A standard patient question is whether their hearing aid will increase sounds which can be already too loud, making those sounds louder still. The answer to this common question is very reassuring.

The basic answer is that present day hearing aids won’t increase sounds that are already excessively loud making them even louder, thus potentially harming the wearer’s hearing even further, provided that they’re correctly fitted and adjusted. The phrase in bold type is the critical part, and the reason why you need to seek professional help with choosing and fitting your hearing aids.

The more complex answer has to do with the nature of modern digital hearing aids themselves, and how they work. Digital hearing aids receive sounds through their microphones and turn them into binary information that can then be processed by the hearing aid’s microchip before it is sent to the earphones. These digital hearing aids can be programmed, allowing audiologists to not only set a maximum volume that suits you, but to transform the nature of the sounds you hear. If you have primarily high-frequency hearing loss, for example, we might program the hearing aid to amplify those sounds while reducing the volume of lower-frequency sounds. This preference can be reversed, of course, if you suffer from primarily low-frequency hearing loss.

The newest digital hearing aids can also filter sounds to make them easier for you to understand. For example, if foreground voices are obscured by background noise, the hearing aid can detect the noise and suppress it or lower its volume, amplifying only the voices. The hearing aids can also be adjusted to dynamically compensate for differences in volume; if the speaker or music you are listening to starts softly but then increases and becomes too loud, the hearing aid can compensate for this. This process is aided by directional microphones that can detect where sounds are coming from and thus reduce the volume of background noise coming from behind or to the sides while increasing the volume of sounds coming from in front of you.

An important point to remember is that hearing aids will not protect your ears from loud sounds like earplugs do. Noise-induced hearing loss can still be caused by loud sounds such as chainsaws or overly amplified rock concerts. But in most situations your properly fitted and programmed hearing aid should handle most of the range of sounds you’re likely to encounter.