Hearing Loss

Life is enriched by the expe­ri­ences we have through our five senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and hear­ing. Together, our senses enable us to learn and enjoy life. Hear­ing is espe­cially vital; it enables us to com­mu­ni­cate our wants, needs, and emotions.

You can­not reverse hear­ing loss or elim­i­nate all Sound Voids™. How­ever, your Audi­gyC­er­ti­fied™ pro­fes­sional can apply the appro­pri­ate care and tech­nol­ogy to lessen their effects and improve the qual­ity of sounds you hear. Unfor­tu­nately, many peo­ple suf­fer­ing from a hear­ing loss are either unaware or ashamed of their con­di­tion and do not uti­lize the avail­able advanced technology.

Defin­ing Sound
The loud­ness of sound is mea­sured in deci­bels. Pitch is mea­sured in fre­quency of sound vibra­tions per sec­ond. A deep voice has a low pitch and fre­quency, whereas a child’s voice has a high pitch and frequency.

High-Frequency Hear­ing Loss
In the first stages of hear­ing impair­ment, high fre­quen­cies are usu­ally lost first. There­fore, dif­fi­culty hear­ing or under­stand­ing high-pitched voices of women and chil­dren is one of the first symp­toms. It is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that hear­ing some­one and under­stand­ing them are two dif­fer­ent things. High­fre­quency hear­ing loss dis­torts sound, which makes speech dif­fi­cult to under­stand even if it can be heard.

Peo­ple with hear­ing loss often have dif­fi­culty dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing words that sound alike, espe­cially words that con­tain S, F, SH, CH, H, TH, T, K or soft C sounds. These con­so­nants are in a much higher fre­quency range than vow­els and other consonants.

Degree of Hear­ing Loss
There are five lev­els or degrees of hear­ing loss. A per­son with nor­mal hear­ing can per­ceive very soft sounds, whereas a per­son with a pro­found loss can only per­ceive sounds louder than 90 dB.

Pre­ven­tion
Avoid­ing loud noise may help pre­vent pre­ma­ture hear­ing loss and the per­cep­tion of Sound Voids.

Do I have dif­fi­culty talk­ing or hear­ing oth­ers talk over the sound?
Does the sound make your ears hurt?
Do my ears ring after hear­ing the sound?
Do other sounds seem muf­fled after exposure?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above ques­tions, the noise may be dam­ag­ing your hear­ing. Most peo­ple don’t real­ize how loud every­day sounds actu­ally are. Sounds above 85 dB are harm­ful depend­ing on how long and how often you are exposed to them. The louder a sound is, the lower the amount of expo­sure is required to cause dam­age. If used prop­erly, hear­ing pro­tec­tion devices can reduce the loud­ness of sound reach­ing the ears.