The imperfect (and expensive) world of hearing aids

Hearing aids. They're just like glasses for your ears, right? Sadly not.

The ear is more complicated - and much harder to study - than the eye. Our ears are made up of loads of tiny, fragile components, and at this point in time doctors can't quite work out how to fix them when something goes wrong.

As I understand it, my hearing loss is down to the fact that the hair cells in my inner ear that carry soundwaves to my brain are completely degenerated. (There could be some nerve damage too, but there's no accurate way to take images of the inner ear, so it's mostly educated guesswork.) While hearing aids can boost certain sound frequencies, they can't repair the damaged hair cells, so the way those frequencies are picked up by my brain is always going to be different. Which means I can't just stick hearing aids in and have normal hearing again.

And in order to boost those frequencies without feedback and other problems, hearing aids employ a load of digital processing that crunches up sounds and turns them into something altogether more crummy. I could wax lyrical about bit rates and noise floors and so on, but as I'm competing against cat videos and Netflix for your attention, I'll keep it brief. Put simply, if the world of normal hearing is a beautiful live concert through an amazing speaker system, hearing aids are the shitty mp3 recording you get on your phone.

My personal quest for better hearing began back in 2014. I was just a young buck, 31 years old, and I imagined hearing aids would solve all my problems.

First I got a pair through the NHS, that magnificent yet cash-strapped British institution. My initial impressions weren't good. Suddenly everything sounded like it was made of paper - paper trousers, a paper coat and hat - all very unsettling. Even after the audiologist tweaked the settings, I couldn't get on with them. They were also horrible beige plastic fuckers, with nasty tubes that irritated my ear canals, so they now live in a drawer at home in case of emergency (I should probably just return them to the NHS).

Then in 2015 I began a long and ultimately fruitless experiment with custom-moulded in-ear monitors (IEMs). The particular ones I tried have built-in high quality microphones and speakers, and use a battery pack to amplify the signal from the microphones. But they weren't nearly as effective as I'd imagined, plus getting the ear pieces themselves to fit properly took the best part of a year, making the whole process doubly frustrating.

When I'd dusted myself off after that long and drawn out disappointment, I looked once again to conventional hearing aids, only this time focusing on private options. You pays your money, you takes your choice. After trying out loads of models in a seemingly endless cycle of hope-disappointment-despair, I finally settled on a pair of Phonak Virto-B Titaniums. Here they are:

They're tiny, and fit almost entirely into my ear canal so you can barely see them. And what you can see of them is black and grey - no ugly beige! They cost more than I've ever spent on anything else in my life (including some very pretty guitars), and they sound...quite good. Sometimes.

Actually they're great if I'm chatting to one or two people who are less than 10 feet away, with little or no background noise, in a room that's not too echoey. And as that's the situation I have most trouble hearing in, they've definitely improved some areas of my life - working in a quiet office had become about 80% bluffing before I got these bad boys.

But unfortunately I find myself in lots of situations where they're no help at all, and some where they make things worse. They suck in busy pubs and restaurants and they don't really help outside with traffic noise, so I never wear them in those types of environments. Instead I get by as best I can without them. Sometimes I can manage ok, but there are still times when I just have to accept that I can't follow the conversation, and try not to let that get me down too much.

I don't wear them while playing or listening to music, because they make it sound like it's coming out of a phone speaker. I can also really tell when the various bits of digital processing in the hearing aids kick in, which is extremely off-putting - imagine you're halfway through listening to a song when suddenly the guitar seems to disappear...

And even though I paid a small fortune for them, I still don't much like the feeling of having them in my ears.

Then there's the hassle involved in wearing hearing aids. Beyond the obvious battery replacement (they need changing once a week), I have to make sure my ears are clean and dry before I put them in, then at the end of a day wearing them I have to give them a clean and put them in a little hearing aid drying machine overnight to stop moisture from my ears getting into the electronics. When I forget to do one or other of those steps, they get gunked up with my disgusting earwax and stop working.

But hey, nothing's perfect, right? I should stress that hearing aids have improved my life, it's just that they can't replace my hearing and they can't heal the sadness I feel every day when I can't hear things like I used to.

And a final thought: I'm convinced there must be another, better solution out there somewhere. If one of the tech giants like Apple or Sony could start thinking of hearing aids as technology rather than medical equipment, we could see something truly amazing, with the same kind of focus on sound quality and aesthetics as we get in the headphone market. No more horrible beige lumps of plastic! We can but hope.