Twenty-two. Twenty-six. Thirty. Thirty-four. My thumb finds the volume button before I've even settled into the recliner, chasing the same number my hearing seems to demand most nights, until the anchor's voice finally pulls itself free from the hum of the refrigerator down the hall.
Quick disclosure before we go any further — some of the links below, including the ones for Audifort, are affiliate links, and I earn a small commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. I only mention hearing supplements I've actually tested myself, alongside my hearing aids. I'm not a doctor or an audiologist — just a retired principal who got tired of guessing at what people were saying.
My wife noticed the pattern before I ever admitted it out loud, and she'd comment on the volume from clear across the room without so much as touching the remote — a raised eyebrow usually did the job. I brushed it off with a joke more often than I should have. What actually got me moving was missing my granddaughter's first sentence at a family dinner — the words got swallowed by table noise before they ever reached me, and I was the only one at the table who missed it.
The Clipboard Habit: Setting Up the Test
Three decades of running a school teaches you to trust a system over a feeling, so before I started taking Audifort this past winter, I didn't want a vague impression of whether it worked — I wanted a number. That's how the TV Volume Test began: every night, I'd log the volume where the dialogue felt comfortable, no hearing aids, just my own ears and the remote.
The rule was simple enough for a spiral notebook kept by the coasters — same chair, same time of night, one number written down without editing it. It wasn't a scientific study. I'm a retired principal, not a researcher. But that number didn't flatter me the way a passing conversation sometimes did. It just sat there in pencil, plain as the day I wrote it.
Fish Oil Didn't Move the Number
I'd written before about the silence at the head of the table, that particular kind of quiet that isn't peaceful so much as it is excluded. In the three years since I really started paying attention to this, I'd tried more than one thing that fizzled — a bottle of plain fish oil capsules every morning for a month, on the theory that better circulation might do for my ears what people say it does for the heart. My comfort number on the TV never moved. Not one point, the whole month.
Hearing supplements in general ask for a kind of patience most of us lost somewhere around retirement — you want the fix inside a week, not spread out over a season. A retired colleague of mine likened it to what I'd already read about natural ingredients for ears — nothing about them moves fast, and nothing about them moves on your schedule. I'd already bought the bottles by then, so I decided I might as well see the full 120 days through.
Sunday Dinner, Week Five
The clatter from the kitchen was always there in the background at Sunday dinner — loud enough to register, never quite clear enough to turn into actual words, which has its own particular kind of tiredness to it. Five weeks into the Audifort bottles, that changed without me planning for it. I made it through the whole meal without once watching anyone's mouth to keep up, and only noticed afterward, drying plates at the sink, that I hadn't needed to. No big moment, no lightbulb — just an ordinary Sunday that went easier than the ones before it.
Is the Problem the TV, or Is It My Hearing?
As the weeks kept stacking up, I started noticing smaller things outside the recliner too. At the grocery store, I caught the cashier's total the first time through, no leaning over the plexiglass divider to ask for a repeat. Some Saturdays I sit in the reading room at the Milton Public Library going through the newspaper, and I noticed I could follow a hushed conversation two tables over without filling in the gaps from context the way I used to.
A friend of mine bikes the Cape Cod Rail Trail most long weekends he can manage, and he mentioned recently that he'd stopped hearing other cyclists call out before passing him. It made me realize this creeps up on plenty of people who never spent thirty years in gymnasiums and echoing cafeterias the way I did — rooms that swallow the edges off every word before it reaches you.
It's the small wins that add up when you're dealing with what doctors call presbycusis, the clinical name for the ordinary age-related hearing loss that creeps up on so many of us well past fifty.
I stayed consistent with the bottles and kept logging every night, and I started wondering if I could use other supplements alongside my hearing aids without one undoing the other. For me, at least, the two seem to work from different angles instead of stepping on each other's toes.
The Restaurant Test
April brought a retirement dinner for a friend at an Italian place with high ceilings and hard floors — exactly the kind of room that used to defeat me completely, forks clattering against plates, five or six conversations layered on top of each other. Restaurants like that are where background noise does the most damage, chewing through consonants first and leaving you chasing vowels around the table.
Usually I do what I privately call the Principal's Nod in rooms like that — smiling along, agreeing at what seem like the right moments, without catching half of what anyone actually said. That night I followed something like seventy percent of the table talk instead of the usual thirty, which sounds modest until you've spent years guessing your way through dinners like it. Nobody had to repeat a punchline for me twice.
That exhaustion afterward didn't show up this time, and how exhausting it is just to listen is something people with ordinary hearing rarely understand — your brain works overtime filling in blanks that used to fill themselves in automatically.
The 120-Day Verdict on Audifort
Four months after that first night with the notebook, I sat down to watch a documentary and adjusted the volume without thinking much about it. Checking the dial afterward out of habit more than curiosity, it read twenty-four. Four months earlier, that same comfortable number had been thirty-four.
My hearing isn't "perfect," and I still put my hearing aids on for church or any room with more than a handful of people talking at once. But the baseline moved, and it moved in a direction I could measure instead of just hope for. Audifort seems to reach a layer my hearing aids alone weren't quite touching — not a switch flipping, more like the volume on the whole day easing down a notch.
On nights when the ringing in my ears gets loud enough to notice, which is its own separate headache, I'll also take Quietum Plus, and between the two I've settled into a routine that works better than either one does alone.
For anyone who wants a fuller breakdown, I put together how Audifort compares to other options I've tried, since no single supplement tells the whole story on its own.
Keeping a Log Changed How I Saw It
Writing the number down every night did three things I didn't expect going in. It stopped the denial fastest — seeing thirty-four in pencil, night after night, made it a lot harder to tell myself I was fine. It also caught progress I would have otherwise missed, because a drop from thirty-four to thirty happens slowly enough to slide right past you if you're not the type to check. And it gave me something to actually do besides wait, which matters more than people admit when you're managing your own hearing health instead of handing the whole problem to a hearing aid and calling it solved.
Two different jobs, not competing solutions — that's how I've come to think of the hearing aids and the supplement together. One amplifies what's already there; the other supports what's left of my hearing over the longer run.
Left unmanaged, this is the kind of thing that quietly shrinks a person's world — skipping the loud reunions, letting calls go to voicemail, calling it a preference instead of what it actually is.
Final Thoughts from the Recliner
Here's the thing about getting older — most of us wait until something's completely broken before we deal with it. Years went by where I nodded along to stories I couldn't fully hear, missed punchlines, missed quieter moments with my grandkids I'm not getting back.
Going from a thirty-four to a twenty-four over four months, on the same television, in the same chair, is a real number, not a feeling I've talked myself into. My wife notices it too — the house doesn't sound like a movie theater every evening anymore, and neither of us works as hard at the dinner table.
Talk to your own doctor first if you're on the fence, the way I did, even if they raise an eyebrow the way mine did. We spend real money keeping the car running and the roof patched — putting some of that toward whatever lets you actually hear the people you love doesn't seem like too much to ask. If you want to see where your own volume dial ends up, you can check out Audifort here and start keeping your own notebook.