Day 2

It's the 4th of July and I'm ready to break these Lyrics in and start putting them to the test. I've got some yard work to do this morning in the blazing heat. Then I've got a nice long car ride to attend a baseball game with 42 members of my family. We'll then watch fireworks after the show. Here are the tests for today:

1. The Sweat Test
2. The Shower Test
3. The Road Noise Test
4. The Conversation in Noise Test
5. The Loud Noise Test

Let the tests begin...

1. The Sweat Test
The 102 degree heat wasn't on full blast yet, but I had some heaving lifting to do out in the yard. I worked up a sweat that normally would have shut my BTE's right down. The Lyrics didn't miss a beat during the event. I did find that my occlusion seemed to get a little worse, possibly because things were sealing up tighter in my ears from the exertion.
Result: Pass

2. The Shower Test
I really didn't know quite what to expect with regards to how this would work. I kind of thought the Lyrics may really diminish in sound quality for a little while until they dried out. I also thought that things might seem really loud. I know that the few times I accidentally jumped into the shower with my BTE's it was immediately noticeable due to how loud things sound.

I tried to shower pretty much as I normally do, but I found that I was pretty careful to not get any real direct sprays right into my ear. I guess I didn't want them to fail quite yet. But I shampooed up, washed my ears and rinsed them out without any problems at all. I also didn't notice anything sounding particularly loud, even though I had my hearing aids on.

I'd read a post from someone else using these that put swimmers putty in their ears each time they showered to keep them from getting wet. I don't know quite was the issue was there, but there weren't any problems for me yet anyway.
Verdict: Pass

3. The Road Noise Test
I had about a 30 minute drive to the baseball game in my wife's car which isn't very quiet unfortunately. Every single manhole cover I hit with the tires generated kind of a static sound from the Lyrics. I'm not sure what was happening with them, but it sounded like a really small speaker when you cranked a low bass note out of it. Kind of like a muted, muffled sound. It was REALLY annoying. I also had both of my kids playing their game boys in the back and the volume seemed really loud, like I could hear every single beep. We got on the freeway which starts out as concrete and I thought I was going to go crazy with how loud the road noise was.

I finally ended up bumping the volume down to a 3 instead of my usual 4 which really softened out the background noise and made it much more tolerable. I was still able to carry on a conversation with my wife even at the lower volume. I ended up arriving at the stadium pretty agitated after listening to all of that noise for 30 minutes.
Verdict: TBD (I'm going to have to do more testing on this one. Maybe I'll get used to it after a while.)

4. The Conversation in Noise Test
The game tonight was a sellout crowd, plus I had 42 relatives that I hadn't seen in a year that all wanted to socialize. I thought that this was going to be a real challenge. Typically I would have put my BTE's in directional mode to help filter out the noise, and then adjusted the volume down a few notches to keep the loud sounds from giving me a headache.

In the end, I was very pleased with how the Lyrics performed. I didn't have a single sound that was loud or irritating. I had family sitting right behind me talking throughout the evening and I found it easy to tune them in and understand most every word they said, despite all of the background noise from the event. I counted and ended up saying "what was that?" two times to people during conversations which I thought was really good for how noisy things were.
Verdict: Pass

5. The Loud Noise Test
I figured that the fireworks would make for a good first loud noise test. I was really anxious to see how these devices deal with such loud sounds. We were just across the park from the launching pad, so you could pretty much feel these rockets going off. I heard several people say how loud they were, but the Lyrics did a great job of filtering that volume down. One of the advantages the Lyrics have over conventional aids is that they literally are an amplified earplug. When you turn them off, you are deaf. This means that if they don't pass the sound it, you really wouldn't hear it. My Savia's do a good job of not amplifying loud sounds that don't need to be amplified, but they really can't do anything about blocking ones that are already too loud.
Verdict: Pass

Overall it was a good day of tests for the Lyrics. I ended up putting the Lyrics into Sleep mode for the ride home as I just didn't want to deal with the irritation of the road noise. Plus the family was asleep the minute we hit the car anyway.

I think I'm going to try sleeping on my side a little tonight and see if I get any soreness.