Listenng to music when you have hearing aids can be a tricky thing. I have a mobile hearing aid loop that can connect via bluetooth to my phone and personal computers…personal as in “belongs to me”, as distinct from the 1980s “Personal Computer“. That means I can hear phonecalls, listen to music on my ipod and listen to youtube videos on my laptop. I have mostly used a rather nice pair of Sennheiser headphones for listening to the ipod and on planes for inflight entertainment.

I am slowing coming round to using the hearing aid loop for the ipod though I miss the “loudness” of the headphones. Ultimately that loudness is probably bad for my ears. However I haven’t quite worked out how to use the loop with inflight entertainment systems yet. With the headphones I have an additional connector that handles the double mono connector that qantas uses for their sound system as pictured. Plug the headphones into one end and plug the two plugs at the other end into the sockets on your armrest.

This means I can use my own headphones which provide much better sound than their provided headphones. The downside is that I have to have them really loud which can annoy other passengers. This happened on a recent trip and once I explained I was hearing impaired they were ok. Personally I don’t like causing that sort of disruption for other people in the first place. Though I hate it, I am that person with the loud car stereo.

So I’m looking at other options. I haven’t yet worked out how to use my hearing aid loop to connect to flight entertainment systems. I’m keeping an eye out for some sort of bluetooth connector but no luck yet, or even better would be a direct telecoil connection. Short term I’ll stick with the headphone/connector option but will ask my audiologist about it when I put my hearing aids in for their next service.