Can an audiophile be satisfied with music streaming sound quality from a hearing aid?

@Flyboybob said:

I have tried streaming music and the sound quality is poor at best.

You are attempting to push dynamic range audio through a balanced armeture speaker which operates on very low power due to the need for extending battery life. The frequency response for most HAs is appr. 125 Hz to 8KHz.
Another factor is your acoustics. Open domes will leak all the bass out, so you’re listening to a 1960’s xistor AM radio sound quality.
You can improve the streamed sound by occluding your ears with custom ear molds, or in a pinch, stuffing some cotton in your ears behind your domes to keep the bass .
With a well programmed Music program you can enjoy decent sound from quality HiFi speakers, or quality over ear cans with your hearing aids in the Music program.

I’m wearing the Oticon Intent 1 aids with custtom earmolds, and they have a frequency response of 80HZ to 10KHz, with their newest software, and speakers. Streaming is pretty good, not HiFi, but fair bass, very good mids, and good highs.

@coastal_california said:

I don’t have a BluOS device for MQA

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure MQA has been discontinued.It never lived up to the hype.

@coastal_california said:

Not sure what Bluetooth Audio Codec’s most hearing aids use

Most use the standard SBC codec, but the newest generations support the new LC3 LEA codec, which is an audio game changer!

@coastal_california said:

Am I an Audiophile? Not sure about that but I have 50+ years of listening through good quality audio equipment (which is also likely a reason my hearing is not so great now!)

Ha,Ha, I can definitely relate. But I attribute my loss to live King Crimson, and Procol Harem concerts in the 1970’s, as well.

Phonak Audeo P90s with custom molds - very poor bass response. Often if I want to listen to music or even Youtube streaming, aids out, cans on.

@flashb1024 said:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure MQA has been discontinued.It never lived up to the hype.

Looks like you are right. I use the FLAC stream so wasn’t aware. There are many reason to like Radio Paradise but their focus on sound quality is definitely one of them Deep Dive on the Main Mix3

@flashb1024 said:

Ha,Ha, I can definitely relate. But I attribute my loss to live King Crimson, and Procol Harem concerts in the 1970’s, as well.

Yup as a student in London and then working close to London in the 70’s and early 80’s I was at concerts pretty much weekly from small clubs (Marquee etc) to large venues for a wide variety of bands including Genesis, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, The Who, Dylan, Clapton, U2, The Police etc - but I think the worst damage was done by a Deep Purple concert in Dundee!

For streaming, headphones on aids would be the best solution, imho. But since I have never been a fan of listening with headphones, I opted for self-tuning. My Phillips have a 24 band tuning eq to play with in HearSuite, so that combined with shutting off everything – noise reduction, compression, feedback etc – can yield a decent sound. I have a treated room and a Focal sub in the system as well and I use Tidal directly from my pute to the dac as a source.

At 23 I was unable to hear much above 10 KHz and certainly nothing over 12 KHz, but I’ve always valued getting as close to live music sound at home, even though I never could hear the full orchestral sound. There’s more to music than frequency response. Early rock (Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Everlys, Jerry Lee Lewis) sounds OK through streaming, especially if I use the app to boost bass and cut mids and highs on my Jabra EP10s. Indian Classical music is also OK. Orchestral music just sounds wrong.
My LP12 - Naim midrange olive - Near 50s just sounds wrong. Substituting JMLab Cobalt 10s is a good deal better, but still wrong. Substituting some big Cantons improves the music still more, but pieces I used to know well still don’t sound quite right.
I think some aspect of timing is is the problem. It’s as if different sections aren’t in sync. I think the HAs do so much processing that the music gets messed up. Live music is fine, fortunately. SO maybe there’s more processing for streaming than for live sound.

@Um_bongo Musical notes above 10KHz do have an influence, not so much because people can hear them, but because they influence the overall shape of the musical waveform.
Are you familiar with the Fourier transform for a 1KHz square wave?

For listening to recorded music, I don’t need anything near 113 dB of headroom. My downstairs neighbor pounds on my door if I crank it up. I sit pretty about 4’ from my speakers and keep SPL lower than 60 dB to keep her away from my door. To partially compensate, I bump up the amplification of the HAs.

I do have a music program, but it’s useful only some of the time. It’s set up per the recommendations of the music listening project in Canada, except that bass is bumped up. When I came across the music project’s recos, I checked the input headroom, and my aids me3t the requirements.

Again, I don’t think frequency response is my problem. At a concert, I can see the instruments as the play. I think vision helps my brain keep the instruments in sync. An LP doesn’t include visual clues. If the timing is wrong, so is the rhythm, melody, and dynamic range.

I may have to go DIY. I’d just have to remember not to touch the programs that work.

Note, however, that the Naim equipment I have was designed for pace, timing, and dynamics more than low harmonic distortion, ‘smooth’ frequency response, and sound stage reproduction. Naim didn’t aim to do an ‘audiophile’ sound.

Don’t suggest headphones; Naim doesn’t do headphone jacks in their olive generation. No equalizer/tone controls, either. Just unusually large power supplies. It’s different. I should get in touch with them and suggest they get into hearing aids that do pace, timing, and dynamics…

I’m not disputing the 10KHz range has influence - especially in respect of higher order harmonics - and for reference - yes I used to be able to model/do the calculations for this stuff in the Fourier and LaPlace domains for complex systems.

The trade-off is that people want a receiver capsule that fits in the smallest canals that runs on fresh air. Making a conventional single reed driver oscillate at 20KHz is going to at least halve its life, vs one capped at 10 KHz. And use way more power to ‘fill in the corners’ of your square waveform.

And given that there’s not much average speech up there either……

Not Hi-Fi though; agreed.

@philbob57 said:

For listening to recorded music, I don’t need anything near 113 dB of headroom. My downstairs neighbor pounds on my door if I crank it up. I sit pretty about 4’ from my speakers and keep SPL lower than 60 dB to keep her away from my door. To partially compensate, I bump up the amplification of the HAs.

If you listened at 113dB, you’d have the police out, for sure.
But even attenuating your input gain, allows quick dynamic peaks, which would be clipped with less headroom. This doesn’t only apply to music either.
So, your aids are good to go if the specs are met.
I can’t respond to your issue of syncing non visual cues, as I have no knowledge of that issue.
I think that’s a topic for a medical professional.

At Focal, we (the sales dept) used to claim 40kHz + frequency response for the beryllium drivers. But then I never saw proof of that - just hearsay from the designer.

Moving anything other than light, silicon gates or electrons at 40,000 times a second is fairly unlikely.

Old info I had was that orchestral peak SPL was 15-20 dB higher than average SPL. I’m just not finding that info today. Is that still an accurate estimate?

I’m not up in arms over the problems with hi-res sound. I hear music better with aids than without, and each generation of aids has made the music sound better. I’ll be seeing and hearing Into the Woods in a week, and I’ll hear what I hear.

I’ll be looking for new aids in a year. I’m hoping someone comes out with aids designed for music (maybe new Widex or Oticon) - if that happens, I’ll do my best to buy them.

Hi Astrohip. I read your post after submitting my very similar one. Good to hear there’s somebody else who prefers streaming to “through the air”. Your description of “indecipherable” and “a bunch of noise” says it exactly. Thanks!