[zengief]

A new hearing loss modality seems to be gaining traction -- "hidden" hearing loss. A core symptom is difficulty parsing speech in noisy environments. Caused by repeated exposure to loud noises. Don't know if folks around here are going clubbing much but I'm under the impression that it's gotten way louder recently. Live music as a whole is pretty popular these days.

Apparently most who have it don't have the classic symptoms: tinnitus or hearing loss picked up at the audiologist's office.

[troad]

I definitely have this. My friends can usually understand one another shouting in a moderately loud bar; I can’t understand them at all.

I don’t know if it’s technically hearing loss though; I feel like I can hear the noises my friends are making, I just can’t segregate them from the background noise enough to parse the former as speech.

[KineticLensman]

I wear hearing aids for moderate hearing loss. They are optimised for picking out speech from the background sounds and in the open air or rooms that have good acoustics my comprehension can be better than people with notionally better hearing. But some sounds are very effective jammers for hearing aids, notably running water, boiling kettles and, unfortunately, the ambient noises in typical restaurants.