Apple Airpods Pro 10 months later - Hearing aid user's perspective

After using Airpods Pro for 10 months continously as hearing aids. (hearing aid user’s perspective)

Pros:
Audiogram values can be input manually.
Crystal clear sound quality (Truly satisfied with speech quality)
Sounds are heard exactly as it is (natural), from behind, side, front.
Conversation boost feature helps while making face-to-face conversation, or with a group.
With my hearing aid on which is Sonic flip 80, i had to read person’s lip movement. With airpods pro i don’t have to lip read, the pure sound can be heard well.

Cons:
Ambient noise reduction works, but further needs to reduce atmospheric noise.
E.g:
We were a group of 6 ppl standing within 5 feet radius each discussing, and road was in forward direction to me at a distance of 50feet. The noise of the vehicles & their horns was heard loudly as the 5 feet radius speech did even with 100% ambient noise reduction.

Needs more focus on the speech or reduce the ambient noise around.

Wind trouble:-
As the bike picks up to 20km/h the airpods reduces the overall sound (as if like noise cancellation) as we
can only hear horn sounds and other loud vehicle noise. (here its very important that we need little
amplification as we need to hear vehicles coming towards us)
Sitting under the fan or in front of table fan, the airpods pro blocks completely.
While running and moving around quickly, it blocks completely.
If you are standing outside and making a conversation, if there is a slight breeze towards airpods pro, it blocks completely.

I am completely satisfied with audio quality of the airpods pro can produce (thanks to apple). As for the Cons, am sure apple will resolve those points in the future updates.

One more thing:
Right now we have these settings in custom transparency mode:

As i have a bilateral moderate sensorineural hearing loss, i need to adjust at sound frequency at specific decible:

I need further more fine tunings to do which is possible on computer connected to hearing aids. We hearing aid users would like to have an Audiology compression feature, so that we can compress the highs (noise) & gain the lows (speech) and amplify each decibel with the desired output value.
Example, see the below video:

Compression is a feature of some hearing aids which attempts to change the amount of gain that the amplification circuits add to the incoming signal to better fit the wearer’s needs.

Compression is especially valuable when the hearing loss results in a reduction in the dynamic range or recruitment.

There are several types of compression techniques:

compression limiting
dynamic range compression
frequency dependent compression
curvilinear compression
multiple channel compression

Thank you

iPhone SE 1st generation
Airpods Pro

Had my AirPod Pros { first gen) over a year. Got them Black Friday 2021 for $159 at Walmart. Took them home, scanned my audiogram in, and started the process of acclimating my ears to them. First thing is they are not hearing aids and nothing from Apple implies that they are. That being said, they work nearly as good, and in some situations better than my $1800 Jabra aids from Costco.

I use them about 4 hours a day, and the rest of the time use the Jabras. As with any HA how much they help you depends on your amount and type of hearing loss. Streaming is excellent. I had quit listening to music years ago, now I hear the full range of sound. Telephone calls are also great with the voices sounding more natural than when using my HAs. Conversations are good, and again the voices sound more natural then my HA’s. I struggle understanding certain female voices, and the Pros help more than the HA’s. If at home and a female guest is present, I quickly change to the Pros so I can be more active in the conversation.

The HA’s are better handling wind noise and win for not attracting attention in public (for example church or other “serious” events). No question the HA’s have better battery life and more comfortable for day long wear. I like my HA’s, but the Pros are an amazing value at one tenth of the price of the Jabras. Worth noting also that the Jabras are really Resound One’s that sell for $4000+. IMO they make a great low cost backup to hearing aids, and a great alternative for people that cannot afford the greatly inflated cost of “medical” hearing aids.

@hamjor1 said:

I did not know that Airpods Pro could be mapped to an audiogram with an iPhone until I read this thread, so thanks all for that “heads up.” For anyone wondering how to do this, see: How to add audiogram to iPhone and map AirPods to your hearing profile

I’ll give this a try, mainly for music listening. (I got a pair of Airpods Pro 2 a month ago.) I’ll also compare it to my ReSound LinX Quattros just to see how I think Airpods do listening to people talking.

Just a word of warning that Apple iPads don’t support the Apple Health app and therefore you cannot get audiogram accommodation on your AirPods Pro 2 on iPads, only iPhones. I’m not sure about MacOS. And for sure you won’t get audiogram accommodation when you connect it to Android and Windows devices.

I’d love to hear what you think about the Transparency mode on the AirPods Pro 2 as a hearing aid device in place of your real hearing aid.

There’s another thread on this forum titled “AirPods Pro 2 as hearing device” if you’re interested in reading up about it as well.

@Xooterpust said:

I’m confused. You used your Air pods as hearing aids? How?

Not sure to whom this question was aimed at specifically. But I’ll take a stab at answering. While you can use the AirPods Pro in the Transparency mode to pick up the environmental ambient sounds around you, according to a credible Apple support specialist I talked to, the amplification in the Transparency mode of ambient sounds is not aided/boosted based on the audiogram you enter into the Apple Health app. It’s only amplified flatly for a normal hearing person.

But ONLY for streaming audio from the iphone, yes, the streaming content can be aided/boosted based on the audiogram you have in the Health app, assuming that you set your AirPods Pro up to do that.

Bottom line is that it cannot be used like a complete hearing aid because the ambient sounds amplification in the Transparency mode is not boosted for HOH people per their audiogram.