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On 04/19/2013 06:16 PM, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
At the age of 81, after wearing hearing aids for about seven years, I
finally decided to purchase a special phone for people like me.
Hopefully, it will help me understand phone conversations better. A
week ago I went to the local Radio Shack store and asked for advice.
They said that the cordless Clarity model D-1714 was very popular and
I bought it for about $80. This price included a built-in answering
machine. Unfortunately the amplification of 40 dB,
From the keen-grasp-of-the-obvious department:
Please tell me you know about T-coil technology. It revolves around an
/electromagnetic/ coupling between the phone and the hearing aid. Most
hearing aids and cochlear implants have a T-coil.
Back when AT&T was The Phone Company, virtually every phone in the US had
the corresponding transmitter. This was a continuation of company policies
that had been in place since Day One, starting with A. G. Bell and his wife
and mother. Any AT&T staffer who suggested that hearing-impaired people
were unimportant would have been tarred and feathered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
Nowadays it is possible to buy phones that don't couple to T-coils, but
it is still quite possible to buy ones that do. I refuse to buy phones
that don't have the technology, even though I have no immediate need for
it. It adds about ten cents to the price of the phone. Shop around. In
my judgment Radio Shack may not be the best place to shop.
speakerphone
A speakerphone cannot couple to the T-coil. But ask yourself, what do
you really want to achieve with the speakerphone?
-- If you want hands-free operation, get a headset (corded or bluetooth)
that supports T-coil.
-- If you want participation from a conference-room full of people, get
an extension phone with speakerphone capability ... in addition to
your personal T-coil phone. Note that a +50dB speakerphone is utterly
unsuitable for this application, because it is too loud for the non-
impaired participants.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I am unable to imagine a scenario where
a +50-dB phone is the winning solution.
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