Hearing Institute of the Desert

I purchased my Opticon OPN-1 ( I believe this is correct for the top of the line Opticon Hearing Aids and sat through through ihree or four adjustments. These are absolutely necessary because I am a former musician (now retired) and what I hear is so important to me whether I'm driving and listening or if I am playing. The most difficult thing for me is expressing a wide dynamic range, distortion that comes off like the "Shhhh" sound of a cymbal that carries on while in conversation or the "airy" sound of background noise thar I never heard before. Most important was recognizing what I believed I actually heard but was a wide dynamic range that was new to me. Learning to hear again has been an experience I never believed I had I'm the past. I understand that the damage to my hearing was caused by loud music but I became use to what I perceived until I began to fine-tune my hearing. I learned to accept what I was missing and now understand that I learned to lip read very well. It wasn't simply accepting a hearing loss because, quite frankly I didn't believe that my hearing loss was real. Over time the correction and adjustments helped me understand what was normal and what an artificial range. I'm not sure that there is any actual understanding of what you lost until you begin to hear sounds like you haven't heard before (like crickets or the caucauphanouy of noise that is a shock to the system when trying to block out the shock of my dogs barking as I recover from a migraine or even the airyness surrounding conversation directed at two people over a table of 10 or more.) Proper adjustment is very difficult to achieve when comparing noise to directed conversation. I never understood what I had lost and it took me nearly six months to adjust to the reality of a flat sound and another with symphonic dynamic range. Wade Zarella took me though those stages and the technology is so very accurate on the Opticon Hearing aids that once you incorporate them into daily wear and the adjustment that represents the most accurate range of sound that is within the range of human hearing, the loss is even more pronounced. Try this; I live in La Quinta surrounded by a Cove of three mountain ranges. If you take your dog's out at night you might see them looking for something, usually a sound above the human range. Turn up the volume of your Opticon OPN1 until you can hear what hear like a new litter of Coyote pups. It's amazing what we miss out on or accept as normal. There is so much more occurring all around us that we miss out on that will amaze. Desert Audiology is one of the best in my book to gain the most from a hearing loss that we can restore. I highly recommend being helped by a true Audiologist who wears his product and understand how to define a specific range of hearing loss important to each if us AND putting up with this long explanation putting hearing experiences into words. Wade is very good at this and at times I fall asleep with my hearing aids in so I won't disturbed my wife who is trying to sleep!