[EB66]

I have the same problem. A lot of people do. For me, it developed during my 20s. My mother is a speech language pathologist so the problem was identified early.

What you have is a hearing discrimination loss. It's often caused by diminished hearing of higher frequencies. Hearing aids can help or if the loss of higher frequencies is total, then frequency-transposition hearing aids may be needed. Learning to lip read can also help a lot too.

Other people without hearing discrimination loss have probably experienced what it's like if they've ever listened to a cheap TV with crummy internal speakers and had to turn on subtitles. Very high frequencies on cheap speakers are often diminished or distorted. That makes it much more difficult to discriminate spoken words even though you can hear them fine.

If you haven't done so already, go get your hearing tested by a quality audiologist (there is such a thing as a bad audiologist). It can help identify exactly what's going on and give you a good baseline to compare against tests in the future (these things often get worse with age).