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Apple Airpods Pro 2 - useful in conversation?

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In reply to @d_Wooluf

@d_Wooluf said:

I’ve got the Nuratrue Pro (forgot to return them when I got the Airpod Pro 2). Pretty good for music I thought. Transparency mode (they call it something else) was good for not getting hit by the oncoming bus maybe. No more than that.

I think the Nura/Denon works for you because your loss is symmetrical. Most of these products have subtle gains.

I think both the Airpods and Nura/Denon require symmetrical hearing loss. Maybe they think that personalising for each ear might make them look too much like hearing aids. It’s a pity.

Have you tried adjusting the L/R balance? I know that sounds obvious, but I had to ask.

In reply to @Harlan

I have Phonak Audeo Paradise P90’s…mine last all day. Approx 17 hours with some battery life remaining.

I do have problems with battery life if I save a program, and use the saved program. Battery life is cut in half. I took automatic speech in noise and made setting changes, and saved it. I could hear more clearly. But not for long.

Hope this helps.
DaveL
Toronto

Now that you’ve posted your , philbury, we can see that your hearing loss is pretty profound. I would not expect the AirPods Pro 2 to be nearly as good for you as hearing aids, or in your case, possibly even cochlear implants, no. My losses are much less extreme, and AirPods Pro 2 are not as good as my hearing aids are with conversation for me–I did check. I do like them for music–played quietly–though, tuned to my audiogram.

AirPods Pro 2 might work as a substitute for over-the-counter aids for somebody with mild-to-moderate loss, although the AirPods’ battery life is pretty limiting, but with just as with aids, more severe losses need more expensive hardware with more firepower and expert audiologist fine-tuning to help with conversation.

My question was about whether the Airpods Pro 2’s transparency mode enabled me to hear someone talking to me when I was using them for music. I guess you might not want to have that permanently set in case it adversely affected audio quality or whatever.

@philbury said:

My question was about whether the Airpods Pro 2’s transparency mode enabled me to hear someone talking to me when I was using them for music.

Yes, the Transparency mode works in parallel with audio streaming. Whether you hear someone talking to you when you’re streaming audio from the iPhone is another matter, because you may have your streaming music going too loud, or because your AirPods Pro 2 cannot amplify enough in the Transparency mode for your high frequencies severe to profound loss.

You may “notice” vaguely that someone is trying to talk to you amidst the music as a flag in the low frequency range, which you can hear better there, so you can stop the audio streaming to try to listen to that person. But with your high frequency severe to profound loss, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to understand what that person is saying to you in the Transparency mode, despite the Apple amplification for accommodation.

Before I got real hearing aids, I often used Airpods Pro 2 with some tweaks to transparency mode to hear conversations in noise. Those tweaks can be made via Headphone Accommodations, and include Conversation Boost. You can also adjust background noise cancellation and boost trebles or mids (speech range). The end result of all this is that my modified transparency mode sounded noticeably different from the standard, unmodified transparency mode. It worked well for my needs, though I doubt it would be enough for more severe losses. I also played with the Adaptive Audio features, but didn’t end up using them.

If you turn on Adaptive Audio in a quiet setting, it just sounds like transparency mode, because there’s no noise for it to reduce. If you’ve made modifications to transparency mode, it won’t use them - it just sounds like the standard, unmodified transparency mode. If you turn on Conversation Awareness, then when you start talking, it switches to transparency mode. But for Conversation Awareness - and only Conversation Awareness - it will use the modifications to transparency mode. If you test this out in a quiet room, it will essentially switch from unmodified to modified transparency mode whenever you start talking.

I found the frequent automatic shifts between standard and modified transparency in Conversation Awareness to be too jarring to use when conversing. It’s also sort of opposite to what I need, because it’s activated when I’m speaking, and automatically deactivates after a few seconds where I don’t speak. I don’t need to hear better when I’m speaking, I need to hear better when the other person is speaking!

It’s possible that just using Adaptive Audio without Conversation Awareness, or using Conversation Awareness but switching off my modifications to transparency mode, would have helped with conversations in noisy settings. I never tested that, but since I made those modifications to assist with hearing, I’m skeptical that switching them off would be a net improvement.

Well, the battery drain was likely worse on the KS10’s because the batteries were failing. On December 12th, the right aid failed completely. It took under two weeks to get them “fixed” which I believe was a replacement covered by Phonak. The aids sound quality also seems improved over the past pair but that could be because I wore an old pair for two weeks and my brain was just thrilled to get a pair with the settings it had worked with for several years. Happy New Year!

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