How do you find music listening?

I listen to music a lot through my hearing aids. Live music and streaming are mainly OK. I also listen to recorded music "thru the air" which can be problematic. It helps that I have refined the music program of my aids in accordance with the music I listen to. I have learned how to use the software and have found AI helpful in interpreting my feedback into adjustments to improve the listening experience. I also find that the quality of the recording is significant so I mainly listen to remastered tracks rather than original recordings or else recent originals.

Do you use your hearing aids every time you listen to music, and if not why?

Yes. Functionally deaf past 6'.

Are there any apps or headphone technology that you find helps? Mimi, airpods etc.

Nope.

Does it make any difference what genre of music you listen to?

Live music remains good. All I've attended in the last 10 years has been: orchestra, small group jazz and chamber, percussion, and bluegrass. Much of my recorded music just sounds off, probably because of timing issues. It's not the music, though - some recordings of, say, Beethoven's 5th symphony sound great. some awful. (I have a lot of LPs.)

Streaming to HAs from phone isn't good. It's a useful accompaniment to riding my bike trainer, but not much else, but the same recordings sound OK when streamed through my car radio.

I usually wear my hearing aids while listening to music.

When indoors, I usually use over-the-ear headphones since I use open domes. This helps me capture the bass sound.

Since I have severe high frequency loss, I don't usually hear cymbals. This isn't a big problem for me since the bass guitar usually covers it up for me. For others, it destroys their enjoyment.

Streaming music is fine as long as I don't try to listen next to a busy road. Again, open domes leak out the low frequency sounds and allow busy road noise in.

I found that the brand of hearing aid made a big difference for me. I tried the Jabra 30 hearing aids and found the sound to be terrible for me. The Phillips 9050 and 9040 hearing aids sounded very good to me.

I don't use a separate program for listening to music. The general program works just fine for me.

I got my first set of hearing aids in 2003 at age 57. I am on my 6th set now, a pair of Phonak Audeo I90-Rs. I have always enjoyed streaming my iTunes library to my hearing aids, regardless of what hearing aid I happen to have. My music is from the last century and I have heard each tune probably hundreds of times. I am very familiar with them.

I do not enjoy listening to other music. New music is similar to conversation for me. Even with a good set of well tuned hearing aids, I find conversation very labor intensive. Trying to hear words, make sense of them, connect them with the conversation, etc is an effort. Listening to new music is a similar effort so I just don’t bother to do it.

I have Meniere's disease. Currently, only one ear is affected. Since the beginning, along with hearing loss, I have diplacousia, which means I am not sure complete recovery would be a good thing (unless my HA compensates for my diplacousia too). One year and a half ago my hearing fell to between 60 and 90 dB, so there was no question I would need to wear a HA. I have had mine since December 2025. I understand that at my level of loss, wearing my HA as long as possible is critical to reach good results. Last time I visited my audiologist, he told me that I had worn them more than 15 hours a day.

My audiologist first only set a "universal" setting, which was obviously made for speech. I created my own user-defined setting using pink noise, but the result was disappointing. I also tried to train my ear by listening to music through Bluetooth. In the beginning, what my ear heard through Bluetooth sounded more like noise. I could only recognise a few recordings of music I knew really well. With training (which I did not do as frequently as I had intended to), my hearing did improve in the sense that I have now a little less than 200 tracks which I am able to identify. Note that I am speaking of recognising, definitely not enjoying!

Last time, I asked my audiologist to add a music setting. This allows me to recover more highs and probably a little more mids and lows, and I am starting to think that, with time, I could find listening to music almost enjoyable. I guess the music setting also behaves differently from the universal setting in terms of temporal level adjustment, and this may be part of why this setting unproved my music experience. I also understand more of the lyrics, which is nice.

I don't know if the missing mids and lows are an unavoidable consequence of my hearing loss or if I could hope for something better by changing my HA, or simply my ear mold, but I understand that I can't expect full recovery.