Surround sound

One of the first pieces of advice my hearing aid audiologist gave me was 'go into the settings on your TV and change it from "stereo" to "mono"'.

I'll admit, I never did that. I thought life had been hard enough on Jase as it was!

But his words did stay in my mind and, as a kind of compromise, I stopped using the home theatre system while I wore the hearing aid.

The other week, we decided to try it. I often have trouble hearing the TV in the lounge room because the room has high ceilings and floorboards, so there's quite a lot of reverberation. Also, I tend to watch TV late at night, when I'm tired, so my concentration often wavers. That doesn't help!

I planned to go to the cinema later that week, the first visit since the CIs. So I decided, in a way, it might be good practice. I let Jase control the volume of the sound to his own comfort level, knowing that volume at a cinema is well out of my control anyway. I then used the remote to set my own comfort levels around his. I wound up with a sensitivity setting of 6 and a volume setting of 1, but I could hear the movie really well! I was catching around 85 – 90% of the dialogue, which is pretty good for me, for that particular television. In fact, I attribute the entire 10–15% loss almost entirely to Gandalf, Ian McKellan, which was interesting because I also struggled with his voice during Waiting for Godot a couple of months ago. (It is very deep, that's the only thing I can put it down to!)

It occurred to me later that the surround sound was actually helpful. Because the background sounds were separated, and not all coming from the same speaker, it was a lot easier for my brain to hear the individual sounds better. Especially the dialogue. I'm sure being bilateral makes a huge difference too, given there were speakers to both my right and left, and different sounds coming from each.


Hmm. Think I'll be watching a lot more things at home in surround sound from now on.