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Have you considered the possibilty that it might, at least in part, be due to simply getting older ?

I think that both sides are right here, I notice myself, and many people have commented to me, how hard it is to hear speech on a lot of programmes.
But also, yes, like all things, your hearing gets worse as the years pass, your eyesight does and, in my case my pancreas, hence the late onset diabetes.
So some time back, I turned up at the hearing aid clinic and got myself kitted out with the latest digital gadgets: Terrible - even though they're finely tuned to your particular situation, background noise in pubs, like listening to TV, meant that I was worse off hearing speech, traffic noise acquired a sort of nightmare droning quality and music, my chief enjoyment, was thin, reedy and unlistenable. I went back a couple of times, went through all the tests again, but gave up.
Sometime later, we were having the sitting room re-decorated and the centre speaker was on a chair a couple of feet out, suddenly, speech was much, much clearer again - so I resited the centre speaker at ear level and spent more time adjusting, rather than accepting the manufacturers setting and it's a really great improvement.
I've also found that my new Yamaha is much better than my old Kenwood, which was one of the first mass commercial surround sound amps. But I do think the programme mixing has a lot to answer for.
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Politics and Ideology: Not my bag