Hearing instruments are not expensive in comparison to other family expenditures. The average lifetime of a hearing instrument can be 5-8 years depending on care and maintenance. A qualified hearing professional will recommend several options and allow a person to try them before purchase. No hearing instrument will restore hearing, but today's modern automatic, multi-channel hearing instruments come closer than ever before. Realistic expectations of hearing are pre-requisite to success with a hearing instrument.
Background noise is a fact of life for people with normal hearing or hearing difficulty.
Those who hear normally have learned to tune out background noise to listen to conversation. The same is true for people with hearing loss. However some hearing instruments make it more difficult for people to recognize speech or minimize the effect of background noise. A single channel hearing instrument with volume control is the least effective technology for processing the speech signal accurate in the presence of background noise. These bands are amplified differently depending on hearing loss, the frequency richness of in-coming sound and loudness.