Does a Lack of Loops Drive You Loopy?

Hands up if your hearing aid has a T-setting. Hands up if you regularly encounter loops that are not working or not switched on? Frustrating, isn’t it?

I’m new to being a loop user. I never felt the need to use them before but as my hearing is deteriorating, my audiologist recently recommended I start using loops and she activated the T-setting on my hearing aid.

Off I went into the world, which seemed pregnant with possibilities of smoother encounters at customer service points and checkouts and an ability to access conferences and theatre performances.

Oh, how quickly I came crashing back down to earth from the reality of how poorly serviced we are in terms of loop provision here in England!

Here is an account of my first two weeks as a loop ‘user’ (and I use the term loosely because I never got to ‘use’ a single loop).

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My Venture Experience

When we first launched our Venture platform in October I chose to wear the aids myself for a little over a month. I wanted to experience the overall sound quality, function of the new AutoSense OS as well as evaluate the new music program.

My first exposure to Venture was my boss (Tom) sharing his reactions when he was first fit. Tom was raving about the overall sound quality and “natural sound”. The most telling part regarding his Venture experience is the number of hours his aids are being worn every day. His last hearing aids would have had a very low number (I had seen 1-2 hours in the past) in the “hours per day” column of data-logging in the fitting software. He is now averaging 10 hours a day. You can imagine how happy that makes his family as well as his work family! He reports that this is specifically due to the natural sound quality and quiet chip in these products. He can put them in and forget he is wearing them.

I had a tendency of wearing new hearing aids in the past when I was working as a clinical audiologist. I liked to experience them myself for a while in order to be able to counsel effectively (and remember those little details – once you hear the low battery beep you have like 20 minutes to get a new battery in there). I function with a mild high frequency hearing loss in each ear named after the musicians who helped me acquire the pesky little notches. I find aids programmed to a flat 30dB threshold are most comfortable so that is where I set the Venture aids. The longest I wore different hearing aids before these was Spice+ for over a month. Other products (Quest, Core) and other manufacturers I tried out in my previous setting I would generally aim for a week or so for their try out.

My takeaways:

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