While hearing aids tend to amplify or intensify sounds & provide spectral tuning to help patients hear human voice better & to filter out background noise, at the other end of the spectrum is sound suppression, in ear & on ear hearing protection that blocks sounds from reaching your ears, to protect your hearing from high sound pressure levels from loud environments, straight piped engines, power equipment, wind noises while riding motorcycles, loud appliances like vacuum cleaners or loud content or music from other people listening to such nearby, from loud roadways or train tracks or airports.
When I use our generator, pressure washer or other loud equipment like our Spot Bot carpet cleaner or vacuum, I wear hearing protection. When I go to the gun range, I double up with in ear silicon sound protectors & over ear sound protection since other people at the range are shooting much louder weapons nearby in the same sealed indoor air filtered room at Westcoast Armory in Bellevue, Wa, USA. I deliberately did not tune the exhaust with an aftermarket exhaust system on our 2020 Yamaha MT-O3 because I like the factory exhaust sound & I wear in ear silicon ear plugs when riding this motorcycle to keep wind sounds from causing hearing damage. I wear a full-face motorcycle helmet that also reduce wind & exhaust & other sound levels reaching my ears.
When I use my laptop, I plug DT 770 250ohm headphones into its headphone jack, the same kind of 1/8th stereo jack that Apple removed from newer iPhone models to promote the sale of their overpriced non-replaceable battery Airpods that become e-waste when the batteries fade in a few years, sadly. I also set the Windows or Mac master volume settings to the lowest level where I can still accurately understand speech in YouTube videos or other online content or enjoy Pandora music.
Lowest enjoyable volume promotes long term hearing preservation, as does the use of hearing protecting foam or silicone ear buds & over ear hearing protection headphones when your doing loud activities or using loud tools or appliance or working in a loud environment, in a loud factory or near a busy roadway.
I have smart shooting headphones that block the high peak sound pressures generating by the expanding smokeless powder combustion pressure that shoves bullets down the barrels of my guns, while still allowing me to hear low volume human speech at the indoor gun range. They take a 1.5v Alkaline N cell battery that looks like 1/2 of an AA or LR6 battery, with the same voltage but lower mass & capacity in mah or less energy capacity.
When Meg & I sleep, we ask our Echo via Alexa to play "white noise, pink noise or recently red noise" to help us sleep. We live with our hearing impair mother who listens to a TV at very high-volume settings in a setup right behind the poorly insulated wall that is right behind our heads, so a lot of that sound from her TV makes it to our ears sadly. We leave a small Honeywell fan blowing to circulate air which produces a kind of "chaotic noise" that we both find pleasing. The Amazon Echo able to make very good "white, pink & red" noise to further blur out the TV sounds.
We put up sound dampening materials behind our bed & put sound reflecting materials behind the TV to further reduce the loud TV sounds reaching our ears while we are trying to sleep. Our mother also purchased TV Ears, when she wants to listen to voices in some of her favorite shows where the dialog at lower volumes even if the other sounds are turned up. Meg & I tend to go to bed around 9 pm where our mother tends to stay up till 1am or sometimes to 4am or even 5am, watching content with very loud sound settings on the TV. Our mother is a night owl & we are both larks, me more than Meg. Anyways, other than compelling mom to get hearing aids, which she is resistant too because of the high costs, we have already done what we can to cope with the issue.
I watched a cool YouTube video about hearing aids that you might find informative: click following link to watch the same hearing science & hearing aid technology video.
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