I don't blame your father-in-law: We live in an increasingly loud world, where people casually make sounds above the threshold of pain. I just started carrying earplugs in my pocket for this reason.
More recently: I've been in movie theaters where the dialog is played over the threshold of pain, and on a cruise where the microphone for a drawing clinic was set over the threshold of pain.
The special part isn't the earplugs (and they're good!), the special part is the little carry case so they can live in my pocket 24/7. I use them more often than expected: loading the dishwasher, vacuuming, movie theaters, mowing, discount stores (acoustic tiles cost more), using an electric leaf blower, digging with a shovel (hitting rocks), riding in a car with bass, etc etc
Naturally, you can use any small carry case and earplugs. I just needed that 'permission' lol
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You may be interested to hear: some experts suggest "age-related hearing loss" is essentially a myth, and it's actually caused by our loud industrial lifestyle.
Yes, it's coming out that driving around at high speeds with the windows down is a major contributor.
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I figured it out years ago when I came across an anecdote somewhere that explained that elderly people in remote, non-industrialized societies had no age-related hearing loss.
> driving around at high speeds with the windows down
That's been well known for decades. I wish I knew that when I was younger. I avoided rock concert and gunshot sounds with earplugs, but always drove with the window down. My left ear is much worse than my right.
I also don't listen to loud music anymore. Sigh.
I wear ear protection whenever I vacuum or use power tools.
I am not an expert but it might be the problem with microphone or sound processing and not actual noise. For example, my smartphone mic picks up lot of noise from wind even if the wind is not strong, while human's ears somehow reduce or suppress the wind noise.
Also, modern smart speakers use arrays of microphones and medical devices might be using some outdated tech.
I haven’t kept up to date with cochlear implants, but their capabilities used to be pretty crude. The bitdepth of sound being profoundly reduced to just 5 or 6 bits equivalent.
It wouldn’t take much to just sound like jumbled noise.
From what I have been told by my father in law it sounds very digitized on his implant. I think it takes some level of therapy for the brain to build the pathways for it to not sound like a jumble of noise anyways and actually interpret speech. It is incapable of really giving the richness of music or other forms of noises. Interestingly enough his implant can connect to bluetooth so if he wanted to he can listen to podcasts.
It would sound the same. The implants work by stimulating a few patches in the ear. Older implants stimulate fewer, newer ones stimulate more. In both cases they stimulate 1/1000th the signal a healthy ear does. It's like a fast Fourier transform that only selects the top N peaks.
Go listen to some simulated CI audio on YouTube. It's not great.
More recently: I've been in movie theaters where the dialog is played over the threshold of pain, and on a cruise where the microphone for a drawing clinic was set over the threshold of pain.