test please delete

[DoctorStrangelove]

I can hear more or less ok, it's the fecking dialogue I can't understand.

Yesterday's kinema epic was "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" SE Collector's edition, which meant another 2 hours of stuff on the 2nd dvd.

I FF through the more tedious bits where he's building replica mountains in his living room & where the ill brought up kids are doing their irritating best.

Other than that it was ok.

The most striking thing was my complete failure to recognize the Wonderkind director in his 1976 guise.

He's changed a bit over the last 40 odd years.

[NickFitz]

I'm looking forward to finally watching the large number of films I have that lack subtitles, as following the dialog without pumping up the volume to antisocial levels is now beyond me

I have noticed that there are such films that I've watched about a year or so ago. As I recall, this isn't to do with my hearing having become drastically worse in that time; it's just that the downstairs flat was empty for a couple of months, so if I'd seen the chap from upstairs go out, I knew I wouldn't be bothering anyone by cranking it right up

[NickFitz]

Also, music now sounds a lot better, so maybe I'll get back in the habit of listening to that, which I hardly ever do at the moment

[covbob]

Also, music now sounds a lot better, so maybe I'll get back in the habit of listening to that, which I hardly ever do at the moment

[NickFitz]

Couple of cold roast chicken thighs for lunch

Couldn't believe how noisy they were

[covbob]

Two agents on the phone today - one quoted a rate half of what I usually work on and needed someone without a notice period (despite mine being stated in BIG BOLD LETTERS on the CV) and quickly concluded that he was wasting his time.

The other sounded to be of Indian extraction and kept calling me by my surname. To be fair the role and rate are OK - we're just waiting for her to confirm whether their rate definition of "gross all inclusive" actually is inclusive or exclusive of VAT. The former might make the rate somewhat less attractive, but I must be being paranoid here. I've never had an agent quote a rate inclusive of VAT to me...

[DoctorStrangelove]

Also, music now sounds a lot better, so maybe I'll get back in the habit of listening to that, which I hardly ever do at the moment

Is the new equipment just correcting amplitude or is it correcting frequency response as well?


Just spent an hour and a half tidying up out the back and doing a bit of weed removal on the path, followed by the sweat inducing clearing up of 8 or so buckets of apples.

Thank feck the apples are almost done.

Several wasps who'd obviously rather overindulged due to the "fly, hic, I know I can fly, hic" behaviour.

Then it started raining properly rather than merely drizzling so I came in again.

Knackered now.

[NickFitz]

Is the new equipment just correcting amplitude or is it correcting frequency response as well?

My hearing looks like this:

so they've been programmed to boost the amplitude of the various frequency ranges to, I assume, get those graphs into more of a straight line.

They also do various tricks like trying to selectively boost the sound from a particular direction if there's a lot of background noise but they detect that somebody in that direction is, apparently, talking to me.

He also mentioned some extra stuff it can do in music mode, such as putting more bass in; but he recommended spending a couple of weeks getting used to them with the standard settings before deciding whether or not to do stuff like that.

Incidentally, those letters scattered around the graph show roughly where those letter sounds sit in the spectrum. Obviously mapping phonemes would make more sense, but I don't suppose many of their customers know the International Phonetic Alphabet. But it's nice to see the Old English letter thorn (upper case: Þ, lower case: þ) getting a look in under its modern guise of "th"

[DoctorStrangelove]

Gosh.

Looks very complicated.

Dunno what "normal" hearing is supposed to look like.

I know my mate, who'd done a lot of shooting, had a distinct trough around 2kHz which apparently caused a lot of problems with understanding speech, particularly with some of our overseas esteemed customers.

Mind you, I have much the same problem with some of them, sometimes I have to close my eyes to increase the amount of processing available to the audio centre.


Oh, having spent 5 minutes on research it looks as if the intent is to even out the lumps & bumps & more the lines upward and make them flatter.

Inneresting.

[vetran]

Gosh.

Looks very complicated.

Dunno what "normal" hearing is supposed to look like.

I know my mate, who'd done a lot of shooting, had a distinct trough around 2kHz which apparently caused a lot of problems with understanding speech, particularly with some of our overseas esteemed customers.

Mind you, I have much the same problem with some of them, sometimes I have to close my eyes to increase the amount of processing available to the audio centre.

I think that is age not a twelve bore.