coolant system corrosion

As a wearer of various brands of hearing aids since the age of six, and the
current wearer of two Widex AK-19s, I can tell you that you are completely
full of shit. Or worse.

 

When it comes to hearing aids, this is bullshit. Sorry.

 

Is there such a thing?
--scott

 

(Scott Dorsey) wrote in @panix2.panix.com:

Honda and Toyota, for two...

 

did someone piss in your cornflakes? and what happened to reading in
context?

a lot of d.s.p. [digital signal processing] /is/ closed and proprietary.
i doubt you or any sales dude know or even /want/ to know what
algorithm are used, or how the processing works.. they know its
features and benefits - that's what they need to know and what they're
talking to. but that's not the same thing, so don't get them confused

 

doesn't that mean systems should be flushed and replenished?

but silicates can wreck pump seals - something very well documented.

that's what you get when you have differing electrode potentials.
materials quality is crucial to that since not only do you have to worry
about potentials from one material to another, but you can have
non-homogeneous materials with strongly different potentials for
different phases within it.

i would imagine this field continues to be actively researched.

 

ok, so...

given the above, what do /you/ know that allows you to disregard the
manufacturer's dipstick calibration and checking specs, or even the
manufacturer's oil change interval specs?

 

No, I fear the hearing aid companies are the ones full of shit. These
days, they are all putting little dsp processors inside, which all do
some amount of noise reduction (mostly gating individual frequency bands).
The noise reduction stuff for the most part doesn't do much good in high
noise environments where it is most needed, and the manufacturers for the
most part won't talk about how the systems work so the people who are
prescribing and installing them don't really know the details of what happens
inside the black box.

It's sort of... well, actually it's just like ECUs.... except that the
hearing aid folks keep up a long line of marketing garbage which obscures
the details.
--scott

 

Dunno about Honda, but check out Japanese government investment in Toyota.
Also MITI ties to both.... the Japanese have figured out how to do it right
at least.
--scott

 

(Scott Dorsey) wrote in

Yes it does. And very, very well. I have 42-years of personal experience
with hearing aids.

Whatever it is that limits the sounds works excellently against anything
from large-caliber gunshots to jet aircraft.

My current hearing-aid model also has a pretty amazing setting that
recognizes road noise. It senses, then reduces, that road noise so that
it's /much/ easier to converse with passengers. No other hearing-aid I've
had has been able to do that.

 

(Scott Dorsey) wrote in

I can't find anything much outside of Toyota getting a $2 billion loan.
That is not "investment". Compare that with the explicit ownership of GM by
the US and the unions.

As for "MITI ties", those ties have often been detrimental. Soichiro Honda
openly and controversially defied MITI's directives when he decided to
start building cars. Had he complied, I wouldn't be drivig an Integra right
now.

 

That's not noise reduction, that's limiting. And the limiting does indeed
work excellently, unless you happen to suffer from severe recruitment in
which case the degree of dynamic range squish required can sometimes just
be too much.

The noise reduction system is what would allow you to understand someone's
voice when that jet aircraft is going over, as well as someone with normal
hearing. The limiter just protects you from pain and ear damage, it does
not improve intelligibility.

Is is the Etymotic? If so, I am glad to hear it works for you; I am told
that is some kind of gated band system that has been optimized for road
noise; it specifically cuts out everything but the vocal region which it
divides up into narrow bands, and if the instantaneous level in any band
is greater than the average level, it silences the band. It does some
other stuff that Etymotic won't talk about also and I suspect it has to
do with having levels in-between silence and full gain in a band.

For a really weird experience, listen to a fiddle with that setting.
I'm not sure quite what's going on but the intonation is screwed up.

How well this kind of thing works depends a lot on the kind of hearing
problem you have; if it's just a threshold issue they can be very good,
but if you have linearity issues they can sometimes make things worse.
A lot of it depends on the skill of the person setting the dsp up and
how well they can get an idea of what you're really hearing.
--scott

 

Without a doubt.'

One of the worst problems I have seen from silicates has nothing to do with
seals.
The crap can plug radiators SOLID with silica. Silica cannot be removed by
simple flushing or acid flush. This happens when you use formulations with
too much silicate, or use water containing magnesium or other ions which are
not compatible with silicate.

I dont doubt that, if overdone, silica excesses in the system can and will
damage seals, bearings, etc.

If you dont overdo with silicates, they dont really cause much of a problem.
To wit, the hybrid organic acid technology (HOAT) was an improvement of
the DexCool systems, using some lower concentrations of silicates.

You know, of course, that silicone greases are nothing more than silicone
oils, viscosified or gelled with fumed silica.. So it depends upon the form
of the silica
whether they are highly abrasive or not. Sand is a bitch.. fumed silica is
not
so problematic. Both are silica

If you are going to use sodium silicate, there is no way chemically to
prevent
them from decomposing to silica, of some form or another. It happens no
matter what you do, with time.

But if you control the concentration, you can make them liveable. AFAIK,
nothing
protects aluminum like silicate.

"We" are currently considering looking into some phosphate chemistry, but at
this point
there is no real commercial interest, and therefore nobody to pay the bills.

By the way, "we" are manufacturers, for whom I still consult.

 

It is important to know if you are being told crap or not.

How would you know, listening to the crap from the various
manufacturers? You believe the last commercial you hear?

 

some, not all - there are still silicone greases with lithium stearate
soap thickeners. dow's molykote 33 for example.

well, i think the 10-year performance spec for whatever it is in honda
oem coolant fill is pretty damned worthy. i doubt it's a silicate given
honda's dire warnings about them in their tsb's.

interesting chatting with you. thank you.

 

The hearing aid manufacturers have their marketing arm like most
companies which tend to overstate their product's features. Mostly, they
pretty much sound alike to me.

At the moment, there's a new product out that does filter out noise
using speech envelope detection. It gives about a 6 dB reduction which
is kinda small or kinda large depending on your viewpoint. The crazy
thing is that it really does seem to work. Anyway, my guess is that the
next big thing in hearing aids will be direct connectivity with other
devices like cell phones and TVs and noise reduction algorithms that
really work.

 

OK Mr. Smarty Pants, please explain what the function of the Dynamic
Integrator™ on your hearing aids is and how it works. Don't give me any
of that market-speak BS - that don't tell me nothing.

What is the AIKIA Locator and how does it work? These should be easy for
a long time user like you - right?

If you work for Widex, you'd probably get into trouble for disclosing
any real information on how Widex programs it's aids. My guess is that
the guys that do the R & D probably consider these terms marketing BS.
No matter, I'm OK with marketing as long as you are. All happy now?

 

Why would I care HOW the thing works as long as somebody can tell me
WHAT it does?

Do you know the exact mechanism by which acetaminophen works? Of course
not. You only know it works wonders on fevers. Which is all that counts.

Then don't try to snow me with technical gibberish that is meaningless
to me, just to show off some supposed brilliance on your part.

Oh, so that's what "AIKIA" is. It's printed on both sides of my aids,
and I was wondering about that (but only idly, not enough to want to
look it up).

I have not got the foggiest notion. And that doesn't matter. All I need
to know is WHAT it does and HOW WELL it does it. Technically HOW it does
it is none of my business, and it would be over my head anyway. My
provider explained the functions of the various settings to me, and I am
satisfied that she has sufficient grasp of the workings of the various
aids out there so as to be able to set me up with a good choice for my
hearing loss.

You people have completely confused "function" with "proprietary
information". The two are unrelated.

Last aid was a Phonak. These are the first Widex's I've ever owned.

 

Well Mr. Hearing Aid Expert, these are advertised features of your aids
but it looks like you have no idea WHAT it does or that they even exist.
No matter, these are not electronic or audiological terms but marketing
terms and therefore not very illuminating or useful. The person that
programmed the aids won't be able to explain how or exactly what it does
because the manufactures don't give out that information. Please let me
know if I've said anything that isn't true.

I'm not interested in impressing you. It's kind of obvious that you're
the kind of guy that shoots off his mouth without understanding what is
being said. Guys like you are a dime a dozen on Usenet. That's the breaks.

It is good that your provider is competent in this area. My opinion is
that a large percentage of providers are not and I wish there were more
like her.

 

Your penultimate sentence as quoted above. Not only is it untrue, it is
very silly.