This is a health-and-nutrition related comment.
I definitely have always had some auditory problems.
When I was little, my parents put me on the Feingold Diet for hyperactivity. It's a diet where you avoid eating particular chemicals that trigger reactions. One of the reactions is ringing in the ears. I still get ringing in my ears if I eat a lot of the high salicylate fruits that the Feingold Diet people talk about. Aspirin will also cause this reaction.
I got my high-frequency hearing tested. They found out that I was able to hear frequencies that were too high, but I wasn't able to hear the frequencies in the area of verbal speech as well as I needed to.
I love using the subtitles on movies too. I can't follow movies with a lot of dialogue and background noise. I can't remember any of the characters' names, either, so if a crucial plot line depends on remembering who they're talking about, I'm totally lost.
Short-term memory for verbal instructions - terrible. I have to ask people to repeat things and I have to write them down.
I like to talk to people alone in a quiet place where I can really focus on what they're saying.
I hesitate to mention this, because I have to give a warning disclaimer. There was a dentist named Weston A. Price who researched primitive tribes to find out why they were physically healthier than modern people living in towns. He noticed deformities of the skull, face, jaw, ear canals, and many other parts of the body, and these deformities affect the brain as well. These deformities are caused by a combination of poor nutrition and exposure to certain chemicals, and they begin in the womb. Many of the people who have auditory problems may have slightly deformed ear canals.
The 'disclaimer' that I have to give is, if you get interested in the Weston Price diet, if you read the web pages and other books about it, and if you try eating some of the things that they talk about eating, you can get EXTREMELY SICK RIGHT AWAY. They talk about eating things like animal organs and bone marrow. I tried eating bone marrow. Within a couple of minutes I was stifling the vomit reflex, and I'm vomit-phobic and I will do anything to avoid vomiting, so I spent the entire evening trying not to vomit, and feeling like I was going to pass out, and I felt so sick I thought I might have to go to the emergency room, just from eating a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of bone marrow. I was glad I ate only a tiny test piece.
I still like to save the baby and throw out the bathwater, with the Weston Price Diet, because the 'baby,' the most important idea, is that these facial deformities, jaw deformities, ear canal deformities, etc. are caused by something we have control over. They're not caused by your DNA. They're a preventable deformity that shouldn't happen. I LOVE the Weston Price Diet's main idea, that the deformities are preventable, but I hate it that they haven't worked out the details of things that will make you sick and how to eat the diet safely. So like I said I'm afraid to even mention that diet without giving a big disclaimer about how severely sick some of those things can make you.
Anyway, ear canal deformities are part of what causes these auditory problems.