Hear More. Live More.

Nobody knows exactly when I lost my hearing. The best estimate from the experts is somewhere between ages one and three, during eighteen months of hospitalizations from a serious illness. By the time anyone figured out what had happened, I was seven years old and had already spent years adapting to a world I couldn't fully hear.

The diagnosis led to speech therapy — nearly a decade of it. I sat in the front of every class. I learned to read lips, body language, and facial expressions without anyone telling me that's what I was doing. My family was working poor, always moving, always surviving. I attended at least twelve schools before graduating high school. Nobody had bandwidth to research assistive technology for a kid who was otherwise keeping up. I was the first in my family to earn a four-year degree.

My only real exposure to ASL came at ages eight or nine, through a friend named Barbara in speech therapy class. Her younger sister was more severely impaired, and their household used ASL. That was it — one household, one glimpse, never revisited. I've watched ASL interpreters at Broadway shows for over a decade and still know very little. It simply never became a need for me, but I understand its value for those who do.

The hearing loss was simply part of who I was. It wasn't until my late teens that it became something that closed doors. I took the ASVAB at seventeen and scored 89%. Took it again at twenty and scored 93%. Both times, the hearing test was the last stop — and the only one I couldn't pass. The Navy at seventeen, the Marines at twenty. Doors closed.

I spent my twenties and thirties adapting the way I always had — quietly and independently. Then came the conference calls. Software developer, late 1990s, teams spread across data centers around the country, communicating through Polycom speakerphone systems. No lips. No facial expressions. No body language. Just voices coming out of a speaker in a room. That was the moment hearing loss stopped being something I could work around on my own.

My first hearing aids were Phonak BTEs. Twelve thousand dollars. My copay was six thousand because insurance coverage was just beginning to exist. They improved my functional hearing by roughly 35% — not a cure, a tool. A significant one. I've worn BTEs ever since, through Phonak, Starkey, and currently Signia Pure Charge&Go IX. Each generation better than the last, none of them cheap, none of them perfect.

The irony I've made peace with: rejected by the military twice for hearing loss at seventeen and twenty. Today, at sixty-two, I'm an Army civilian and I love the work. Some doors close slowly and open from the other side.

Profound Soundz exists because the content written for people with hearing loss is mostly written by people who don't have it. The reviews are generic. The advice ignores real constraints. Nobody talks about which headsets press on your BTE aid and cause headaches after an hour. Nobody explains that "over-ear" on the box doesn't mean your ears will actually fit inside the cups. Nobody mentions that active noise cancellation can feel like pressure on the skull for certain types of loss.

This site covers consumer-accessible devices, captioning tools, connectivity options, and practical configurations — because not everyone can afford hearing aids, not everyone is ready for them, and even those who have them still need the right headset for a Teams call. Every recommendation here is shaped by 60-plus years of living with significant hearing loss and figuring most of it out independently.

Profound Soundz is a Tekdec, Inc. property.