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Music sounds fine when streamed, but sounds bad when heard live in concert

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I have 3-year-old Oticon More 1 , with firmware 1.4.3. When I stream recorded music from my Samsung phone to the hearing aids, the quality of the sound is acceptable. However, when I hear (through the microphones of the HAs) the same piece of music played through my hi-fi, the sound quality is really bad. Classical music heard live in concert sounds even worse. The “bad” sound is hard to describe, but it is as if the sounds at different frequencies arrive at different times, when they should be coming in together to make chords. It makes ordinary listening to music “in the room” or in a concert venue pretty unpleasant. My audiologist has made adjustments at three sessions without it helping. It’s as if the sound arriving through the microphones is processed differently than the sound arriving by Bluetooth. I would think that a musician practicing and listening to his/her insturment through the hearing aids would be quite discouraged, especially if they then listend to a streamed recording of themselves playing.

Anyone with a similar experience? Any thoughts about this?

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@Robley said:

When I stream recorded music from my Samsung phone to the hearing aids, the quality of the sound is acceptable. However, when I hear (through the microphones of the HAs) the same piece of music played through my hi-fi, the sound quality is really bad.

But this is two totally different things going on here, streaming is done from your phone where most of the processing is happening and no microphones, if you use the built-in search button from right here on hearingtracker you’ll find a few posts on this.
Your Audiologist can check these links out for programming ones for music.

https://grandpianopassion.com/category/hearing-music/12

https://musicandhearingaids.org/13

Musician health and hearing publications2

Musicians' health and hearing information publications

Some hA’s deal with live music better than others and obviously what you have the ’s set up to do, the degree of loss to your hearing will make a massive difference. Which HA’s do you have out of interest?

@Xonic83 said:

Which HA’s do you have out of interest?

Lots, far too many, I like to play around with each from the main players, except Oticon, the last I tried from them was a pair of OPN-S, unfortunately I can’t get used to their “open” brain learning thing :thinking:

I have the very same experience. What probably makes a major difference is the distance between the audio source and the microphone. This was optimized (was made very close) for audio that is streamed but is generally not (is much more distant) for sound coming to your from speakers or live performers.
The other thing is that audio from speakers picked up by HAs ends up being converted electronically twice- duplicating all the distortions by such processes.

When speakers are very close to my HAs (situations that include wearing headphones) the sound is more or less OK- but nothing beats streaming.

For this reason, HAs that come with good Bluetooth and TV streamers are extremely important to me.

Hearing aids don’t ‘like’ pure-tones and their harmonics, higher strings and harpsichords land quite squarely in the ‘not sure if it’s feedback or not’ area.

Unless the aids properly work out that they’re in music, (which is quite hard in classical pieces) it’s possible that they’ll attempt to resolve the signal as speech too.

Many aids have a dedicated music program. So if the aids don’t recognize music the wearer can select the music program. What’s the problem? I can understand that a music program isn’t good enough for some kinds of hearing loss, but in general it helps a lot.

My experience is exactly the same. I love streaming music, and do it all the time. But “live” music, ie music thru the air, sounds like a wall of sound, with little ability to actually discern the music.

I don’t know why, but that’s just the way it usually is with aids & implants. YMMV.

Edited

My hifi sounds similar to your description, but live music sounds fine. I’m on my 3rd set of speakers. The one saving grace is that each new set of aids does a better job with reproduced music, and i think my next set will do the trick. That’s what I tell myself, at least. :slightly_smiling_face:

ETA: THANKS, um_bongo, the processing you describe could cause the delay that Robley and I hear. Wales is high on my list of destinations if I leave the US. :slightly_smiling_face:

In reply to @Um_bongo

Thank you Um_bongo. It may well be that my Oticon Real are attempting to interpret music as speech, an understanding that may well help me in my search for better HAs. It appears that the “Music” program is aimed at streamed music and bypasses the ADC and subsequent interpretive processing that must come between the microphone and the receiver.

My chief enthusiasm is for classical and renaissance music, so it’s precisely harpsichord, flute, and strings that make the problem for me. Echo-y performance venues, such as old stone churches and parts of concert halls, of course, turn the sound into non-music.

the only ’s I’ve ever managed to sound vaiguely natural with music are Widex, with the feedback managers turned off. My hearing loss is such that I could dial the HA’s back enough to give me less boost than I otherwise would need every day, but still enough to hear things more clearly. I found being further from the sound source helped with the cone effect and facing it square on also helped. Widex has 2 main programs, Universal which has some delay although if you’re far enough away from the source it’s not too bad, and Pure with their 0 delay tech, which suits a high freq hearing loss but can sound a little sharp and the mics are put into Omni by default so they pick up a lot of background noise and reflections, especially from behind you.

I could forget I was wearing them when I had either music or a movie on in either of those modes, weirdly found the universal more pleasing despite the delay.

I actually thought Phonak’s Lyric would sound the best given it’s analogue, but this turned out not to be the case as the high freqs had a habbit of really distorting and clipping despite it being on its lowest volume.

One more thing you could try, there are a couple of companys in the US that make newer analogue hearing aids. I’ve not tried these but they seem fairly cheap so might be worth a go:

True Sound With TrueEQ Analog Hearing Aids | Conventional & Traditional10

Experience natural sound with TrueEQ Analog Hearing Aids from the Analog Hearing Labs, the only -registered source for non-digital hearing aids. Discover now.

In reply to @freezerman404

After my right ear tanked out with Hydrops a few weeks ago, nearly all bass sounds sound very broken to me. Like every bass speaker or car makes the sound of a blown speaker or a farting elephant :slight_smile: I honestly thought my very expensive subwoofer had blown but no, I just can’t hear it any more.

In reply to @RobHooft

Thanks, Ed14. The music program helps with streamed music, but seems ineffective with “through the air” music. My audiologist has tried a couple of adjustments to that program, but so far without making any major difference.

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