talking inside your head. Ask whether your church has one, and if it does, ask us to activate the telecoil programme, because it is frequently sitting there switched off.
• A remote microphone. Clipped to a lectern or handed to the speaker, it streams straight to your hearing aids. This works in any room, loop or not.
• Sit forward and to the centre. Direct sound falls off with distance while reflected sound does not, so the front third of the room has a much better ratio.
• Sit where you can see the speaker’s face. Behind a pillar is worse than three rows further back.

If your church does not have a loop, it is worth raising with them. They are not expensive relative to a sound system and they serve everyone in the congregation with hearing loss at once.

Stadiums, concerts and loud events

The problem is not that it is too quiet. A stadium crowd runs well above the level at which sustained exposure causes damage, and a concert can be higher still.

What actually works:

• Consider protection rather than amplification. If you have hearing left, protecting it matters more than hearing the announcer. Musician’s earplugs reduce level evenly rather than muffling, so the event still sounds like itself. Details on the musicians earplugs page.
• If you wear your hearing aids, ask for a loud environment programme. This limits output and applies heavier noise reduction. It is not the default and it should be, for anyone who goes to games regularly.
• Take breaks. Twenty quiet minutes in a concourse genuinely reduces the total exposure.
• Watch it with children. The same event is a bigger dose for a smaller ear canal, and a fifteen year old’s exposure is still with them at sixty. More on preventing noise damage.

The dinner table

The problem is competing voices, which is the hardest of the three because the noise is other speech, sitting in exactly the frequency range you need.

What actually works:

• Directional microphones. This is precisely what they are for. Higher technology levels do this better, and it is the main thing you are paying for when you move up a tier.
• Sit with your back to the room so the directional pattern is working with you rather than against you.
• Round tables over long ones. Faces at a similar distance and everyone in the same conversation.
• A table microphone for family gatherings. Genuinely transformative at a holiday table with ten people. See the table microphone.
• Kill the background. Television off rather than down, and music off during the meal.

More on why this environment is so hard in our piece on restaurants.

The general point

Most hearing aids leave our office with more than one programme, and most people never use the others because nobody told them which situations they were for. If there is a specific room that defeats you, a particular church, a regular meeting, a weekly card game, say so at your next appointment. It is usually a ten minute adjustment and an accessory recommendation, not a new purchase.

Book an appointment or call 770-590-8662.