Best hearing aid for listening to high quality music

I use earplugs that sit on the entrance of the ear canal, bought in construction department. Useful also outside of you want to stream and not hear much, like during the long commute in a bus - no fiddling with the domes.

Moldex wave 2k

Ah, brings back memories, this was the subject of my first post on this board some years ago. And, my answer is the same.

If you really care, and most here do not, You need a good set of headphones. No hearing aids are accurate with music. Some, like my Marvels, are better than others.

I am also an audiophile and have fairly expensive equipment, though not 100s of thousands worth!, I also play amateur clarinet and piano. My hearing loss is fortunately only moderate at the worst and I am a DIY HA programmer so have been able to experiment. I had Linx2 aids for 5 years and found them reasonable with music though with a tendency to resonate in sympathy with high frequency violin tones. I then switched to Bernafon Viron 9s and I am very pleased with them. I know Bernafon is a company related to Oticon but they do pay particular attention to hearing music. In my view their sound is far more natural than I could achieve with the Linxs. I have been told by a senior audiologist that Resound have a tendency to emphasise high frequency performance which might be beneficial for hearing speech but is not so good for music as even though music covers a wider frequency range it does need to be well balanced.

Best, according to what? We all hear differently

OK. Guess I wasn’t clear enough. True, if you really care about the sound of music and have significant hearing loss, and different in each ear, then you do need more then a good set of headphones. You also need a good sound source that you can tune, perhaps even an equalizer. Perhaps even a headphone amp.

But, again, most here don’t really care about the accuracy of music. If all you want to do is be able to hear the band when you square dance, then any good HAs will do. If what you want to hear is a “reasonable” simulation of music, or “oldies” o the radio, then most of the newer HAs will do.

But the subject of this post was listening to “high quality” music. Sadly, there are no hearing aids out now that will allow you to do that accurately. When some are developed that allow you to hear music accurately I will be first on line to get them.

After the War I got into the start of hi fidelity music and along with countless others built base reflex speaker enclosures and corner horns to squeeze a few lower cps out of 12" and 15" speakers. Luckily the AR3a speaker came along to solve the good bass issue and we spent our time and money on the latest record stylus to get the best sound at the other end of the spectrum. For me, and many others, when digital technology came along it made audio equipment cheaper, also degraded the sound and classical music lost much of its mass market. About then my hearing began to fail and eventually hearing aids were necessary and none had decent bass.

I now have Phonak Marvels with ear molds. Molds are often criticized because they are prone to occlusion which greatly amplifies low frequencies. I listen to music streaming which sounds far better than through the HA microphones. I don’t understand exactly what is happening but with the molds inserted snugly, it seems that the occlusion effect is operative and I hear bass that closely approaches the
bone-shaking pedal notes of a Wurlitzer pipe organ. In a war movie the rolling thunder of B52 bombs sounds and feels like the real thing and at times the sound is good enough that if I didn’t know better, I could believe that I was listening to my old JBL 001 system in my first pair of corner horns. For most of my life I thought that low frequencies required moving a large mass of air which seems impossible for a tiny
HA , so I give credit to occlusion.

If you are not able to get decent bass from your HAs, try inducing some occlusion. I find the best snug fit by making low growling in my throat. Sound that is barely audible to someone standing close, with occlusion sounds in my ears like the loud 60 cycle hum that was well known in the old days. Not good for conversation but it makes music listenable.

Maybe I should just get a pair of AirPods for the music, and stick with my current HAs for everything else…

I was actually thinking about using the AirPods instead of the HAs when walking outside…?

Very interesting reading all of these replies. I think that if you have a mild hearing loss then headphones, air pods and so on are certainly a good way to listen to music. But if you have a severe loss and particularly if it is very different ear to ear, then that approach really doesn’t work.

I do have such a loss and I need to use my HAs to function at all, but I also want to go on listening to music as best I can. That was why I started this thread.

There are lots of things that people have said that I agree with. I won’t be boring and repeat them, but to me the key points are to have the right HA in the first place, have the fitting done by someone who understands what you trying to achieve, have one or two programs set up specifically for music and make use of the facilities in the relevant control app to help in different situations.

Turning off as much processing as possible in music programs is essential. Also feedback control is hugely important. It’s a matter of juggling the frequency response and feedback control to give the best compromise. I like to hear what the fitting software thinks is the right approach for the music program and then get things adjusted so they sound as good as can be to me. This means multiple returns to the audiologist unless you can arrange to DIY it yourself. Anyway it doesn’t matter then whether Resound likes to increase the higher frequencies to add speech understanding, because you just get them adjusted down again.

And the control app often has tone and balance controls. It’s important to know what they do and they are somewhat limited, but you can tame an over-exuberant high frequency noise by adjusting the treble control if you have one.

Also something that is potentially important for people with more severe losses like me is to ensure the audiologist sets the MPO limit high enough. I don’t care so much if I hear a bit of distortion on my voice if I’m speaking in a public event for example, but I object to any distortion when I’m listening to music. It was by chance that I discovered that raising the MPO setting in the music program by 6dB was transformative. My audiologist didn’t know if it would help or not, but tried it anyway.

Anyway I will get back to watching this thread. Keep the ideas and comments coming everyone!

Again forgive me my ignorance. Am not familiair with that many (english) abbreviations.
So… what is mpo ?

Most graphic equalisers adjust by plus or minus 10dB, but I (and no doubt lots of other people) have a much bigger problem than that, so that doesn’t work…

Haha funny thing! I am still listening to long-familiar music, too, now with my CI. Here it is the other way round: My brain says there shouldn’t be additional instruments but my ears say there are! Music can be so beautiful now (but by far not all songs)

In my experience, no HA I’ve ever had was good for listening to HiFi music. I have Paradise now and I’ve used them about 3 or 4 months. Compared to my Galaxy Buds, the Paradise is very tinny. Don’t get me wrong, while they are significantly better than my old Phonak Brios, they don’t play well in the hifi sandbox.

@Dani said:

Haha funny thing! I am still listening to long-familiar music, too, now with my CI. Here it is the other way round: My brain says there shouldn’t be additional instruments but my ears say there are! Music can be so beautiful now (but by far not all songs)

That’s fantastic! I find that if I listen to newer not so familiar music that I can at least kinda enjoy it. But it is frustrating missing things I know are there in those familiar ones.
I’m very happy for you and your experience.