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Group of 4 - Noisy Restaurant

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I went to my favorite coffee shop today for lunch with a client. The barista knows I wear , but had only ever talked to me at the counter. When he seated us at a table, he noticed we were close to a hidden speaker and he quietly reached back and turned it down as a took a the seat with my back facing the wall. I thanked him and he winked at me. That is the most thoughtful thing anyone has done for me in a while! And he is about nineteen.

Avoid HARD restaurants. Restaurants without soft furnishings are bad. I am on a Parish Council and we now meet in a church hall with the same problem.
Had to go to a McDonalds earlier this month, same problem.

Insist on going to restaurants that have drapes, fabric chairs, carpets if possible and sound baffles - ie you are not eating in a kitchen. A cruise ship has all of these and with 100 diners it is rarely a problem.

If all else fails, switch them off :slight_smile:

I’ve been in property management. Cheap restaurants say they don’t have a large profit margin. They want to have rapid turnover. Ceilings and carpets? Bah humbug. Gotta pay for those.

There’s a SoundPrint app for reporting sound levels in restaurants and searching for an establishment’s reported levels.

I have Phonak Marvel and a Roger Select iN. The Roger Select makes all the difference in a restaurant. If I’m just with my spouse, she wears the Roger around her neck. If we’re with others, I put the Roger on the table. If no one is talking at our table, I do hear a lot of noise from nearby tables. If people at my table talk, their words come directly to my ears, like they were talking into an ear trumpet. People at surrounding tables are mostly muted. But when someone else at my table talks, the ear trumpet moves over to their mouths. It’s magical. It’s also. not cheap, but when Roger had an accident a year ago and stopped working, my spouse told me that in no uncertain terms was I to find the $$ to get a new one. It seems that Roger wasn’t just a benefit for me, but for my spouse and cohorts as well. Fortunately, it got “repaired” under warranty. Whew!

In reply to @vtuser

I was searching for Live Transcribe and found a few different ones. Which is the one that you are using? There’s also another called NALscribe which someone had recommended. I haven’t tried it yet in a noisy place!

In the Android Play Store, I see 3 Live Transcribes listed - Live Transcribe, Live Transcribe & Notification and Live Transcribe App. It appears that all 3 are the same app from Google Research. I’m not sure which one I installed now but they appear to be the same one.

I know people with perfect audiometry test, yet suffering from the same symptoms as you describe.

Not hearing well in noisy environments can have two main root causes: “hidden hearing loss” and “auditory processing disorder”.
Googling will bring you many links, picking a couple from the first page:

Hidden Hearing Loss: A Disorder with Multiple Etiologies and Mechanisms

Hidden hearing loss (HHL), a recently described auditory disorder, has been proposed to affect auditory neural processing and hearing acuity in subjects with normal audiometric thresholds, particularly in noisy environments. In contrast to central...

and

Hidden Hearing Loss: What It Is & What You Can Do About It | ENT of Athens...11

Do you frequently misunderstand what people are saying or feel as though you can’t hear well in background noise like during a dinner party?

In my opinion you could:

  1. Ask for comprehensive exams to understand the root cause (eg. speech-in-noise test)
  2. Ask your audiologist to create a dedicated program for noisy environments

Point 2. is basically about filtering out some frequencies to favour the speech spectrum and enabling noise cancelling through (digital signal processing). In standard conditions you may not notice the difference, but in noisy environments this can improve your (social) life a big deal.

The type of loss matters too. I believe nose cancellation and directional microphone settings work best for significant hearing loss across the whole frequency range. In noisy restaurants, I feel my direct hearing through the vents prevents those features to work as well as they could. So what I do in noisy places, I use closed ear pieces without vents to bring the overall volume down. Then, then the aids perform better, specifically noise cancellation. In really loud places like some bars, for me, it is even beneficial to use earplugs. Signal to noise ratio can be improved by bringing overall volume down and allowing people to shout in your ear.

Edited

@hh1

Yes as long as it’s the Roger On iN or Roger Select iN.

In reply to @Markismus

Markismum, all you’ve said makes sense. I may add that going to sports bars or anywhere they have two or more TV’s on are places I avoid, can’t hear anyone at my table.

You gave me a laugh, saying, “Only problem is hearing the price”. So true.

In reply to @Acrover

@Acrover said:

So what I do in noisy places, I use closed ear pieces without vents to bring the overall volume down. Then, then the aids perform better, specifically noise cancellation.

I use the smallest domes that I can get as I find comfort is more important than performance. Superb performance is pointless if the aids are too uncomfortable to wear.

I find when streaming audio from my TV Connector that the gain if I put my fingers in my ears is significant. I might just try something like cotton wool to see if it ensure most sound that reaches my eardrums is processed by the hearing aids.

My Multi Mic helps, but not if really noisy. If very noisy and I choose to be there, I just pull my aids out, sit quietly, and enjoy my meal

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