Does it make sense to buy a microphone?

I have congenital deafness, profound hearing loss. The percentage of speech intelligibility is approximately 1-2%. I use a pair of Oticon Xceed 1 SP. I often have problems communicating at a distance when lipreading less possible. Does it make sense to buy a remote microphone? I’m considering Edumic (as microphone and mobile streamer for cable input). P.S. please don’t offer CI.

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From your audiogram, your hearing is much worse than mine. My intelligibility is about 30%.

I use Costco KS10 aids (similar to Phonak P90 or Phonak Audeo Paradise 90RT). I occasionally use the Partner mic, which sometimes helps but not a great deal.

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It can be somewhat helpful, if you can get it close (within a meter) to the speaking source and adjust the pickup volume or playback volume. As you might expect, in a noisy room, and especially with distance between the mike and the speaker, it’s going to pick up more background noise than voice and likely not be very helpful. My losses are not as profound as yours, so your mileage may vary, but it may be worth a try, especially if you can return it if it’s not helpful.

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If you can understand speech up close in a quiet room without reading lips, a microphone would likely help. If you need to read lips no matter how good the situations is, I don’t think a microphone will help.

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That is pretty close to deaf. When I got CI’s my speech intelligbility was 4% and 8%.

As mentioned, can you close your eyes and understand someone speaking to you that is very close to you in quiet? If you can’t the remote mic probably will not help you.

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Thanks everyone for the answers! In general, the microphone will not help me.

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Good thread
I’ve learned something new

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Are your aids paired to your phone? If you have an iOS phone, you have an inbuilt microphone function in the iOS phone “Live Listen”. Try using this function to see if it helps you.

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Yes, I have iPhone, and I tried Live Listen. But, as I understand it, the sensitivity of the iPhone microphones is not enough, so the sound quality was poor.

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