It's Critter Time!

ElTipejoLoco wrote: Fri Sep 12, 2025 12:32 am Does your particular variety of hearing loss mean you also can't benefit from bone conductivity audio devices? I use a pair of headphones that go slightly in front of the ear (that I wish were better designed to have some built-in way to keep them tight on my skull), as I've always been both hard of hearing and prone to ear infections, which means I'm mostly always having to play games exclusively via my left ear anyway.

I don't play competitively, though. Also, a lot of the time in FPSes I just sort of play by being up against walls on my characters' right anyway to minimize needing to rely on audio cues in my weaker ear anyway. All that aside, you could still check if there's options to enable some sort of radial indicator for incoming damage in the games you play.

Battlefield does have radial indicators, but they're unfortunately games with very short Time To Kill so in most cases I can't orient myself fast enough with just the radial. Good advice with the right wall thing, I can maybe try to be conscious of that.

I haven't been tested to see if I could use bone conductivity devices due to not having insurance that would cover such testing or devices. I have zero hearing in my right ear, like I got a hearing test and I couldn't even perceive a sound was being played in my right ear. The only sounds I picked up at all were so loud that I could hear them through the noise cancellation in my other ear. Was kinda freaky given that I went from completely normal hearing to that in a day.

I dunno if there's specific medical grade conduction options, but the stuff I got was just consumer grade and I didn't really know ahead of time how they'd be or if they'd work for me. The ones I have are wired Elesound Bioxar conduction headphones and run for about 30 USD from what I can see on Amazon right now, but I wouldn't recommend them unless you can figure out a way to comfortably tighten them on your head (I've tried rubber bands and failed, and my alternative is just occasionally pressing them against my head on my own or wearing headphones on top of them, which is both silly and deffo double-y deforming my cranium). There might be an affordable option somewhere. It only really helps if you can still sense vibrations on the surface of your head and use that information to compensate, though, so if you decide to try them I'd suggest picking something that's sold by a seller that allows returns and refunds, just in case.