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Headphones for the hearing impaired

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I also use the accommodation on the AirPods Pro 2. For folks with only moderate hearing loss, that may be a good solution, for folks with much heavier hearing losses like myself, the AirPods Pro 2 doesn’t have as good amplification compensation as hearing aids. There are several YouTube videos where audiologists have tested this out and all of them basically confirmed that the Airpods Pro 2 is only good enough for people with moderate hearing loss.

Nevertheless, I still use the AirPods Pro 2 to listen to music and watch movies and accept the compromise that it’s not amplifying the highs well enough for me (just barely adequate) so that I can get the excellent booming lows from it.

I don’t think any headphones are designed with people who have hearing loss in mind, so I’m not sure if there’s a good recommendation for your question anyway. If you wear hearing aids when using headphones though, the question because not very relevant anymore because the hearing aids already compensates for the loss, and the headphones just help fill out the lows where the hearing aids can’t fill it out as nicely.

For your heavy hearing loss, especially on the lows in your left ear, beside looking for a pair of headphones that has low frequency emphasis, if you couple that with an equalizer that can give you an extra 20-25 boost to help out, then that’ll make your music listening experience much nicer.

No, I don’t really have any specific headphone brand to recommend to you. I think any of the big name brand like Sony, Bose, Sennheiser, Beat, JBL, AKG, Audio Technica, etc. are all good.

I would avoid the “open-back” type headphones, however, as they would allow a lot of the sound to leak out, and they also allow background noise to seep in. A fully enclosed type of headphones would be best to keep the background noise out and keep the generated music in. Most of the modern ones also have Active Noise Cancellation as well.

Also, for your heavy hearing loss, you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money of a high fidelity type pair of headphones, which may put a heavy emphasis on accurate sound reproduction that you can’t appreciate with your level of loss anyway. A pair of good value headphones is probably good enough in your case, and the most important thing is that they should deliver good bass performance. Even if the bass is embellished a little on the loud side instead of being accurate in the sound reproduction, that’s OK and may even work better for your type of heavy low frequency loss, especially in the left ear.

Aussie but I’m sure you’ll find them elsewhere. Fourie the bloke who runs Value Hearing also did a blog piece on them & was pretty impressed - I can’t find that right now unfortunately. I have not tried these myself but they are on my radar when my Sony MX3/s cark it. (keep in mind the prices are AUS too so if you are US they are likely markedly cheaper in US$)

https://shop.valuehearing.com.au/collections/hearing-enhancement30

https://shop.valuehearing.com.au/products/copy-of-audera-wireless-noise-cancelling-headphones29

I am severe hard of hearing person (90dB flat) and I am using for listening music:

  • Sennheiser HD 25-1 (headphones)
  • Lake People Phone Amplifier G93 (you need to change switcher inside for impedance)
  • Software Windows Equalizer - any is good enough

So I decided (against some advice) to try earbuds with an equalizer. I did that because I wanted a solution for travel, and I don’t want to take bulky earphones with me.

My earbuds were cheap XINWLD A97 Pro Bluetooth 53 Earphones. They enjoy good reviews on Amazon. Naturally I use them without my hearing aids. They sounded decent out of the box, but seemed flat and lifeless. Most things sound lifeless to me, LOL… but I wanted to improve the sound with an equalizer.

And I had great success with an equalizer on my Windows 11 laptop. I applied Equalizer Pro together with an app called Peace. It was possible to get an approximate frequency profile using an audio sweep and listening to the volume. The earbuds required a TON of bass boost, plus I applied high frequency boosts to compensate for my hearing loss in that area.

The result is that I am now enjoying better music sound than I have heard in many years.

After doing this I tried to set up something similar on my desktop and failed after hours of diddling. I also tried to get an equalizer working on my Pixel 8 phone, and that also didn’t work. I don’t know why it has to be so hard to set up good listening on our devices, but it is.

For anyone who is interested, here are the equalizer settings that are working well on my laptop.

Peace

@Freddy said:

The result is that I am now enjoying better music sound than I have heard in many years.

After doing this I tried to set up something similar on my desktop and failed after hours of diddling. I also tried to get an equalizer working on my Pixel 8 phone, and that also didn’t work. I don’t know why it has to be so hard to set up good listening on our devices, but it is.

You should be able to set up equalizer APO, and Peace on your desktop.
Did you check the github directions?

For your Pixel, you can get the Wavelet app, which works very well, and you can import profiles too.
A lot of users use Poweramp for the PEQ.
That appears to be a typical Harmon target curve you’ve got there, albeit with a ton of bass.

The laptop and desktop are both Dell and both use Win11 but one works and the other doesn’t. The desktop has MaxxAudioPro and I think that app is preventing Eq APO from working. I had a lot of trouble with the audio on that desktop when it was new and complained to Dell about it. They were unable to provide directions on the complicated audio features on that computer. They eventually sent a tech out and replaced the mother board (!), but it made no difference. It’s the Maxx and Dell doesn’t understand that thing either.

After that I managed to get good sound out of one of the front jacks but not the others. I count that as success. But the equalizer won’t work.

It might be impossible to uninstall MaxxAP.

I don’t know what “github directions” means.

The bass is probably set too high, but it is a good starting point and it sounds good. Music does not sound boomy, but voices sound slightly bassy. I will tune it a bit better in time.

The best app for Android is supposed to be Poweramp, but it didn’t work on my Pixel. Someone who is an advanced programmer might be able to get it to work, but I’m not one of those. I tried a couple of other apps too without success. I will try Wavelet.

Thanks for your response and suggestions.

@Freddy said:

It might be impossible to uninstall MaxxAP.

You may wish to buy a usb soundcard, or DAC/Amp, and turn off the MaxxAP.
You’d have to restart your pc, and boot into bios, and turn off the internal sound maxxap.
Idk if you can go into settings>device manager, and disable the driver there.
My old Dell xps desktop has onboard sound, but I disabled it in bios, and installed my Asus Xonar Essence STX soundcard.

Github is a repository for software, and apps, which usually has a lot of info on eq apo, but I think disabling your dell soundcard will work as long as you have another audio source.

For sure, get Wavelet. It’s got presets for almost every set of cans, and as I said you can import customs as well.

Thanks. I will work on those things one by one. I want to learn more about Poweramp and Wavelet. (I already installed Wavelet and it is a mystery for now.)

I have heard that some folks do a clean reinstall of Windows to get rid of Maxx.

I refined the equalizer profile so the test WAV file plays flatter, but now the music sounds worse, too much bass. Don’t know what is up with that but I had to pull the low frequencies down for them to sound OK again.

During the frequency sweep I can hear peaks and valleys that have to do with my hearing loss, but those don’t noticeably bother the music.

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