Tag: Ipod

A personal story about hearing loss

dog-with-hearing-loss
Only people without hearing loss could ever use this means of communication.

Here is a story  about hearing loss from the early days of Friday on My Mind, January 16, 2013. Nothing much has changed in 12 years except to give those new to hearing aids a heads up – they need replacing at least every five years. My hearing loss took a bit of a dip in 2020 but that proved to be due to a physical ailment. Nevertheless I forked out a few grand for a new pair of hearing aids in 2023 and yes, they have a charging station. We still need the debate about a simple piece of technology that has just one function yet costs four times more than a laptop or tablet which can deliver, well, anything.

By Bob Wilson

This story begins with a famous pangram (a phrase using all letters of the alphabet) – The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. We’ll get back to that later.

When I went to the bedside cabinet drawer on Monday to change my hearing aid batteries, I had just two left (they last about 7 days). Next day I rang my service provider who said they would post some to me, as per the terms of their 12-month contract. Australians dispose of approximately 156 million lithium hearing aid batteries per year. That is a serious amount of lithium in the landfill. Some hearing aid manufacturers now sell rechargeable hearing aid pods (the batteries last for a year). It’s about bloody time.

It started off being wryly amusing. For years I thought Jimi Hendrix was singing, “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy”, (now the name of a website which chronicles mis-heard lyrics). Is Billy Joel really singing, “You made the rice, I made the gravy”? Does the line in Toto’s Africa sound like “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do?” Or Canada’s national anthem – “Oh, Canada, we stand on cars and freeze?”

After five years of asking people to repeat what they said and seeking refuge in my favourite three words – “What?’ “Pardon” or “Mm,” I had my hearing tested.

Six months into the quixotic world of hearing devices, I have mixed feelings; good days and bad days and also much for which to be thankful. Gone are the days when I thought my wife said “Hearty Elephant” when she actually meant “hardly relevant”. I could go on, but you hard of hearing blokes out there know about which I speak.

If you are losing the high frequencies (and we all do as we age), if it gets too bad you won’t discern between words like ‘list’ and ‘fist’, you will turn the TV up louder than your partner will like and you’ll avoid going out to places where people gather.

But hearing loss is not just a problem for older people. The Ipod generation and those who frequent dance clubs and rock concerts are at high risk of damaging their hearing. There’s a lot of difference between the 50 to 60 dB level of normal conversation and the 140 dB pumped out by some of the world’s big stadium bands.

Phillip Adams is one of the few mainstream writers who confessed in public to needing hearing aids. Adams canvassed themes with which I had become entirely familiar, through five years of denial and hogging the TV remote.

“I developed a preference for foreign films with subtitles,” Adams wrote in The Australian Magazine, December 2012, adding that he rather enjoyed the self-censorship which came with deafness “..allowing me to ignore a bombardment of banal conversation or unattractive views”.

BHA (Before Hearing Aids), we’d be watching the splendid US spy thriller Homeland (with subtitles) which might read “birds chirping” or “dog barking in distance”. I could not hear those sorts of noises at all. AHA (after Hearing Aids), as the audiologist warned me, flushing the toilet evoked memories of a trip to Niagara Falls in 2010. I no longer heard faint chirping in the Bottle Brush tree next to our front veranda – I could hear and identify honeyeaters, wrens, whip birds, cat birds as well as the sound of frogs and the creek gently running at the bottom of our block, 100m away.

They say it can take your brain a year to adjust to being able to hear high frequencies again. The audiologist patiently heard the problems I reported when playing guitar or whistling. I complained it sounded like an effects pedal and there was feedback and other unpleasant sounds. After some tweaking of compression and other frequencies, these problems diminished. Now I am finding the handiest thing about these devices is the volume button. I turn it down if people’s voices sound brassy and loud up close and up when, say, listening to a speaker in an auditorium. Oh and the wonderful music programme button – four-part harmonies and fiddle/mandolin solos never sounded so sweet.

The amazing thing, considering the estimated 1.45 million Australian who have hearing aids, is why there is so little dissent about the disproportionate cost. Even mid-range hearing aids can set you back $3,000 each and if your hearing loss is serious or your job depends on hearing every word, you’ll be in double that figure in no time. Meanwhile, you can go to a computer shop and walk out with the latest Mac laptop for less than $2,000 and enough computer power to run an international online business. Or you can use a smart phone’s GPS, telecommunications suite, camera, video, skype, email, internet access and hundreds of apps for no money at all. Just sign here and pay your bill every month.

While hearing aids fall into the category of a big ticket retail item, it pays to shop around. There are sales-oriented hearing clinics out there which will lure you in with a free assessment and then push you fairly hard to sign a contract.

I got assessed by a couple of private clinics then went with the Federal Government’s voucher system (for the over-65s), opting to pay for a “top-up”. My mid-range, programmable hearing aids (I have two) cost me $3,400 and the government paid the rest.

Choice magazine surveyed 525 people to find the main reason people get hearing aids is to overcome social disconnection and isolation. But half of the people interviewed had problems with their hearing aids and one is six were dissatisfied, so it is no simple fix.

Choice said people also shop around online, citing a member who was quoted $12,000 for a pair of top-end hearing aids and ended up buying online from a UK retailer for about $4,250. The retailer programmed the hearing aids according to his audiogram. The member later found a local clinic to service his aids for $100 to $200 per appointment.

There can be warranty issues taking this approach, but increasingly, older Australians are starting to add hearing aids to the list when they go to Thailand or the Philippines for dental work or knee replacements.

Whatever the options, I can say I’d rather have my hearing aids, imperfections and all, than go back to the muddy pond that was once my hearing.

Meanwhile, for those of you who do not (yet) suffer hearing loss, consider this. Occupational health and safety advocates nonprofitrisk.org says the permissible top limit for noise exposure over an eight-hour period is 90 decibels.  If you don’t know what that means, here’s a short list:

  • 80 decibels: city traffic, manual machine, tools;
  • 90 decibels: lawn mower, motorcycle, tractor;
  • 100 decibels: woodworking shop, factory machinery;
  • 110 decibels: chainsaw, leaf blower;
  • 120 decibels: ambulance siren, heavy machinery, jet plane on runway;
  • 130 decibels: jackhammer, power drill.

So if you’ll recall the pangram we cited in the first paragraph. If you’ve got moderate hearing loss, Australian Hearing says this is what you will hear:

__e _i_ brown _o_ jum_ed over _e _azy dog.

Scary isn’t it!

Friday on My Mind was a weekly column by Bob Wilson, published by Bob & Laurel Wilson Consulting Pty Ltd. You can now catch up on occasional post-2023 Digressions or troll the archives on this website.

 

 

 

How we listen to music in 2022

cassettes-cds-streaming
Image: Technology exists to convert a cassette to MP3 – have we had a copyright ruling on that?

This week I decided to reflect on the many ways we can listen to music in this digital age. We’ve come a long way since the first recording etched on to a wax cylinder in 1860. In just 50 years, the mainstream way of listening to music has moved from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs and now to online streaming. It’s been quite an evolution.

This FOMM was inspired by a frustrating search for an album by Californian bluegrass singer AJ Lee and her band, Blue Summit. I was introduced to AJ at U3A Warwick’s Music Show, where presenters curate a list of YouTube clips and provide background on the tracks. This particular song was performed by the Brothers Comatose and AJ Lee, a splendid interpretation of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

On Monday I started packing for a week away in the caravan, part of it at the best music festival in Queensland, Neurum Creek Festival. This one has been running for 16 years at the Neurum Creek Bush Retreat, which is about 12 kms from Woodford. In preparing and packing, I decided to see if I could load new music on my Ipod, which is no longer supported by Apple. The problem is that as I now longer use ITunes, the music player I use can’t ‘talk’ to the Ipod. Mr Shiraz sent me a link to a piece of software that will mimic ITunes so you can ‘sync’ your music collection with an Ipod, a portable music player invented by Apple in 2001. Since Apple stopped supporting Ipods, many users have opted to put them in a drawer and move on. One alternative is to buy a cheap mobile phone, add a large storage card and use it as a personal music player.

I could tell how far CDs had dropped in popularity when looking to buy AJ Lee’s 2021 album, I’ll Come Back. I decided not to download it on Spotify, as the artists are paid a trifling amount when we listen to their music on that platform.

Subsequent searches found the album on streaming services, which was not what I wanted. I went direct to AJ Lee’s website and the only option was to purchase a physical CD and wait however many weeks or months it takes to arrive from the US. Then I tried Bandcamp (where you will find our music). Success, the album was there. I duly downloaded the album and now can listen to it on my computer, my phone and, once I get around to it, burn a CD for my ‘new’ 5-CD changer.

The CD player failed some months ago and I eventually established that the model was obsolete and a replacement laser could not be found. I opted for a refurbished model from a seller on Ebay. It’s a quality Sony deck and, so far, is working perfectly.

Before I went into hospital for a procedure in late August, I spent a day (dusting) and alphabetising our CD collection (450-plus). I told She Who Loves Order in her Life I had done this ‘so if I cark it, at least you’ll know the CDs are in A-Z and not filed according to ‘mood’.

As audiophiles will tell you, CD music is superior to cassette but inferior to vinyl, because the digital sound is compressed.

Vinyl music played on top line analogue systems always sounds better than both CDs and the alternative (playing or streaming MP3 quality tracks). The cassette, with its annoying hiss and tendency to become snarled in the player, is a long last.

Audio cassettes were invented by a Dutch company (Philips) and adopted by mainstream America in the mid-60s. My memory of cassettes is that people would borrow someone else’s tape and dub a cassette to play in the car. This practice was and still is illegal, even if retailers happily sold boxes of blank cassettes and high-end twin cassette decks on which one could dub to a blank tape. (The last piece of music technology I actually understood.  Ed.)

Most of us have a couple of shoeboxes in the cupboard full of cassettes – legitimate ones bought in music stores, or bootleg copies. The difficulty now is that, for most people, their means of playing cassettes has evaporated. My tape deck worked for about 20 years. One deck stopped working and then the sound quality became so poor we decided to switch to another medium.

I did a straw poll among people of my vintage to establish how they listen to music (if they listen to music at all). Most said they no longer had a CD player (it either died or they found the business of swapping them over tedious). Most late model cars no longer come with a CD player, so that accelerated the decline in popularity.

Some people opt for a WIFI speaker through which they can stream music from YouTube or Spotify. How this works is you turn the gadget on and say in a loud, clear voice: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.” There is a pause, a whirring sound and a disembodied voice says: “OK, playing DJ Goodwill.”

Others turn on their smart TV and then search for music videos on YouTube. Depending on your cinema surround sound system (if you have one), the sound quality is OK. The database of video clips is apparently bottomless, but the quality is uneven.

According to Gizmodo’s history of the compact disc, the first commercial CDs were available in Australia in late 1982 (about 150 titles). This was a few years before we moved to Brisbane and bought a Technics stereo system for around $1,500 (it was on sale). We started a CD collection then and even today, I prefer a CD to any other format.

What is hard to stomach is knowing I paid $25 to $30 each and sometimes more for an imported disc. Today you can go to a charity shop and buy CDs for coins. It’s not about money, though. Our CD collection is special in that at least 100 CDs were given to us either as a gift or as a swap (one of ours for one of theirs) by musicians we know.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said streaming accounted for 86% of $565.8 million music sales in Australia in 2021. Over the same period, physical music sales dropped from $100.5 million to $56.1 million. Vinyl albums led the way at $29.7 million, compared with $24.9 million for CD albums.

A Roy Morgan research report in 2020 said 12.7 million Australians were using a streaming service. Spotify is the clear market leader with 8m customers, almost double what it was in 2017. YouTube Music is next with 4.4m users in Australia.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) concurs, saying 61% of Australians used a streaming service in June 2020, up from 48% in 2019. As you’d expect, 88% of the 18-34 age group used music streaming services. Surprisingly (well, I’m surprised), the biggest growth in online music streaming was the 55-64 cohort (from 47% to 59%), 65-75 (30% to 44%) and the over-70s (17% to 26%).

I confess I’m part of that trend, although this weekend it’s all about live music, coffee and a CD shop – the way it should be.