It is common for adults to have some hearing loss. The older we get, the poorer our hearing becomes. Hearing loss usually begins gradually with certain words sounding soft, muffled and/or distorted. This change often makes listening a difficult task, especially in noisy areas.
People with a hearing loss often feel that they can hear fine but cannot understand what is being said. In most cased, people with hearing loss have more difficulty hearing high pitch sounds. The consonants s, z, f, v, sh, and th, are difficult to hear if you have high pitch hearing loss.
If a person hears low pitches normally, he/she usually hears vowel sounds normally. This is why many people feel that they can hear fine. But when a person only hears vowel sounds, they are not hearing enough of the word to understand it. This makes speech sound like it is being mumbled.
Hearing aids and speech-reading may be able to help you with this type of hearing loss. These tools will help you understand conversations better. Unfortunately, hearing aids can’t make us hear as well as when we were younger but they do improve our hearing and allow us to hear more than we could before using them.
Here is a chart measuring Frequencies and Decibels of common sounds,