Watching TV when hard of hearing

lol This is my theory of aging that this “proves”. We get older. Maybe our ears are deteriorating. We spend more money on amplification devices to hear better. The ears keep going downhill. We spend more money. The ears win.

Hot tip…dialog is primarily in the center channel. Dial down all the other speakers to bring out the dialog in the center. Fun funsies, I dialed down everything else to nothing and just had the dialog. You lose a lot of ambience and intentional emotional manipulation of the music but the dialog sure is great.
I had also directed that center channel to my loop. Worked great.
The tv connector beats it all though.

Very int’g about the Live Listen connection! I’ll save your instructions and try that! I do a similar thing sometimes with the external mic that links to my Resound HAs. I turn it on and place it near the TV speakers. Direct audio to my ears!!

It’s easier listening to a 90s series than more recent. There are many complaints out there for specific shows of more recent times even by the undiagnosed (won’t say fully capable as many may just have challenges they are not aware of).

Star Trek series in particular for me - the more recent renditions like Discovery especially. The sound track I swear are designed by idiots. Sound affects & music that will take your head of but dialog ha. Especially in a scene where they are talking quiet/whispering - yeh we get it for theatrical sake but really we can see they are whispering, you don’t literally have to take the dialog down 7 notches…

A major help for me and my wife, in addition to hearing aids, is a auxilary speaker made my TV Ears. It is not the funky earbuds/headset they make. It is actually a speaker that looks like a tall Alexa. Between it, captions and HAs, we understand most of what we hear on TV programs.

A good idea. Also, they are delayed a few hours generating CC on the Newshour broadcast to the west coast, I mean the YouTube version. Maybe it’s me, but I can’t always find the delayed version w captions.

It’s now 2 years later. I just watched a fancy new 90 min. program on Oceans with famous discussants. During almost all of the talking and glorious footage, loud mood music was playing, vying with the spoken word. Without CC, I would have been lost!! Neighbor with whom I watched it also wears hearing aids, but his loss not so great as mine. He said the voice-over music does not bother him, and he understands it fine, despite the loud mood music.

I stopped watching tv during the years my hearing got bad and I couldn’t afford hearing aids. That broke the habit, and after I did get aids, I have never watched a lot, but when I do, I have the Phonak TV Connector and keep closed captions on. I don’t like relying on the captions because reading them keeps me from really watching the show, but sometimes I have to rely on them. Anyway, having the connector and captions makes watching possible.