Just erased a rant. Last winter I went to a wonderful concert in the middle of winter. That was the first time I checked with myPhonak and found autosense had picked MUSIC! So I saved a copy of the progam. Still have it.It was so much better than I expected. Can’t wait to go to more concerts. I hadn’t been to a concert since I was working for 3M in a high noise factory. That was 53 years ago.
My Paradise P90R hearing aids autosense seldom if ever selects music. Time to work with myPhonak and find some music to listen to in that MUSIC program.
A lot’s already been covered in the responses so far, so I’ll just share my experiences which may or may not be of interest.
I’m working drummer, mostly live performance. I don’t do audio engineering, which has much more specific requirements. I’ve been wearing Widex Evokes for about 7 years now.
Like the OP, I was dismayed with the lack of information from manufacturers that would allow for an educated choice. My first audiologist simply pointed me to the Evokes, stating something like “These are best for musicians”, which is likely just conventional belief among audiologists at the time.
At one point, I experienced a loud feedback blast that resulted in a distorted buzz in my left ear. A fellow musician pointed me to his audiologist who specializes in working with musicians, including going onsite to see for herself whats needed. I talked to her about upgrading to newer and she basically said don’t bother, it’s not worth it.
While the Evokes drastically improve my perception of speach (seriously improved my social life), and are OK for casual music listening, They just don’t cut it for performing or my few attempts at mixing recordings. I’ve decided there is just no one-size-fits-all solution for me. For performing, my audiologist directed me to ASI Audio’s 3DME In-ear-monitors, with mics integrated into the earpieces. There’s a 7 band stereo EQ, which I use to compensate for my hearing loss, plus adjustable stereo limiter to save what little hearing I have left.
For mastering, I’m wondering if you could have a separate EQ at the end of your signal chain that you keep set to compensate for your ears, and then do the mastering on separate eqs. You may need different settings for different levels, I don’t know. I’m sure there are other complications Im not thinking of that might render this idea useless,…
Bad days I think they sell hearing aids like cars.
Thanks for your post!
I want to find the perfect Audi. I know they’re out there. I want to hear better. Then I’ll start playing my ukulele. Start with lessons. It’s been a while.
Provider who wears ’s Mod to Prof HF Noise Induced.
Well for an Audiophile or Musician, I simply say “Bring your instrument in” or “Let’s go check out your system”. Home visits are key for people with specific HF clarity or “Sound Issues”.
I adjust in house. I have adjusted 2 sound engineers in studio, and both of them were so underfit because of frequency deficient/comfort programming or overpowered frequencies for HF fidelity and clarity.
Wearing hearing aids and loving music myself, helps me figure out most Audiophile issues.
You can’t tweak the tech, but you can lie to the computer…anything you want to have happen is within the programmers range but understanding the basic buttons we have is key.
Compression, nobody messes with compression too much anymore…but it can still be “messed with”.
I’d find a provider who is sound savvy and then pay for a home visit with laptop programming.
I am also not against having the PT take over programing and doing what he/she thinks they need…and then letting them experience every frequency and its power…I let them see what they ask me for and I don’t give them…changed them up pretty darn quick…
I’m late in responding to this thread, but want to say I’ve found it very satisfying to read through and realize that many of us are feeling the same frustration when it comes to our experience with music and audio. I’m a lifelong musician and worked as an audio engineer earlier in my career. I have a home studio that I make music for my own enjoyment from.
I agree that the specs provided by manufacturers are woefully inadequate for evaluating and comparing different brands. Before I purchased my Oticon Mores a year ago, I searched for info on frequency response and distortion levels, and found that most brands didn’t publicize this data, particularly the latter. I found that my audiologist couldn’t provide much help with optimizing my HAs for music, let alone a studio environment–she didn’t have the background, skills or much of an interest in doing this. I’ve experimented with using the Oticon software to fine-tune the settings on my HAs, but I’d much rather leave that to more experienced hands.
I live in Philadelphia, and I think there must be some audiologists in the area who specialize in fitting HAs for musicians, music lovers and audio professionals. I wonder if having a comprehensive list of vendors with this skill set might be useful for people who want to pursue optimizing their HAs for music and audio.
I wonder for music for people with not too severe hearing loss whether the RME ADI 2 DAC / PRO and some IEM would be good it provides a parametric stereo EQ with I think +/- 24dB. Have you had any customers using it?
Hi Folks. I’ve been doing quite a bit of digging, and I think I’ve found some stuff that was helpful to me.
My experience has been with Widex Beyond and that is at least two or three generations old. Also, I’ve only had one HA in the past so any coordination between HAs was not available (as well as not being able to stream). So that experience is dated and perhaps not so applicable to people with two HAs. Also, everyone’s hearing problem is different, so one persons experience is not necessarily going to apply to another.
Much of the research I’ve run into on HAs is about speech and about speech in noise. That’s important. What I’m not finding so far is much said about music programs, but I’ll bridge to that in a second.
So if you haven’t seen this, it is quite well done and compares the latest (June 2025) hearing aids.
I’ll recommend you at least look at 28:00 and listen to the speech in noise tests. The comparisons span (in my opinion) from too much immersion to too little immersion. There were a few in the middle that I found were very impressive - way better than my prior experience with my HA. So the new tech I think is come a VERY long way.
Second, here is a VERY accessible and informative reference on HA compression that’s written in a vendor-agnostic way. Besides describing compression as it relates to HAs, it also talks about various strategies for programming and issues related to the strategies. Although I know a lot about audio, compression, and have some HA experience, I think this gave me some more understanding of the situation relative to hearing loss, HA programming, and perhaps some insight into how an audiologist might approach a fitting. It might also provide some important audiology terminology that can be used in looking for other information in a google search or in discussing things with an audiologist. I didn’t check them out, but there is also a long list of references at the end.
Maybe a few things that I’'ll try to paraphrase from this reference that might be helpful are:
A typical hearing loss would be that you can’t hear soft sounds, but your hearing of loud sounds may be close to normal. So the job the hearing aid needs to perform is to “squeeze” the dynamic range of a normal person’s hearing into the dynamic range of a given person with their hearing loss. And if the loss is as described, with loss of soft levels, it needs to increase the amplification on the lower levels without amplifying the higher levels. A compressor can perform this type of function, where it may have one gain below some loudness threshold and another gain above the loudness threshold.
Compressors introduce some transients as the loudness transitions across the compressor threshold. Just the change in gain creates an issue with the sound’s envelope (squashes the dynamic peaks). Also, the speed that the compressor reacts to the change in level (attack and release) have various issues no matter how they are set. And there differences between people that will likely introduce a preference for the choice of these settings. Some HAs have adaptive algorithms that dynamically control these settings based on the behavior of sound, and some also provide a way for a user to do some A/B choices to try to adapt the settings to better match what they think sounds right for them.
I don’t have much information on how music programs are set up, but what this article describes as Wide Dynamic Range Compression () seems like it would be a good strategy. If think my characterization of this would be that you would want an amplifier that raises the normal lowest level of hearing to the lowest level of a person with hearing loss. Then you would want a very low first compression threshold (as near as possible to the lowest level of hearing with a compression ratio that creates a linear increase from this level to the (or whatever level is needed to sound normal). If unneeded compressors can’t be turned off, then set all the gains to the same level gain so there is one compression ratio (this is what was suggested earlier in this thread). The chosen gain + maximum input needs to be less than the maximum output power (MPO) of the HA, or there would need to be a 2nd compressor with a large compression ratio near the MPO to prevent clipping. From my audiologist, the output level should not exceed 132 dB SPL. Take this with a grain of salt (as I may not know what I’m talking about), and maybe discuss with your audiologist.
In other words, get rid of the compressors in the middle of the dynamic range so there are no compression transitions and transients in the range that the music will operate in. In playing with trying to set up some EQ in Pro Tools to compensate for my hearing loss with headphones, my experience with compression was that the knee had some audible artifacts, and my preference was to move the knee away from the dynamic range the music I was listening to was operating in.
I’m not trying to sell anyone on a given brand, but I’ve been focusing on Widex Allure and I’ve been able to find some interesting articles by Widex. This link takes you to their "evidence’ page which has links to many of their publications over time.
Here you can find a selection of publications available online concerning our different hearing aid products. Click here to start reading!
You might need to poke around looking for something you find of interest, but
I think some of these opened my awareness to the fact that there is a lot more going on in HAs than is going to be able to dealt with by just simple EQ and/or tweaking - not that some of this experimenting my provide some insights on what might help the audiologist help you. This was interesting to me.
Discover my expert audiologist verdict using the new Widex Allure in a variety of real-world settings - quiet spaces, noisy environments, music listening, & everyday life.
Compass Cloud
There are some issues here. The new platform has a staged release, so it’s not clear about what is going to show up later - they don’t have all the functions that were on WIdex Moment like Zen tinitus, , remote programming, and is still to be enabled. Their Compass Cloud program seems to have less capability than the old Compass program according to reviews. My audiologist said he recently did his first fitting for an Allure and was not overwhelmed with the amount of control settings available compared to the old program.
I’m guessing that Widex had to port the Compass program when it was moved to the cloud, and that they wanted to get the new W1 chip platform out the door even though not all the bells and whistles are available yet. So there are some unknowns about what will eventually show up and whether there’s anything that I might care about at this point. As per the OP, I think I have lots of questions that are unanswered, and maybe even more when it comes to Allure since it is a bit of a work in progress. Still, given Widex’s bias toward catering to sound quality and musician’s tastes, I’m just going to take a leap of faith and trust that they haven’t blown up their Music program and that whatever controls I need are there now. The Compass Cloud review did list quite a few things that the audiologist would have control of, and I think these all sounded like ones I would care about. One search I did indicated that the knee thresholds on the compressors were controllable by the audiologist (if you trust the AI). I’m not exactly sure that will be necessary since they likely have already made good choices in the Music program with Widex’s TruCompression and Enhanced Dynamic Range Compression features. I’m not sure where I saw it at this momemt, but I did see that the fitting range for the Pure Sound program is much more limited than the fitting range shown on the data sheet (about 40 dBHL at low frequency to 80 dBHL on high frequency). This was better than Widex Moment Puresound fit range, but possibly outside my current fitting range on at least part of the bandwidth. So it’s possible I wont be able to use Puresound and get it’s 0.5 ms latency. Their reported 2.5-3.5 ms Unversal Latency should be good fine. Don’t know the latency in the music program - hopefully on the shorter end since it should be less processed then the speech in noise programs.
I have a 75 day return window, so that should give me some time to adapt to the fit, do some evaluation, and maybe make some adjustments with the audiologist. If feel I’ve actually learned quite a bit in this pass of my shopping for a new hearing aid. I’ve enjoyed hearing about other’s experiences and thoughts. FWIW, I sent Matthew Allsop @ Hearing Tracker (the guy who did the review with the speech in noise sound tests) an email asking him to do another review with a musician’s view point in mind, providing my summary of the thinking here. We’ll see if he “bites”.
Good post! Most of the time ’s only care about speech & don’t know how to set hearing aids up for music.I have always programmed my own hearing aids & brought them used from Ebay. I play keyboards & guitars & the piano sound always use to sound like the sound was coming from a electric fan in front of the speaker. But like you said "you need to turn all suppressors off etc. Because it sounds so unnatural.
I question how hearing aids are classed as medical equipment. They don’t work.
I was in a prep ward in the hospital. I was lying down on a Gurney for a heart procedure during Covid. My operating Cardiologist was preparing me.
For the previous 1/2 hour I realized I could hear behind me. 25 feet or so. I couldn’t hear the cardiologist talk. It might have been the most important talk of my life. It might have been my last.
It was impossible because of the way my hearing aids were set up.
There are fatal flaws in the way hearing aids are sold and set up.
Another ridiculously long pointless post, honestly the mods need to set a character limit to what can post, remember it’s a forum site.
but you don’t have to read it…
It is understood shorter posts are more likely to be read by most, but there is no harm in a long well researched post. Yes most will not read it and learn any insight. However for someone interested in the topic and willing to read it, it could be useful.
Of course not and I don’t, 1 or 2 paragraphs is enough to get your point through, any more and it’s just wasted, but I like to read the posts from others who have points to make, cheers
I’m a bit late on this but, I find what you’re saying very interesting. I’ve not read all the replies yet, as I want to answer some questions from my experience with Phonak. I’ve played Rock Guitar, very loud for many years, so I still find music very important. Of course, like many of my local peers, we just didn’t notice the permanent hearing loss, as it was very gradual.
Firstly, to me, the Music programme isn’t for Music at all, as all it does is remove some noise reduction elements, along with beamforming. What it doesn’t remove is the compression levels from your fitting programme (, , Phonak Adaptive Digital). This alone, to me takes away a lot of the dynamics in music.
Secondly, you also mention pitch shifting. Even with my loss, Phonak switch it on for first fit. This really isn’t necessary. I actually think it defaults to ‘on’ to help feedback management.
Thirdly, Phonak’s feedback management is VERY aggressive, and will take huge chunks out of your gains to avoid it. I find this strange, as you can add them back in via the App’s graphic, and there’s no feedback!!
On listening to a particular tune, which is “Heaven and Hell”, from the same titled Black Sabbath album, I’ve noticed Tony Iommi’s guitar solo is very low in the mix. This can be from both streaming or through the Car speakers. I don’t remember it like this, back in the day.
It would be nice to get a frequency list to compare to a full scale of notes on an electric guitar. I may then be able to boost some of those to replicate those missing sounds.
When I read your post, I knew I wanted to check these out, but only just got to it. This looks like a brand I was considering 8 years ago, but I heard at that time they went out of business. This may be a different company.
This device looks perfect as a musician’s in ear monitor (IEM) and would integrate well in my studio environment. It has 20 - 20 kHz range (+++), 0 latency (+++), a 3D ambiance mic on the ear piece that can be mixed with an analog monitor (cue mix) input (+++), 135 input range (+++), 122 dB maximum output, configurable output limiting with no distortion (+++), a 7 band EQ across 60 Hz to 10 kHz with them spread about 1 band per octave (++), and a Blue Tooth connected phone control app. Sealed domes, Independent settings for each ear. All programming and $800. WOW!
I need to call ASI tomorrow, but I’m thinking this will work fine correcting my hearing for my pro audio studio needs and will work well in an ATMOS environment. I think, as you said, different tools for different situations. I might still want a regular hearing aid, but I think I’ll check this out first, and re-think how I want to source the hearing aid. I still like Widex Allure, but may just need their stock fitting for their standard programs.
For others who thinks this sounds interesting, I’ll caution that the IEMs are cabled to an external battery pack with a USB rechargeable 8 hr battery life and with analog I/O for integration with monitoring. It’s not a , think of it looking more like a Walkman setup.
There’s no streaming audio over bluetooth. This makes total sense for studio and live performance environments where each musician has an independent queue mix (typically they are on headphones or IEMs), and this unit could be plugged into a typical headphone output (1/4" TRS).
What’s really interesting is that you can use the ambient mics without the monitor input to just hear the studio monitoring, or your could feed the monitor input from a stereo or headphone output for stereo or binaural monitoring with no studio monitoring. In a live situation, there is pro gear to make it wireless, but it’s expensive and not portable like an iPhone.
Per the OP, this unit has all the specs I wanted on their web site, and they are excellent for my situation. They have a phone number to call, and I’m sure they will be able to talk real world audio environment situations. There is no feedback because they are , so no de-tuning for feedback management. It’s all analog so no digital noise suppression or dynamic anything. Its got 3D (omnidirectional) ambient mic so should be find for a surround environment, and it also works great for a musician with a cue mix but wants some stage or studio immersion. Full dynamic range. Full spectrum (down to 20 Hz). Probably should work fine with headphones since the mic is on the ear piece.
I think your one post Nunio may this entire thread well worth my time. Thanks again.
Thanks for your post and this thread. As a musician who is looking for his first set of I already had many of your questions and very much appreciate the additional questions I picked up from your post.
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