Hearing aids

Mine are like that to win the phone conversation coming though the hearing aids. At home I sometimes wear headphones when working on music and my Mac, but generally I just use the ear buds when on planes.

I never use earphones and didn’t plan to on the trip but the Rick Steves suggestions state that if you wear hearing aids you should bring along over the ear headphones for what I assume is the guides narrative. That is the reason for my question.

Thank you

I have gone to Europe for 16 of the last 18 years and go again in two days. I have worn hearing aids forever and wear them in Europe just as I do at home. When flying and using my noise cancelling headphones, I take out my hearing aids. I have taken 16 RS tours, soon to be #17, and more and more times on those tours the use of communication devices that allow the speakers to talk softly and the tour members to wear receivers and ear phones are being used.
If your hearing aids will accept this type of communication, great. Mine do not so I try to remember to take a good pair of small earphones to plug into the receivers that are provided by the guides. I think this is a real improvement for folks like me who use to have a hard time hearing the guides.

DH has worn hearing aids for a couple decades. He prefers to bring his own headset. It took him several tries before he found one that fit easily and didn't cause feedback problems. (His are over the ear type aids).

I have Bluetooth capable hearing aids. If you are wearing them connected to an iPhone, you can hear any audio tours, such as the RS tours, through your hearing aids. The sound quality, however, isn't the best. Instead, I keep the hearing aids on, and because my hearing aids are powered by a behind the ear control with only the domes in my ear, I use a pair of Bose ear buds which are connected by wire to my iPhone.

This does several things:

First, it allows me to hear my surroundings, because the sound inlet is behind my ear and I am hearing my environment THROUGH my hearing aids, the way they are intended to work.

Second, the sound quality from my iPhone is much better when I listen to RS audio guides, Podcasts, and music through my ear buds. When someone asks me a question, because I am not using the Bluetooth capability of my hearing aids to listen to an audio guide, it is crystal clear. The iPhone App that controls my hearing aid is still functional and I can adjust noise pollution through the iPhone.

Third, when I am on a plane or otherwise focusing on listening to music, I can take out the hearing aids and just listen to music through the ear buds.

Does this make sense? If I listen to the audio tour through my hearing aids, which are simultaneously providing aural input from my surroundings, it provides me with a somewhat degraded sound quality for everything.

Yes it makes sense but... I am going on a Rick Steves tour and the guide now uses an audio system and everyone has a receiver that you plug your earphones into. This is, as I understand it, the reason over the ear earphones are suggested with hearing aids.

Actually, I get very good audio from my iPhone - from, for example, the Rick Steves audio tours. But this is different.

The audio guides used on the RS tours (and most others out there) are not technologically compatible with what you have now for hearing aids. They are separate little boxes with very ancient technology to produce the sound through a simple headphone, think 1960's transistor radio. You can bring headphones you prefer and plug those into the audio guide and then place the headphone over your ear where the hearing aid picks up the sound from the headphone. There is no blue-tooth or other connection option.

If your hearing aids have a telecoil T-switch, you could use a personal induction neck loop or ear hooks. I would recommend taking a earphone jack adaptor kit with you in case the jack is wrong size. I’ve used ear hooks for audio receivers and museum audio guides.

We recently just returned from two RS tours in Europe and I too had to manage the Vox box used by the tour guide. My solution was to just remove one hearing aid. The Vox box ear bud was in the left ear and the right ear had my regular hearing aid. Additionally, I found that conversations with my wife were easier if she remained on my right side, my regular hearing aid side. I carried the unused hearing aid with me and reinserted it after the tour’s Vox box was no longer being used for the rest of the day.