Listen to the sounds of mrmphmphrm

More and more often these days I'm noticing that in crowd situations -- parties or loud restaurants or public spaces -- I can only hear about half of what anyone is saying. It feels a little bit like being a foreign exchange student with a limited vocabulary: I can usually get the gist of the conversation by backtracking from the words I do catch and filling in the blanks, or by waiting for someone to say something that'll fill in whatever context I missed. But it makes it really difficult to participate in the conversation, as opposed to just sitting there watching it: by the time I've figured out what people are talking about, they've moved on to the next subject and I'm lost again. Someone'll make a joke and I'm just sitting there with a blank look on my face while I try to figure out what it was.

We also have lots of conversations at home which go like this:

A: [statement]
B: What?
A: [statement]
[pause]
B: What?
A: [STATEMENT!]
B: response
A: What?
B: [RESPONSE!]

...and so on. I always wrote that off to the fact that we're both kind of low talkers, but I'm starting to wonder if there isn't more to it than that.

I have an audiogram from a few years ago which shows "mild loss (30dB at 500Hz, 40dB at 1000Hz) bilaterally" -- which, conveniently, seems to be smack in the middle of the pitch range for human speech -- so I know this isn't all in my head. Well, strictly speaking it literally is in my head, I guess. But at the time the doctor sort of laughed it off, made some joke about spouses never listening to each other anyway, so I figured it wasn't enough loss to be concerned about.

I guess this whole post is boiling down to: Hey, bayleaf, whaddya think? Is it hearing aid time? Or would that just make the crowd noise louder instead of helping me understand the conversation?