FLoC

[yogi]

Been to that Chicago Warshowski & Co many many years ago. Back in those days Allied Electronics and Radio Shack had the same setup. The Internet is a different arrangement and more like a global flea market. If you shop around long enough you can always find a good deal. It helps to have the right tools (browser) as well.

[Kellemora]

Whitney and Warshowski is actually the same company, same warehouse. Or it was back in the day!
I don't remember the actual story, but when Dad Whitney passed the company to his two children, they didn't get along on a lot of things. So they each had their own sales side of the businesses, but still worked together on the back end, hi hi.

[yogi]

They were one of the better supply houses around, but they were also some distance from where I lived. It was often more convenient to just shop at the local stores. But, when something was hard to find, Warshowski had it.

[Kellemora]

Back in my muscle car days, I bought quite a bit from Whitney, until their fight, then I got everything from Warshawski. I realized it was the same stuff from the same warehouse, but felt she needed to have the upper hand over her brother whenever possible.
Actually, the company started as Warshawski, then merged with Whitney, probably because Roy married a Whitney girl. I do know they had a very long history, and technically are still in business under some other company that bought out both together.
It was after my racing days when Warshawski moved to LaSalle, Ill. I remember when heard they were moving to LaSalle, I immediately though LaSalle Street in St. Louis, the old Florists Wholesale Row, but was wrong.
Everything I ever needed, especially if considered a custom item, Warshawski had it!

In a way it is ironic how I could go from rebuilding engines to not knowing diddly squat about fixing today's cars.
But then too, one heck of a lot has changed about them, and not too many folks are building racing engines of the type we built back in the day.

[yogi]

I doubt that the basic gasoline internal combustion engine has changed much over it's lifetime. The attachments to it, however, have gone through a sea change. It's all electronic wherever possible which might go a long way to explain why your racing day skills are irrelevant in today's automobile. I think you can still do a lot of your own work, but the service and diagnostic equipment needed now and days is as costly as, say, a gaming computer. LOL Besides, you are at a stage in your life where messing with all the maintenance and repair is not as much fun as it used to be. It's time to enjoy other things that are comforting instead of demanding.

[Kellemora]

I no longer have the physical capability of even plugging a tire, as witnessed by my neighbors picking me up off the ground when I over exerted myself.

I still miss the old muscle car days though and souping them all up. Installed dome pistons, white sheet cams, and the like.

[yogi]

Sad but true is the fact us old timers gradually lose our ability to perform tasks we loved so much in our past. A lot of that has to do with aging bodies and minds, but I've also noted a lot of profiling going on. Some people who were long time friends stopped talking to me altogether during the days when I had cancer. The cancer is gone and so are the friends, but I am the same person I've always been; just a little bit older. We are being profiled due to our age, and as in any profile certain individuals are being mischaracterized. About all you can do is maintain your dignity. Those days of old actually happened and that cannot be altered by any profile. We can all be proud of our accomplishments, even if the rest of the world isn't. The worst thing that can happen is to become discouraged. I know that staying positive isn't always easy, but it's the only way to survive.

[Kellemora]

You got that right Yogi!

We have a show over here that's not all that great of a show, but their INTO is awesome, after you get over the nausea of it, it become cute and addictive. The name of the show is B-Positive.

Here is the intro song with the video that goes with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrLi5TpMGg

My late wife Ruth, despite all of her many problems and stuck in a wheelchair always remained positive, and tried to call other shut-ins to cheer them up every day if she was able.

[yogi]

Thanks for the "positive" link. It reminded me of something that might have come out of Monty Python. LOL Maintaining a positive mental attitude has been a goal I've pursued for many decades. I don't suppose you would think that to be the case when you read some of the gripes I publish. But I have a captive audience here. Nobody else will listen to, or read my ramblings. LOL

[Kellemora]

I have a short video I edited that I keep on all of my computers to play before I start work in the morning, if I need a quick boost. It's called Hap-E to C-U Agin, but is different than others I've found.
It's a 9mb avi file. Fun and cheerful to listen to for getting your work ethic charged up.
Sometimes I play the Mule Skinner Blues by the Fendermen to get ramped up, hi hi.

My wife will tell you I find the darndest things to complain about, and sometimes I go of the deep end with folks who are idiots, hi hi. If we are together in a store or someplace when I get irked, she will walk away and leave me to fight with whomever I chose to pick on, hi hi.

But I have an entire bucket of gripes about a lot of things that have become my pet peeves, but I don't usually unload them on anyone who can't do anything about them. Lose friends that way!

[yogi]

I love the Mule Skinner Blues, but, don't see how that would be motivational to begin a hard day's work.

I realize we are talking ancient history here, but the Fendermen recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHvQMXjkLfc really shows how outdated the recording technology was in 1960.
Here's Dolly's verion, which could possibly motivate ME. LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orfuTrKsYyM

[Kellemora]

The version by the Fendermen wakes me up and makes me laugh, puts a big smile on my face.

Speaking of Dolly Parton.
My wife used to play with her when she stayed at her aunts house only one block away from our house here.
I like a lot of her songs, but didn't like her rendition of the Mule Skinner Blues, hard to understand what she is saying and often way to high pitched for my hearing too.

I'm hunting on-line for the version of Happy which I truncated so as not to see the wasted parts of the video.
I just can't find the one I have anymore, and believe me, I've looked for it!

[yogi]

The bane (or one of them) of old age is high frequency hearing loss. Back at Motorola when I was testing microphones for a living I had to plot frequency response. That's when I learned how bad my hearing was. The mics were good up to 10 KHz but I stopped hearing the tones around 1500 Hz. It was a noticeable loss, but in all honesty not very debilitating. I learned to live with the hearing loss for many years, and then one fine day my wife's niece decided to get married and have a reception. We sat one, or possibly two, tables away from the DJ booth and the speakers he had put in place with the use of a crane. Back then it wasn't enough to simply hear the music. You had to feel it, literally. Loud as it was I thought I was adjusting to it until after dinner when I had to use the little boy's room. I could hear virtually nothing on that trip to the water hole. That surprised me to no end and I stayed out of the banquet room for quite some time hoping to recover. I didn't. In fact I never fully recovered. Something was permanently damaged at that reception. I didn't work at Motorola when that happened so that I could not give myself an audio exam. However, the human voice goes up to around 1800 Hz and I'm certain my top frequency is around half of that. The very sad result of this hearing loss is my wife's voice does not sound like the one I grew to know and love for five decades.

I've thought about a hearing aid, but never heard of anyone who loved, or even liked, theirs. There are some high tech amplifiers these days if I can afford to part with 8-10 grand. I might just do that if only to hear her sweet tones once again. But the little hair follicles that reproduce the high frequencies are most likely dead forever. The hearing aid would bring up the volume of the rest of the spectrum, but I doubt that there is any hope for recovering the high frequencies.

Even before that wedding, music in general didn't sound right. After that event it was difficult for me to understand most of the music vocals. Using headphones helps a lot. That recording by Dolly I linked to didn't sound too bad, albeit I know I didn't get the full impact of her vocal cords. The version by the Fendermen sounded distorted and with too much bass. None of their words were intelligible to me. I never was a great fan of music, but now it's totally futile unless I have a headset on.

[Kellemora]

I was born with some hearing loss up in the range where little girls squeal and where piazzo crystals make their tones.
I've considered it a blessing, hi hi.
But yes, my hearing is getting worse also. I've never listened to loud music, but have been near a few explosions that left me not able to hear very good for a few days, but I did recover from those instances.

Most hearing aids are only amplifiers, which I think could actually make you go deaf faster.
I did try one once that did not amplify, but just moved an upper frequency down an octave. They did mean I could hear those sounds I couldn't hear, but not at the pitch they were originally, so they sounded really strange.
Like a girl using a mans voice, hi hi. I took them back near the end of the 30 day trial period.

Now that's a switch, I could hardly understand what Dolly was saying, but have no trouble with the Fendermen, I hear every word clear and crisp.

As a Ham operator, we had audio test tones to test out speakers and the like. Although it did that, it had another purpose which is why it was part of some receivers. You could interject a pure tone to the audio to enhance it, usually used with Morse Code to pull a certain person out of the crowd, but it worked with voice also. Sorta like turning up the treble on a deep voice or turning up the bass on a higher pitched voice. But you could use it just to hear the tone it made and turn the frequency up and down.

I was thinking, maybe there is a site on-line that lets you listen to a pure tone that can be adjusted up and down?

[yogi]

There was something called a beat frequency oscillator (BFO) in my ham rig. I believe it was used for filtering sideband signals which had no carrier. The oscillator did the same kind of enhancing that you describe. The voice pitch of the modulated SSB signal could be raised or lowered with that BFO and thus you could easily pick a single signal out of a bunch of noise. It didn't work very well next to any signal that did have a carrier, such as Radio Moscow was prone to do.

There may in fact be some kind of hearing test online, but that would be very tenuous. The quality of the tone depends on the speakers and the rate of digital sampling going on in the browser. It might be good for an approximation, but any serious testing would need lab quality equipment. There are audiologists who do exactly that and will also sell you a hearing aid with an equalizer. The net result would be all the audible tones would be at the same level at your ear drum. My problem, however, is that the receptors for the high frequencies are not functioning. There isn't a way to amplify nothing.

[Kellemora]

Some of my early radios had a BFO on them too.

I get a pretty clear tone from my cheap old speakers, but don't know how well they would work as far as a hearing test goes.
But at least you would know what range of frequency you couldn't hear.

The idea behind that one hearing aid I mentioned, was it would take the tone I couldn't hear and move it down an octave to where I could hear it. It did do that, but didn't sound natural, and also lowered other tones I could hear OK, which made it horrible for me to use, and why I returned it.

I did use a pair of glasses once that amplified sound, but it didn't go into my ear at all, just against the bone behind my ear. I could hear all kinds of sounds I had never heard before, unfortunately, they were not the kinds of sounds you want to hear in the first place, hi hi.

[yogi]

Now Hear This

hearingGRAPH.jpg (60.82 KiB) Viewed 2668 times

The sensation of pitch is related to the frequency of the sound. The pitch increases with frequency. Thus, the frequency of middle C is 256 Hz, and the frequency of the A above is 440 Hz.

In non-tonal languages the consonants are important. The consonants (k, p, s, t, etc.) are predominantly found in the frequency range above 500 Hz. More specifically, in the 2 kHz-4 kHz frequency range.

Typical human speech ranges between 50 Hz and 300 Hz. Most men typically range between 85-180Hz, and most women between 165-255Hz.

Here are some interesting graphs and some notes I copied from various websites. Before I pretend that I know what I'm talking about I want to say that an octave of a tone is twice the frequency. I don't know how a hearing device could shift tones by a given number of octaves. What I think is more likely is that those frequencies above 500 Hz that you could not hear were divided by 2, or 3, and that resultant frequency was amplified. So if you could not hear a 1320 Hz tone, they boosted the response at 440 Hz (two octaves down) which in effect over amplified the tones you could hear. As far as I can tell, this is a common problem with hearing aids.

The big graph, its red line, represents the typical frequency response of the human ear. Thus, middle C and A are pretty much in the flat area to the left on the curve. The third octave of musical note A is 1320 Hz, which according to the graph takes about 12-13 DBspl increase in level to be heard. My best guess regarding my own hearing problems is that the curve takes a sharp dive around 1 kHz so that I don't hear any musical notes that are in the third octave range. Given that the quality of music is in it's harmonics, for me that cuts out quite a bit of the sound produced by any orchestra.

I seem to understand human speech much of the time, but take note that the consonants typically are in the 2 - 4 kHz range. Since my hearing above 1000 Hz is pretty much non-existent, I don't hear the consonants in your speech. Given that women have a base frequency range (the red line of the inserted graph) higher than most men, they are more difficult for me to understand. This is the problem with me not hearing my wife's voice correctly. A lot of the harmonics are above my maximum threshold of hearing, and I don't hear them.


I'll go sit down and be quiet now ...

[Kellemora]

Back when I was tested, I had no hearing at all from like 1,200 up to 1,450 hz or something like that.
But then above that I could hear again, but also the volume had to be higher as well.

Whatever makes the BEEP in computers, watches, timers, stoves, microwaves, etc. I can't hear those sounds most of the time.
My wife says both the washer and dryer play a jingle when it is finished, whatever it is, I've never heard it, not even once.

[yogi]

I happen to know I have high frequency hearing loss, but as you point out in your case it's not linear. Only certain bands of frequencies are muted in my ears. It's very interesting that you could not understand Dolly's singing in the link I posted while I had no problem (or very little). I also can hear that little jingle the washer and dryer play when finishing their chores. But you cant. Now I'm starting to wonder exactly what my hearing response curve actually looks like. In fact I can find out, for free. So they claim. I get junk mail all the time from people who want to test my hearing "at no cost to me" to see if I'd benefit from the hearing aides they are selling. I don't know about the average Beltone shop, but there are audiologists who would be able to provide me with a graph similar to the one I posted above. Then again, even if I had the graph I don't see me buying a hearing aide any time soon.

[Kellemora]

My uncle Bill had a hearing aid that put out this loud squeal every time he walked past a TV set. He said he could not hear the squeal, but everyone else in the room did, and it was loud too, hi hi.
He finally got the company to replace them, and finally no more squeal, but he could hear a pin drop two rooms away he kept them turned up so high, hi hi.

I get a hearing test like every three years, and they never gave me any printouts, just the bill, hi hi.