Postby coldrainwater » Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:23 pm
From a practical standpoint, I reckon it helpful to isolate the differing [listening] difficulties, triage the lot of them, and formulate a sensible attack plan; those last words spoken as if the world and its sounds were logical…
Speaking instead of time and the passage of years, sooner or later, if I am lucky, I will follow in the footsteps of my own father, who volumes the TV as if no one else were watching. For myself, I have resolved to give in to the inevitable at a much younger age and adopt a semi-permanent usage of headphones, letting my form of obnoxious take the shape of bulbous headphones worn like a true audiophile. Smell and sound reverberate through family zones in unison and the rulebook says that a courtesy flush is appreciated by all. The same might as well go for noxious noise. When I am alone, I pretend like the walls have feelings too and that their echoes are eery complaints.
That is where I am coming from anywho. Whether it is one person or four talking, I expect that I will need that soap opera voice familiarity that only shows itself after listening for some 10+ odd hours in all cases that I have tried to date. Background noise makes it a bit tougher for me to isolate where the problems lie, so I eliminate it when I can. It is very low in the pecking order for me. I want listening to be a pleasure and go to great lengths to make it such, always ensuring that those lengths don’t include eliminating the ever-important challenge factor. I won’t let my penchants rob me of progress. Like a controlled science experiment, if we want it, we are left with the ability to challenge our ears in exactly the ways we want to challenge them, and we can listen for quite a few hours per day, so short controlled experiments, a few weeks in duration or less, should answer a lot of questions.
In my case, I am super biased toward headphone use. If memory serves, it took me about 10 minutes to make that call, a snap decision if ever there were one, and I haven’t turned back. It was, for me, easily the difference between being able to fully comprehend and not being able to understand much of anything. As a practical matter, I deal with noise pollution daily and adding more to ‘train’ that skill simply wouldn’t be needed. Headphones don't totally eliminate the problems, they just give me a fighting chance.
As always, I am grateful for and appreciate all the different perspectives offered so far. The more polar the viewpoints, the more interesting, to me at least.
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