In Sam's Words...

"What does it sound like?  It sounds like a broken Atari game.  Maybe Pong. And the voices...think of Darth Vader's wife: high and synthesized.  But these questions about what it sounds like miss the main point. The real question is what does it feel like to have an implant.  Here the benefits are real and immediate: it feels real good.  The mere act of taking these hearing struggles head on and forging my own fate with technology as my wingman is incredibly liberating.  Like breast-beating. Like telling it to the mountain.

"Almost as strong is the experience of sound when both my coch and my hearing aids are on.  Through the right ear, the hearing aid brings warmth, weight, organic produce, tomatoes, barley grass and peet moss. A full, lush, three-demensional oil-painting kind of sound.  Through the left ear, the coch provides steel and structure.  It's airy and cool, a skeletal metal sculpture, solid and sharp. The two sound worlds come to meet in the center of my head, and if i move too quickly, they messily and nauseatingly collide.   But when I sit still, there's balance.  And there, it's just starting to get interesting."