Cannot understand dialogue on TV--------what to buy

[Andrew Joiner]

I also feel your pain. I have trouble hearing/understanding high frequency voices (Bernadette on Big Band Theory). This is the setup I use. Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones coupled with a Bluetooth transmitter that plugs into the TV headphone jack. The transmitter will allow pairing with 2 Bluetooth headphones at once.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks Bruce. We have been looking for this.
Can you use this on a non-bluetooth TV? Can you use headphones and still use the TV speakers with no echo effect? I like to use headphones while my wife listens to the speakers at the same time. Thanks for your post.

[Bruce Page]

Andrew, you can use the Bluetooth transmitter with anything that has a headphone jack. It works fine with my dumb 2004 Sony LCD. I can't say if it will shut off the TV speakers, it depends on the TV, you could plug in some headphones into yours and check. I haven't noticed any echo effect with my setup.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Another option is a FM transmitter from Walmart (less than $10) plugged into head phone jack, and a pair of "Work Tunes" ear muffs. I use this set up in my shop to listen to you tube music.

[Tom Stenzel]

I used the closed captioning option on the TV—especially for British shows. It is pretty easy to turn on and off and makes understanding the dialogue much easier. When I decide to get hearing aids—which might be soon, I am going to get the ones that link to the TV. I have heard that they work very well.

I turn on the CCs when I watch TV late at night and turn down the sound so everyone else can sleep. In our 1000 square foot mansion, a radio or television playing anywhere on the main floor is heard throughout the house. The problem is the quality of the CCs on many shows is absolutely abysmal. You do miss things in the show too. I've threatened to use headphones but probably would stop watching first.

-Tom

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Tom,

I am deaf. Since 2011 I use a cochlear implant to hear. Even with the implant, I have to use an aid of some sort to hear television audio due to it's typically poor quality. I used a set of wireless Sennheiser headphones. They come with a base which you plug into your television or stereo. Then you can adjust the volume at both the base station and on the headphones. They work well.

These allow my wife to set the volume on the television to suit her and I can then adjust the volume on the headphones to suit me. It results in both of us being happy.

[Wayne Lomman]

My wife is profoundly deaf. We always have the captions turned on. Both myself and our daughter are fine with this. We can all converse about the show and there is a whole new level of entertainment comparing what was said with what gets written on the screen. If it doesn't have captions, none of us watch it.

This is a low tech approach but necessary. Deafness takes many forms and money/technology cannot solve all the issues nor can it keep up with changing deafness which is where my wife sits in the spectrum. Our best solution has been to adapt our lives to suit the disability, same as we have gotten rid of steps etc to assist with mobility. Cheers

[Keith Outten]

I am also a big fan of the Bose noise cancelling products. I currently use the wireless QC30 earbuds for everything from my CNC Router in my shop to lawn mowing and bush hogging on my tractor. Most of the time I listen to music from my phone but there are times when I use them just for the noise cancelling capability.

[Chris Parks]

I am also a big fan of the Bose noise cancelling products. I currently use the wireless QC30 earbuds for everything from my CNC Router in my shop to lawn mowing and bush hogging on my tractor. Most of the time I listen to music from my phone but there are times when I use them just for the noise cancelling capability.

I have always wondered how noise cancelling headphones work, if I am wearing a set and turn on my tablesaw do I not hear the saw and thus work in silence?

[Keith Outten]

You will still here a faint hum from machines running unless you are listening to music. I expect the volume is relative to how well you can hear, for an old set of ears like mine background noises are faint. My tractor is a 40 hp diesel and my lawn mower is a 25 hp Kohler that is right behind the seat and both are much more comfortable riding with noise cancelling earbuds. I have a fairly nice set of Peltor hearing protectors and the earbuds are far superior. I have a very old 15" planer that is so loud it will wake up the dead so I wear the Peltor headset on top of my earbuds when I am planning lumber.

I also trail ride in the mountains on an ATV and most of the time I wear my earbuds which reduces the whining motor noise and I get to enjoy my own music on long rides. I have also used both the Bose wired and wireless models and I found the wired ones reduce more noise.

[Al Launier]

I find the thread to be interesting. Frankly I hadn't thought much about noise cancellation as a remedy for better understanding of dialogue.
In my situation the loss of hearing is very significant, the left ear being much worse than the right, whereby I must use hearing aids. I have difficulty understanding people with higher frequency voices, usually women, (sometimes that's a blessing in disguise with my wife) and it's almost impossible to understand what is being said on DVDs and theater movies where the background music is so loud that it dominates everything. Increasing the volume to hear the dialogue only worsens the situation. As a result I watch very few of these shows.
So, are you all saying that noise cancelling devices will solve that problem?

[Nick Decker]

This is something I've struggled with for quite a while and have spent a lot of money on. I have quite a bit of high freq. hearing loss. It's especially bad for watching movies, and the reasons for this have been noted earlier.

Everybody is different, of course, and is at a different stage of deterioration, so what works for me might not work for you. I haven't tried Bose, so can't comment on them. I have tried several different Sennheiser units with varying degrees of success. The SET840 linked to earlier didn't work well for me at all, so I returned them. The ones I've been using for the last two years are these.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Yup, they're expensive. You'll have to decide if they're worth it to you.

The best thing about them is customization, both at the headphone and at the base unit. That means they're more likely to remain useful to you as your hearing gets worse. Customization at the headphones means you won't have to get up to change settings if you change the source audio. If none of the settings work for you, I'd say you probably need to look into hearing aids.

A couple of things I don't care for: They pretty much cancel out ambient noise, which means I likely won't hear the phone or someone knocking at the door. Also, if you don't turn the speaker down on the TV you'll get a bit of an echo effect. I live alone, so not a big deal for me.

If you buy from someone (like Amazon Prime) with a liberal return policy your journey will, of course, be less expensive.

[Al Launier]

This is something I've struggled with for quite a while and have spent a lot of money on. I have quite a bit of high freq. hearing loss. It's especially bad for watching movies, and the reasons for this have been noted earlier.

Everybody is different, of course, and is at a different stage of deterioration, so what works for me might not work for you. I haven't tried Bose, so can't comment on them. I have tried several different Sennheiser units with varying degrees of success. The SET840 linked to earlier didn't work well for me at all, so I returned them. The ones I've been using for the last two years are these.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Yup, they're expensive. You'll have to decide if they're worth it to you.

The best thing about them is customization, both at the headphone and at the base unit. That means they're more likely to remain useful to you as your hearing gets worse. Customization at the headphones means you won't have to get up to change settings if you change the source audio. If none of the settings work for you, I'd say you probably need to look into hearing aids.

A couple of things I don't care for: They pretty much cancel out ambient noise, which means I likely won't hear the phone or someone knocking at the door. Also, if you don't turn the speaker down on the TV you'll get a bit of an echo effect. I live alone, so not a big deal for me.

If you buy from someone (like Amazon Prime) with a liberal return policy your journey will, of course, be less expensive.

Good info Nick. Would it be advisable to have a hearing evaluation by an audiologist to determine which model would be best suite for oneself, os is this not needed?

[Nick Decker]

Al, the problem with a lot of audiologists is that they work for hearing aid companies. I'd avoid them if that's the case. Mine work for the VA, so I trust they're not profit motivated.

I did try a couple of other units from Amazon before buying the ones I use. Just sent the first ones back, no problem.

If you try the 195 units that I linked to, take the time to experiment with them and get to know the controls. The controls at the base unit interact in a fairly complex way with the settings you can make at the headphones. By that I mean that adjusting the base unit gives you a quite different result at the headphones, which will then need to be readjusted to suit.

Overall, it's possible to set them up so that voices are almost the only thing you hear, but it sounds pretty muted and distracting. Somewhere between that extreme and the raw audio is probably something you can live with. I find myself switching the settings fairly often at the headphones to accomodate different audio settings in a movie, i.e., someone having a normal conversation in a quiet room vs. someone talking in a noisy crowd scene.

[Aaron Conway]

You could get a Sonos Playbar or Beam which have a "speech enhancement" feature that works really well.

[Jon Nuckles]

As televisions have gotten thinner, TV speakers have gotten worse. If you have a stereo setup in the room and don't have your tv hooked up to it, doing that might be good enough to help some people who don't have bad hearing problems. I am about to do this myself.

I was told while tv shopping recently that a 4K tv would not be compatible with a stereo receiver more than a couple of years old. Running the cable to the receiver and then on to the tv would sacrifice the higher definition picture, while running the cable to each device separately might result in problems syncing the picture with the sound. After learning this, I decided to hang on to the old tv for a while longer!