r/AskAudiology

Hi everyone—I'm hoping to connect with anyone who has gone through something similar or has insight.
I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) in my left ear immediately after surgery on April 2nd. When I woke up from anesthesia, I had no functional hearing in that ear, along with intense ringing (high-pitched, constant, and honestly pretty overwhelming).
Timeline:
April 2: Right Ankle Surgery → woke up with hearing loss + tinnitus

April 3: Contacted provider, was initially told to take antihistamines (no steroids yet)

April 4: Urgent care → confirmed hearing loss → started Prednisone (initially 60mg, now increased to 80mg)

Since then: ongoing monitoring with ENT, multiple hearing tests, attempted HBOT (paused due to pain).

Currently on 80MG of prednisone, doing chiropractic, acupuncture, and lymphatic massage.

Symptoms:
Persistent loud high-pitched ringing/static

Occasional popping/clicking sensations

No meaningful return of hearing so far

Sound perception is basically non-functional / distorted at best

Hearing Test Info (most recent):
Left ear thresholds around:
April 4th - 70–85 dB (severe loss)

May 1st - 35**–55 dB (moderate loss)**

My SRT has been stable at 40 / PB% 111 /PB level 60

Right ear: normal / near normal

Has anyone had SSNHL after surgery/anesthesia specifically?

Did anyone see delayed recovery after a few weeks, or improvement after increasing steroids?

For those who couldn’t tolerate HBOT—did you still recover at all?

Any experience with injections vs. oral steroids and whether it made a difference?

Did your tinnitus improve even if hearing didn’t fully return?

I’m trying to stay hopeful but also realistic—it’s been really scary going from normal hearing to this overnight. I’d truly appreciate any experiences, advice, or even just knowing I’m not alone in this.
Thank you 🤍

Hi! Quick question - I know hearing aids are programmed to different hearing losses. Is it the same for bluetooth? My hearing aids work fine but I cannot hear the sounds (chime to turn on, low battery, or bluetooth audio). Just curious if thats adjustable. TIA!

Earlier today, I was crouching beside my car (Holden Trax) while inflating the front tire on the passenger side, with my head positioned quite close to the wheel as I was attaching the air pump. At that moment, the car emitted 2–3 honking beeps because the driver exited the vehicle and left the key inside. Although I was on the side of the car rather than in front of it, my ear was still relatively close to the vehicle.

During the exposure, my ears didn't particularly feel any pain, only a bit of tension, and since I was outside, I don't think my tinnitus spiked from it. However, about an hour later, my left ear developed some random pain that comes and goes, along with a slight spike that I noticed when I got home (not loud, maybe a notch or two). I'm not sure if what I'm experiencing is just temporary sensitivity or something more significant.

Is this type of short, close-range exposure likely to cause any damage? Would you consider this to be acoustic trauma, or just a temporary thing?

Thanks

As the title saids

We're having a bit of confusion as this isn't something my audiologist office has really done before

I have cochlear dysfunction so I need molds for the gain and occlusion but I have ric hearing aids

So naturally I have slimtips with a Skelton add-on which would be fine in theory but I'm sensitive to acrylic and my ear canals flex a lot (Hypermobility)

We ordered silicone and they came as acrylic,we can't find anyone to awsner why,error or not

At this point we are just assuming it's not an option for these speciality molds/slimtips?

For context these are phonak molds and hearing aids

my ears seem to get blocked pretty easily and it’s been a recurring issue for a while now. i was told before that my ear canals don’t really clear themselves well, which might explain why it keeps happening, but it doesn’t make dealing with it any easier.

the problem is i keep seeing mixed opinions about different methods. some people say irrigation is fine, others warn against it, same with suction. it’s hard to know what’s actually safe, especially since i also have tinnitus and really don’t want to make anything worse.

sometimes i notice the blocked feeling and try to figure out how bad it is, and at one point i had a look using a small camera (bebird), which confirmed there’s buildup but didn’t exactly help me decide what to do next.

so now i’m kind of stuck between leaving it alone and wanting to fix it before it gets worse.

what do you usually do for recurring ear blockages without risking more problems?

Hi! I need some advice. I am a DJ and wear custom molded earplugs when I play in order to protect my hearing. I use a -15Db filter in the plugs.

After I wear them for my shift which is usually around 5/6 hours, I take them out and my natural hearing is super muffled and my ear canals feel very open.

Can someone tell me if this is normal and why this is happening?

I’m nervous that I’m Turning my headphones up louder because I’m wearing the earplugs and this is actually damaging my hearing more OR that maybe I’m pushing wax into my ear canal?

Is muffled hearing typical after wearing earplugs for extended periods of time?

How is your unilateral hearing loss going, especially for mild and moderate hearing in right ear. Which hearing aid has helped and cost?

Scared about how I will feel but getting hearing aid will help me since I am 23 years old. Still in university and not having a job so that means I need to look for affordable good hearing aids at costco.

So far how is it? How bad is it? When people call you with the tv on can you hear them in the same room? Phone calls, alarms, police alarm etc.

How do you feel about restaurants that are busy can you still hesr yourself talk and family talk?

Concerts, orchestra, church, party but with mostly concerstional because we have family friends that don't party hard at all. For music through the Tv how doesbit sound like and through your phone? I also like to have the fan in my room so how does it feel when family comes in and talk to you? is it muffled all the time or you hear good? Having your back against someone and they call you can you hear them or being on your side with the bad ear? Also walking at the park or street how is it when someone is talking to you as well?

Where do you work?

Just in general I have so many questions and I want to know I am scared but its the next step in my life. I dont see many people with unilateral hearing loss mild to moderate especially in more "younger" age.

Thank you for reading my post.

She had an audiogram done without aids which showed moderate to profound hearing loss.

I want to know how she’s hearing with aids, as close to “real life” as possible.

I am in the process of finding a new audiologist for her and want to make sure I’m booking the right type of appointment for her.

Thank you!

Hi everyone, I work as a receptionist for an audiology clinic in Canada.

I'm looking for a type of glue that will help secure the tube to the silicone earmolds for pediatric patients.

Ideally something that is stable for everyday use and for some pulling as kids tend to do so, but not too permanent that we can't remove the tube out for changes.

Also, ideally something not at a crazy price point if possible.

Would love to hear any recommendations, thanks!

Background: I'm a signal processing engineer who's worked on speech enhancement pipelines for telecom. I was diagnosed with mild-to-moderate bilateral sensorineural hearing loss about two years ago. I wear prescription aids for work but I've been genuinely curious about how OTC devices handle noise reduction — specifically the ones marketing "AI-powered" speech enhancement. So I spent the last few months buying and testing several OTC hearing aids in what I consider the hardest real-world scenario: noisy restaurants during dinner rush.

This isn't a product review. I want to talk about what's actually happening under the hood when OTC manufacturers say "AI noise reduction," because I think there's a meaningful gap between the marketing language and what the silicon can realistically do, and I'm hoping some audiologists here can weigh in from the clinical side.

What "AI noise reduction" probably means in OTC devices

In the telecom and hearables world, modern noise suppression generally falls into a few buckets:

1. Classical approaches — Wiener filtering, spectral subtraction, fixed beamforming. These are computationally cheap and well-understood. Most basic hearing aids have used some version of this for years.
2. Statistical/adaptive — Adaptive beamforming, minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR), postfilters. Better, but still limited in non-stationary noise (like restaurant babble where the "noise" is also speech).
3. DNN-based — This is what "AI" usually means. A trained neural network (often a recurrent architecture like LSTM or GRU, or increasingly some form of convolutional network) that's learned to separate speech from noise on large datasets. These can be remarkably good at handling non-stationary noise because they've learned spectral patterns of human speech vs. everything else.

The catch with category 3 on OTC devices is compute. Running even a small neural network in real-time on a hearing aid DSP chip is non-trivial. You need to keep total processing latency under roughly 10ms to avoid the user perceiving a disconnect between bone-conducted and air-conducted sound. That's a brutal constraint. Most OTC devices are running on chips with nowhere near the processing headroom of, say, a smartphone neural engine. So the question becomes: is the DNN actually running on-device in real-time, or is it a hybrid approach where a simpler model was trained with DNN techniques but deployed as a more compact filter?

My restaurant testing experience

I tested four OTC devices over several weeks at the same two restaurants (one moderate noise, one loud). I won't rank them because that's not the point, but I want to talk about one specific observation.

One of the devices I tried was the ELEHEAR Beyond Pro, which markets something called VOCCLEAR as its AI speech enhancement system. In the loud restaurant scenario (I'd estimate 75-80 dBA ambient), it did something I found technically interesting — it seemed to be doing a more aggressive separation of the voice I was facing versus diffuse background noise than what I'd expect from simple directional microphones alone. My dining companion's voice had noticeably more presence relative to the background babble compared to two other OTC devices I had with me. It wasn't perfect — when someone at the next table spoke loudly from my side, it would occasionally "grab" that voice too, which is consistent with a beamforming + learned speech model approach rather than a pure speaker-separation system.

But here's what I can't determine from subjective listening: how much of this is genuinely a DNN-based enhancement versus well-tuned adaptive beamforming with aggressive noise gating? Without access to the actual algorithm architecture or independent measurements of speech intelligibility improvement (like SIN or QuickSIN scores in controlled conditions), I'm essentially guessing based on the perceptual artifacts I notice.

The honest limitations

Even the best-performing OTC device I tested was noticeably worse than my prescription aids (Phonak Lumity 90) in the loud restaurant. That's expected — prescription devices have more sophisticated multi-mic arrays, more processing headroom, and critically, they've been programmed by my audiologist with real-ear measurements tuned to my specific loss. OTC devices are working from a self-fit audiogram with generic fitting logic. For mild-to-moderate loss in moderate noise, several of the OTC devices were surprisingly competent. In severe noise, the gap widened considerably.

My question for the audiologists and researchers here

From a clinical perspective: when you see OTC devices claiming AI-based noise reduction, how much weight do you give those claims? Are any of you aware of independent third-party studies (not manufacturer-funded) that have measured speech intelligibility improvements from specific OTC AI noise reduction systems in standardized conditions? I'd love to see actual QuickSIN or HINT data if it exists.

And for anyone else with a technical background who's been evaluating these — have you found ways to objectively measure what these devices are doing to the signal beyond just subjective listening?

To be clear, I think OTC hearing aids are a net positive for accessibility, especially for people with mild-to-moderate loss who might not otherwise get any amplification. But I also think the "AI" marketing has gotten ahead of what we can actually verify these devices are doing. Would love to hear other perspectives.

Hi guys. I hope this is the right place to post this. I am waiting to see an ENT. I had a ruptured eardrum 7 years ago from an ear infection. Ever since then I have had issues with the same ear. Once I went shooting without earplugs (It was my first time and didn’t know any better) and lost my hearing in that ear for a couple weeks while the other was unaffected. My main concern is that every single time that I have a cold since the rupture, the same ear becomes clogged and I can’t hear anything for weeks while the other is perfectly fine. I am just curious if anyone knows what exactly might be causing this? I assume the sensitivity in that ear specifically is related to the rupture, but why? It’s super frustrating to deal with any nothing seems to help. Any tips would also be appreciated. Thank you!

My 9 year old son has a lot of difficulty tolerating loud, noisy environments to the point where he becomes extremely overwhelmed and begins to panic. This happens in movie theatres, swimming pools, sports games, etc. These ARE loud and stimulating environments for sure, but he seems to have a significant amount of sensitivity—so much so that he is very uncomfortable. I have just assumed it’s a sensory overstimulation but now am wondering if we should have his hearing checked by an audiologist just to be sure there isn’t something else going on. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you!

I work in audio DSP and was recently diagnosed with mild sloping hearing loss, so naturally I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand how OTC hearing aids actually decide what to amplify and by how much. I see a lot of posts here from people asking whether their audiogram falls in OTC territory, and I think understanding the fitting algorithm side of things can help frame that question better.

Most of the cheap OTC amplifiers I looked at first are basically doing one of two things: flat gain (everything gets louder by the same amount) or a simple EQ curve where you drag a few frequency sliders around manually. Both of these are fundamentally guessing. You might boost 2kHz because dialogue feels muddy, but you have no principled basis for how much gain that frequency actually needs relative to your specific hearing thresholds.

Then I started reading about NAL-NL2, which is a prescriptive fitting formula developed by the National Acoustic Laboratories in Australia. Audiologists have been using it for years in clinical fittings. What it actually does is take your audiogram (your measured thresholds at each frequency) and calculate a specific gain prescription per frequency band. It accounts for things like the loudness growth function at different hearing levels, so someone with a 35dB loss at 4kHz gets a different gain prescription than someone with a 25dB loss at the same frequency, and crucially, the relationship is not linear. NAL-NL2 optimizes for speech intelligibility while keeping overall loudness comfortable, which is a much harder problem than just "make it louder."

What surprised me is that some OTC devices are now implementing NAL-NL2 directly in their companion apps. I found this on an ELEHEAR device where you input your audiogram and the software generates a frequency specific gain curve based on the NAL-NL2 prescription. That means the DSP is applying different amounts of amplification across the frequency spectrum according to a clinically validated model, not just a user's best guess with a graphic EQ.

To be clear about what this does and does not mean: having NAL-NL2 in an OTC device does not make it equivalent to a professional fitting. A clinical fitting involves real ear measurement where the audiologist verifies the actual sound pressure at your eardrum, accounting for your unique ear canal resonance. The OTC implementation is working from your audiogram alone, so it is an approximation. But it is a dramatically better approximation than flat amplification or manual EQ, because the underlying model was built on decades of loudness perception research across thousands of patients.

For the people asking "is my audiogram in OTC range," I think the more useful question is whether the device you are considering actually does anything intelligent with your audiogram data. A device that takes your thresholds and runs them through NAL-NL2 to generate a proper gain prescription is doing something fundamentally different from one that just lets you turn up the volume. That said, OTC devices are designed for mild to moderate hearing loss. If your thresholds are pushing into severe territory, a prescriptive formula in an OTC app is not a substitute for seeing an audiologist who can do verification and work with more powerful hardware.

I went for a hearing test and was found to have a 30 dB hearing loss in my left ear between 1 kHz and 4 kHz. After this, I started to notice that my ears would pop frequently when I swallowed, and I experienced earache. However, these symptoms were not always present—some days were worse than others. While waiting for my ENT appointment, I tried using Beconase nasal spray. Will my hearing return to normal?

I was getting a pair of impressions made yesterday and toward the end the audiologist asked me a question, which when I answered broke the seal on my left ear right before she removed them. I’m getting ear plugs made with these. Will it turn out alright?