Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

AirPod Pro 2 as hearing device

This topic is closed.

210 replies13.9k viewsLast reply

Jump
Link to this topic

Makes a light blink on the side of your car when you turn. Don’t know what Americans call them.

Edited

In reply to @d_Wooluf

No, I did not test them in-store with their iPhone. The aided streaming works fine on my own iPhone so I’m sure it’ll work just fine on the store iPhone.

As for the Transparency mode, I want to test it specifically WITHOUT still being paired with any iPhone, neither mine nor the store. Even if Transparency is aided only while the Airpods are connected to the store iPhone, but is no longer aided when disconnected from the store iPhone, then it would still fail my requirement anyway.

The Transparency mode must be aided stand-alone even when the Airpods is not connected to the iPhone to be qualified as . What if my iPhone wants to go into sleep mode while I still have my Airpods on? I don’t want to keep my iPhone awake all the times for my Airpods to function as HA.

I think you might be right that the only works in transparency mode when connected to a supporting iOS device. Pretty disappointing.

I haven’t tried connecting to a non-iOS device to verify, but I did try toggling the “Headphone Accommodations” while listening to music playing from a speaker. (see screenshots) I found the effect of the custom audiogram to be pretty underwhelming in transparency mode even with them connected to my iPhone 12. They really aren’t hearing aid replacements by any stretch.

image
image

For me, the boost is enough to make me keep them for streaming and better phone call performance.

As an aside, I wouldn’t worry about going back to the store. Their iPhones get completely wiped every night. If there was no Apple ID to associate with, then I don’t think there’s any permanent connection to a particular store iPhone.

@a13z said:

For me, the boost is enough to make me keep them for streaming and better phone call performance.

Yeah, I concur. Really for me, if I stream music a lot on my iPhone, then I may keep the Airpods Pro 2 for the phenomenal bass performance while still having some semblance of the highs presented by the personalized (albeit pretty crude compared to my OPN’s highs). But the reality is that I don’t listen to music on my iPhone that much, and I don’t care for the extra bass on phone calls anyway. My OPN does just fine for phone calls on the iPhone.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos and movies on my Windows laptop that can also benefit from good bass. But if personalized audiogram is not supported outside of the Apple Ecosystem (even sans iPad as well), then the bass value proposition from the Airpods diminishes greatly for me.

The only other value proposition left from the Airpods Pro 2 for me is the Transparency mode to help it act has hearing aids for emergency backup. Well, if it’s not aided either without needing to keep the iPhone on all the times, then that value proposition just goes out the window for me as well.

I just confirmed the is not loaded in transparency mode unless it is connected to my iPhone.

I listened to it with the iPhone, toggled the Headphone Accommodations a couple times to get a sense of what transparency mode sounds like without the audiogram.

Then I turned off the iPhone. The AirPods switched into standard live transparency mode (no audiogram).

After I turned the iPhone back on, I had to manually go in to the accommodations settings and switch on “Custom Transparency Mode” for the audiogram to be loaded again.

Edited

Thanks @a13z for checking then sharing this.

I did some of my own testing in a couple of different ways. I play a couple of the same video programs (one with music and one with a female voice, both containing highs). One way is with the direct streaming audio from my iPhone to the Airpods, and I can hear the highs (not as noticeable as my OPN but sufficiently noticeable) in both video clips, so I know that my is loaded in streaming mode, and the Airpods amplification in streaming is strong enough to give me adequate highs to hear. It’s just too bad I still don’t see any evidence that the Airpods can load my audiogram outside of the Apple ecosystem, or on my iPad even.

In the second way, I don’t stream those video clips to the Airpods, Instead, I just play them through a real speaker so the sound travels through the air from that speaker. Then I put the Airpods in Transparency mode so that they would pick up these video sounds through the air into their external mics, then play back the sounds from the Airpods internal speakers into my ears. I didn’t find the compensated amplification of the highs that I was looking for (that was so obvious before with streaming) to prove that my audiogram was loaded in the Transparency mode.

I take the Airpods out to just listen with my bare ears to compare that against what I hear from the Airpods in the Transparency mode, and it sounds almost the same (with no highs because I can’t hear it with my naked ears). If Transparency mode were slightly louder than the naked ears, it was only because I had the Amplification volume setting in the Custom Transparency Mode set to highest or middle. If I had set it to the left mode value (no amplification gain, just same volume level as the real thing), then there’s really not much difference at all.

So my conclusion is

  1. either the Transparency mode didn’t load my audiogram, or

  2. if it actually had loaded my audiogram, then it didn’t do a good enough job delivering those amplified highs I needed into my ears like in the case of streaming. But maybe it was just a combination of my hearing loss being so bad, and the Airpods amplification being too mediocre compared to what my OPN can pickup and deliver.

So instead of saying that the Transparency mode didn’t load my audiogram, I’ll instead say that if it did load my audiogram in Transparency mode, then it couldn’t deliver the high amplification that I need. Maybe for folks whose hearing losses are not as bad as mine, it can do the job OK for them; just not for my kind of loss.

@Volusiano said:

So instead of saying that the Transparency mode didn’t load my audiogram, I’ll instead say that if it did load my audiogram in Transparency mode, then it couldn’t deliver the high amplification that I need. Maybe for folks whose hearing losses are not as bad as mine, it can do the job OK for them; just not for my kind of loss.

Unfortunately, I think you are right. See here10 and here6.

Edited

Yeah, that’d be my last resort, which it now has gotten to that point anyway.

So here’s the answer I get from Apple Support in my chat with them.

Below is regarding whether your is loaded on non-iOS devices or not. Their answer is NO audiogram support outside of the Apple ecosystem. They were partially wrong in their answer that the iPad supports the audiogram. I corrected them that there is no option to load the audiogram in the iPad because there is no Apple Health app support for the iPad and they agreed that I was right about no audiogram support for the iPad.

image

Below is about whether the audiogram is loaded in the Transparency mode or not. As expected, their first line of support people don’t have an answer for it. I will update here more if their specialized people call me back.

image

Same ole… The first support people one talks to are only capable of answering the simplest of questions. At least he had the sense to refer your question to a specialist.

Good Luck!

I also bought a pair of Pro2s recently, as I am looking to have something serviceable as a temporary backup alternative to my hearing aids (I had my hearing aids go caput a few months ago and had to go 4-5 days with nothing as I waited to get in to see my audiologist). Unfortunately, with having asymmetrical losses between my right and left ear, these earbuds don’t provide good balance, and even on the left ear alone, I still couldn’t hear very well. I had been hopeful because I’ve seen a couple people with similar losses to my left ear say they do a decent enough job. I even tried doctoring my by making my loss in the right worse than it is so that the average between the 2 ears was closer to my loss in my left, then using the shifting the slider in the right/left balance further left, but the result wasn’t all that good.

Oh well… now considering the Jabra Enhance Plus as a back-up, but not too keen at the thought of spending almost a thousand on a backup pair that will (hopefully) have very little use. $200 would have been great, especially if I could have used the Pros as everyday earbuds for when I stream a lot or have several calls. I may wait to see what happens in the world next year, and see if anything that is pretty low priced comes out as a halfway decent product, perhaps Apple themselves if they decide to tackle a real OTC aid.

Edited
@jcw11 said:

Unfortunately, with having asymmetrical losses between my right and left ear, these earbuds don’t provide good balance, and even on the left ear alone, I still couldn’t hear very well. I had been hopeful because I’ve seen a couple people with similar losses to my left ear say they do a decent enough job. I even tried doctoring my audiogram by making my loss in the right worse than it is so that the average between the 2 ears was closer to my loss in my left, then using the shifting the slider in the right/left balance further left, but the result wasn’t all that good.

This is another great point for folks with asymmetrical loss. Apparently the Apple software is still very crude and only supports ONE (1) adjustment channel for both ears.

Just for reference, below is how Apple will handle the asymmetrical loss. Apparently it will just average the 2 if they’re fairly symmetrical, or it will pick the better ear if they’re very asymmetrical. It’s not clear at which point the Apple algorithm decides the hearing losses become asymmetrical. So you’re left to whatever criteria Apple decides in terms of how to handle your stereo hearing loss.

image

jcw11

You might send your observations and to Apple. Who knows, your problems might be addressed in a firmware update.

I have no doubt that with the ruling, Apple, like Sony, is considering dipping their giant corporate toe into the OTC hearing market.

I know there is a lot of suspicion on this forum about OTC hearing aids. But properly done with individual customer support (Jabari is doing that now) I think OTC are very doable for people with at least moderate tech skills.

Edited

In reply to @troutcm

@troutcm said:

Same ole… The first support people one talks to are only capable of answering the simplest of questions. At least he had the sense to refer your question to a specialist.

Good Luck!

Well, I was able to talk to a specialist now, and he’s not really that knowledgeable either. But he has the ability to confer with the engineers, and after a looonng wait for him to confer, below are his answers:

  1. The will NOT work with a non-iOS device (like Android or Windows or whatever else), and not with an iPad either because lack of the Apple Health app support (which contains the audiogram) for the iPad.

  2. The audiogram is LOCALIZED on the iPhone that you set it up with only as a software-based implementation. Meaning that the audiogram is NOT uploaded to the actual Airpods at any time (which makes sense because that would turn it into a hardware based implementation like with hearing aids). It remains ONLY on the iPhone that you set it up with. If you pair it with another iPhone that you have not set up your audiogram with for that iPhone, then you will not get the aid from the audiogram when you stream on that iPhone.

  3. For the Transparency mode, you can get the aided boost from the audiogram in the Transparency mode only as long as you’re connected to that iPhone which you have the audiogram loaded. If you’re not connected to that iPhone, then there’s no aided audiogram boost in the Transparency mode.

The bottom line is that the audiogram is localized to the iPhone that you use to set it up with, as a software implementation for that iPhone only. It does NOT get uploaded to your Airpods, which would become a hardware implementation like how a normal hearing aid is designed to work.

Edited

In reply to @Volusiano

@Volusiano said:

For the Transparency mode, you can get the aided boost from the audiogram in the Transparency mode only as long as you’re connected to that iPhone which you have the audiogram loaded. If you’re not connected to that iPhone, then there’s no aided audiogram boost in the Transparency mode.

That is good to know. I had the impression my sticked after unpairing my AirPods from my partner’s iPhone. I did not notice any difference in the ambient sound amplification. It might be some sort of confirmation bias… On the other hand, I streamed a podcast from my Android device this afternoon and it very much looks like there was none amplification based on my audiogram. The sound was very similar to the one from my regular earphone.

Edited

In reply to @tenkan

@tenkan said:

Are you not able to sideload apple apps? It’s very common to do this with android in situations like this.

Although it’s the Apple Health app that holds the (which you’ll need to load to it if not already), the Health app does not need to be invoked by Apple to get the audiogram loaded to the Airpods. The iOS pulls the audiogram that resides in the Apple Health app database to make use of it seamlessly. So even if I can sideload the Apple Health app into Android, it wouldn’t really do anything to load the audiogram.

Since the iOS is the software that loads the audiogram (in the Health app database) into the system, I don’t think you sideload an entire iOS into an Android OS, then integrate it into the Android OS somehow, right?

But I’m not even interested in getting the Airpods audiogram to work in Android. I’m most interested to get it to work in my Windows 11 laptop. I’ve been thinking about using something like Airfoil for Windows (already a retired app but I have it installed) to stream the PC audio (with Google Chrome or VLC media player selected as the source) out to the iPhone using Airfoil Satellite on the iPhone to receive the audio, then hopefully stream it out to the Airpods aided with the audiogram from the iPhone. However, I could not get this combination of Airfoil on Windows and Airfoil Satellite on iPhone to work. The audio still just goes out to the PC speakers. Any other viable suggestion to stream audio from Windows 11 to the iPhone would be much appreciated. That would be an acceptable workaround for me to keep the Airpods and not return it.

@Volusiano said:

Any other viable suggestion to stream audio from Windows 11 to the iPhone would be much appreciated. That would be an acceptable workaround for me to keep the Airpods and not return it.

I used to use “Boom 3D3”. Since I had an iPhone and a Mac, I deleted it some time ago. I might give it another try.

Related discussions