What do you do in loud noisy theaters/arenas?

[Mary Beth]

Addie wants suggestions….

”I am going to a loud fun theater production and I wonder if

I should get noise cancelling headphones?

 

There will be captions on my phone. Lots of dancing and music.”

[Mary Beth]

I do fine in loud arenas without needing to lower the noise.  You can lower volume to reach a comfortable level.  You can also remove your processor/HA.  I have noise canceling BOSE headphones and they dampen noise but do not cancel noise to the same extent  as they do for typically hearing people because our mics are not located in the same position inside the BOSE cup.

[Adelaide]

One good thing is that noise can't destroy our hearing.  Thank you for info.  Addey

 

[Tim]

Great question.  About  6 weeks ago I went a Queen tribute band concert and had to wrestle with the same issue.

I don't remember if you are SSD and there isn't anything in your signature so this may not apply to you.

As an SSD person, the tremendous volume was overwhelming on my good ear. It was essentially painful, not healthy, and overwhelmed anything that my CI could do.

I borrowed an airpod from my wife for my good ear to provide some noise reduction which then made everything more pleasant.  In hindsight, using noise canceling headphones would have worked too but would have been more of a hassle to bring and looked "funny."  I am planning on getting a pair of good construction earplugs for similar random very loud environments to carry around in my travel bag.

At the concert, it was about 5 minutes of trying to manually cover my good ear without success before I used the airpod.  With the ~30 dB sound attenuation, I could then adjust the volume on my CI to be a reasonable match to my good ear and enjoyed the rest of the concert.  I just used my "everyday" program which worked fine for me.  I would have preferred my old "omni microphone, no DSP" program but that wasn't an option (long, un-related story.)

Tim