Late-deafened music lover rediscovers love of music via cochlear implant

December 31, 2011 11:27 AM

Deaf guy goes shopping for high-end headphones and other tales of musical rediscovery from Lee Walker, a lifelong music-lover who lost most of his hearing in early adulthood. A cochlear implant restored usable but quite different hearing, which Walker put to use enjoying music by any means necessary – captioned music videos, giant DJ-quality cans worn over external implant hardware, plugging an iPod Touch directly into that hardware.
posted by joeclark (4 comments total)

Interesting - he's right that the direct connect cables show their age after just a few months, but ... headphones? Ew. At least in my experience, anything in contact with my CI processor other than my head makes all sorts of rubbing noises, and I can't stand that. If I was going to go with anything other than direct connect, it'd probably be an induction loop, although obviously those are lousy in terms of introducing an external buzzing.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 12:55 PM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

Interesting, but I wonder if his audiophile needs might be better met by tweaking the direct connection to the cochlear implant. A custom cable, EQ, and maybe an amplifier seems a better route than the acoustic route with headphones into the microphone in the CI.
posted by exogenous at 1:47 PM on December 31, 2011

I think what fascinates me most is how out of sync with modern sensibilities his musical tastes are. He should write for Pitch Fork Media, they'd love him.
posted by Yowser at 6:16 PM on December 31, 2011

Oh, come now, Yowser. If your musical tastes stopped cold at age 19 and you were now 30, what would those tastes be like? Would anything have changed in the interim?

Corollary: Ask anyone over 35 how keen they are on “new” music(s).
posted by joeclark at 8:33 AM on January 1, 2012