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Hearing aids for musician

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My first post, I will try to be concise. And hope I haven’t double posted. I am a professional acoustic musician, build and design acoustic instruments, and have a recording studio. In my niche I am nationally known. So, music is actually my life. I need hearing aids and will soon go and be evaluated on my hearing loss, but safe to say it is predominately in the high mids and high as far as frequencies go, and overall muted. Speech recognition is a problem as well. I have read a lot and from what I read, some of it admittedly old, hearing aid manufacturers really don’t seem to be that interested in designing hearing aids for the musician, or audiophile, but more speech recognition being their bread and butter. Models and programs that tout high quality seem to point to gates, compression, and other effects to get there. Of course I want to hear speech better as well, but these effects concern me. As a studio engineer, I don’t want to hear compression in my reference. Only after mixing pure acoustic dynamics and balance, I may choose to add compression to the recording. I don’t want gates to cut off things like reverb tails and attack transients. And of course it seems obvious that I would need something with as many bands of EQ available to match my particular hearing curve. So if any of you can help me with my knowledge base of what is available that has a specific design aspect toward music,…manufacturers, programs, analog or digital, recent technology, and the like…I would be very grateful.

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I am a musician with mild-moderate hearing loss only in the very high frequencies (6khz & 8khz). After having done much research, I was fit with a pair of Bernafon Chronos 9 Nano hearing aids. I purchased them from Costco, and had a great experience with the hearing instrument specialist there.

These aids have a frequency range up to 10khz, and they employ channel-free technology. There is a dedicated music program which turns off all the automatic features, including the feedback manager, since the feedback manager can distort musical notes.

The aids I have are the small behind-the-ear type with a very thin wire leading to a receiver with “open domes” in the ear (RITE or “receiver in the ear”), which allow the low frequencies to enter the ear naturally. I really like these aids, and actually use the music program as my default program in almost all circumstances, since it sounds more natural to me, and doesn’t do strange things to music.

According to my research, one of the best experts on musicians and hearing loss is a man named Marshall Chasin. He has some great articles that are available on the internet. Google his name along with “music” and “hearing loss” and you’ll probably find the information.

Everyone’s hearing loss is different, and what works for me might not work for you. But I thought I’d share my positive experience, in case it might be of some help, especially to other musicians.

@Diapason said:

I am a musician…fit with a pair of Bernafon Chronos 9 Nano hearing aids…According to my research, one of the best experts on musicians and hearing loss is a man named Marshall Chasin.

Went down that road, too. Still having some problems with loud piano playing, but most things work out fine.
Chasin’s articles are here: http://www.musiciansclinics.com/articles.asp33
Especially interesting for me were Can your hearing aids handle loud music, Six ways to improve listening to music and Hearing Aids for Musicians.

Hi,

I found this thread via google, I am very interested. Dulcimercentral, have you yet found a hearing aid that suits you?

In my case, I have a mild to moderate hearing loss and recruitment, which gives me problems with loud noises and music. I accepted that I really have a problem, when I noticed that I could not tolerate my own piano playing and my choir (I´m a music teacher), which are, of course, louder than speech but - for normally hearing people - not too loud.

I have tested a Siemens Pure Binax and found this quite convenient in everyday situations and for listening to recorded music. However, the pure was not able to handle live music. Especially high voices made the Siemens distort quite badly.

I am now testing the Widex Dream 440, and while this was quite uncomfortable sound-wise at the beginning, it doesn´t distort with live music, and it gives excellent speech recognition.

Now to your initial question regarding compression: You won´t be able to use a hearing aid without compression. Say, for instance, a normal hearing individual can hear noises from 20 to 100 dB (of course, louder is possible, but harmful). With hearing loss, you can hear noises from 50 dB to 100 dB. If you amplify that without compression, you will have to map the range 20 dB to 100dB to the range 50dB to 130 dB, which, of course, would be harmful to your residual hearing (and, by the way, no hearing aid has an output of 130 dB).

So you will have to compress the dynamic range of the input to match your personal dynamic range. In my case, this is even worse due to recruitment: Sounds louder than 85 dB feel uncomfortable to me, so my personal dynamic range is form 40dB to 85 dB, 45 dB in total, which is quite bad compared to 80dB of normal hearing (and I know that there are lots of people out there with an even narrower dynamic range).

But I have found that your brain adjusts to the hearing aid. At first, you find the sound with hearing aid unnormal, but after some days, you will start to find the sound WITHOUT hearing aid unnormal.

When wearing a hearing aid, you will have to readjust your personal “reference” of what a good sound is.

As a sound engineer, you will - in my understanding, and from my personal experience - have to wear your hearing aid as many hours as possible, and you´d better not change any settings too much. You will need a music program, that uses as little dsp as possible and doesn´t do any noise-cancellation and speech enhancement, and you should use the music program most of the time, not only when listening or mixing music.

Best regards,

Musician_72

This is a great thread. Thanks so much for everyone’s input.

James
flutist since 12-years old

James Galway (famous flute player) once was asked “Are you a flutist, or a flautist?” to which Galway replied, “Well, I don’t know anyone who plays the flaut.”

Hi,

with the help of a siemens-technician, my acoustician tried to get rid of the distortions of the siemens pure 7 bx. Result: No success. There is still very annoying distortion for high female voice (choir, for instance), and for louder music in general (for instance: me at my grand piano playing forte). To make this clear: I am not talking about amplified music, I am talking about sound-levels which are comfortable for the normal-hearing.

So my conclusion is: While the Siemens bx-chip sounds good in everyday situations, and sounds good for music reproduced on a stereo, I cannot recommend it for live-music and for musicians in general. Of course, for the concert-visitor sitting not directly in front of the orchestra, the siemens might be fine, but being on the conductors position, this is not an option.

I am, right now, very much at my wit´s end. My hopes now lie on the bernafon juna, which I haven´t tested yet due to unavailability at my local shop (they will arrive within the next weeks).

Find this thread fascinating. But I am concerned with the lack of being posted. this can be a game changer.

I believe bernafon has been the go to aid for musician in that it does not apply compression the same way other aids do. other aids apply compression after a kneepoint frequency and I believe bernafon aids do not do that and instead applies compression at all volume/gain levels. so the sound coming in is better represented with the sound produced. however their aids have a bad reputation in terms of speech in noise performance.

I would have suggested people try out oticon aids as their approach to compression involves a kneepoint like most aids but I believe they change the attack release time at which compression is applied. as a result many on this board (not sure if they are musicians) think this brand sounds more “natural”.

For most aids you can set the kneepoint and compression ratios. I think for musicians this would be something that should be looked into.

I believe some are missing another issue. there are features on many aids that may be turned on and off. Namely frequency transposition features. This feature definitely affects high frequency sounds. widex calls their technology Audibility Extender. it moves sounds from high frequencies that past a cut off frequency to the lower frequencies. this can probably be turned off or have the cut off frequency raised. resound, starkey, phonak and possibly siemens have their own version of this technology that probably needs to be adjusted for musicians.

There are other features that affects wind noise, echos, etc that you may want to turn off and and on.

another important feature is the microphone settings. You may want omnidirectional microphones when listening to music.

If I was a musician I may look into having an aid for work and another for outside of work.

also imo musicians stand the most benefit in programming their own aids. please look into that too. we’ve got thousands of threads here regarding this.

Hi, I´ve added my to my signature. In my case it won´t do to simply work with “less compression”, as there still is my hyperacusis to deal with.

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