I'm skeptical about this. I also have trouble understanding what people are saying in a noisy environment. Almost every google search result for this type of thing is a business selling hearing aids, all saying that it's a sign of hearing loss. But my hearing itself seems fine. I suspect that it's more of a brain thing. Some people are better than others at understanding (or pretending to understand) what people are saying in a noisy environment.
You can get a hearing test. If everything comes back nominal, you might have a mild form of auditory processing disorder.
It's not too uncommon, and is tremendously common among people with ADHD, dyslexia, and people on the spectrum.
Whatever it is, I definitely have it. One thing that helps me a ton is just focusing directly on people's lips when they're talking in a noisy setting. I can't read lips (at all), but the extra little bit of visual information helps me a great deal with comprehension.
At the moment there is no real reliable procedure to diagnos APD. It is the, we tried everything else but we can't see anything wrong with you type of diagnos.
High frequency hearing loss is associated with decreased intelligibility, and some of the harder situations to discern people is in a group or noisy environment.
I had a fairly rapid decrease in my high frequency hearing (basically my ears aged 20 years in a few months), and the biggest indicator to me was how much harder it was to understand dialogue in loud shows. I was turning on subtitles and/or turning the volume up where before I was fine with a fairly quiet volume.
