Anyone here using an external equalizer for fine tuning your hearing aids?

Hi;
I would like to get the most out of my Widex Moment 440 RIC HA’s for music by going to an external equalizer and right now I am looking at the Schiit Lokius 6 band equalizer and was wondering if anyone here is using this or some other external equalizer with good success,for music only.
I realize that the phone app would control the HA,but the Schiit would control the ‘main’ stereo set-up.This is the Lokius:Schiit Audio: Audio Products Made in USA32

Thanks,I just thought maybe the outboard equalizer would help to be a finer adjustment to the basic three band EQ on the phone app.Huck

New to the forum, but as an avid audiophile/composer/ex-musician amongst other things maybe I can address a few things:

@GrayGhost said:

I would suggest, before you do that, get a noalink wirless and download the software and you can set up your music program the way you would like to hear it.

I agree this is probably the first good step to take. I am new to HAs and still going through a lot of trials, but in general but as far as I can see from fiddling around in fitting software, “music” programs on various hearing aids will tend to minimise or disable many of the features that are used for speech intelligibility (such as noise cancelling or emphasizing important bands of speech) so that is a good place to start to see if you can fine tune that or make a custom program with some features disabled that may interfere with fidelity or tonal balance in music. With fitting software you or your audiologist have the ability to fine tune multiple bands of your prescriptive targets at a few different SPL, so you can effectively make a profile that is completely tuned to your taste or some other goal in mind. Maybe in some situations where you might not be meeting prescriptive or desired targets, this is where the external equalisation could come in handy (be sure you are not exposing yourself to dangerous doses of SPL in doing so).

@z10user2 said:

I would leave the source untouched by any manipulation. The old “as the artist intended”. There will of course be some colouring of the sound by the different components it passes through including the speakers but I would leave everything flat.

By default, anyone with anything more than a flat/mild hearing loss is not “hearing what the artist intended” regardless, and in fact any sort of equalisation whether it be through HA’s or otherwise in order to get closer to flat perceived frequency response is in fact closer to “what the artist intended” rather than leaving it alone or doing nothing, or the “untouched” sound as you describe. I had the same thoughts when I was less experienced with audio and even to some degree when learning about my HL and trying to cope with not enjoying music, but it is really the only logical conclusion when you look at it objectively.

Despite what many audiophiles and gear-lovers want to claim, frequency response, low distortion, and the preservation of time-domain characteristics from the interaction of the soundfield with your body/environment (the room) are simply the only real things that matter in terms of audio fidelity (one’s personal subjective preference in terms of a sound signature is something else entirely). In my experience with hearing loss, trying to maintain maximum fidelity (i.e. a flat FR alongst other things) is probably one of the most important things when it comes to our brain interpreting music as accurate or normal-sounding. So if I had to make any broad suggestion, which isn’t even exclusive to people with hearing loss, it would be to try an affordable calibrated microphone like the minidsp umik-1 and take in-room measurements, and learn to use software like REW to measure and assess your room to learn where to make corrections with parametric EQ in the first place. If for example your speakers in your room are emphasizing certain frequencies that is not easily correctable or already corrected by hearing aids, that could result in essentially a “double amplification” or “underamplification” that could cause further distortion or non-linearities that could affect your experience.

Onto the gear. If your source would be a computer, that is simply the easiest way to accurately and limitlessly apply EQ with software like EqualizerAPO/Peace in windows or the built in EQ in the Macos audio subsystem. If you don’t have a computer in the mix and you want a way to losslessly apply EQ in between your source and DAC, I’d say probably one of the best options would again be a product offering from Minidsp (similar price to the Schiit analogue EQ) where you can get a direct digital-to-digital interface so the signal integrity in maintained into your DAC without multiple conversions to and from digital/analogue losing further performance. It can be configured with software and you can achieve surgical levels of precision with EQing depending on your needs. If you are looking for a full solution you can fully interact with without some sort of computer or more advanced setup, I would look into the RME ADI-2 DAC ($1000) which is one of the best products in audio and can replace and almost certainly outperform and replace your current DAC and preamp entirely and give you a bunch of other features. It comes with a 5-band PEQ built in and you can have multiple profiles, and it is also a very competent headphone amplifier. If you need to input analogue sources for whatever reason, the RME ADI-2 PRO variant will also handle this but it is more expensive. A new version of both these products is also releasing soon which will have 10-band PEQ and some new features such as more inputs/outputs I believe.

I would say if you are willing to tune your room/buy better speakers/treat your room etc, it is prudent to do that first, but if you can’t then tune your HA first before external EQ as an option. I would skip the Schitt product since it is not very versatile as an eq and (personally) don’t care for the brand, and anything you can do on that can be better done on a computer, hearing aids, or any of the products with PEQ I suggested. There is also DAC versions of the Minidsp products that could replace your current DAC if you wanted to.

One thing I have noticed is most hearing aids don’t/cannot correct high frequencies, and high frequencies aren’t even really covered on typical audiograms anyway. External EQ could definitely be a way of restoring some of those details and dynamics to music if you were capable of hearing them with some minor to moderate amplification, because HA’s aren’t going to appreciably correct those anyway.

Just my 2 cents

@huck Besides the 15 channels, each ear can be different. You can for your right ear in the lows and your right ear in the highs.

WH