New paradigms in hearing technology?

Understandable. Hearing aids seem ideal to produce those middle ranges. Terrible at low end.

It depends if you have domes or custom ear molds. I have custom ear molds and have a good wide range of frequencies.

You should post your audiogram up next to your avatar so people would know what kind of hearing loss you have. It would make the discussion more relevant to your case.

I recently acquired the Apple AirPods Pro 2 which has audiogram accommodation, and I now use it for streaming audio from my iPhone now instead of using my hearing aids for streaming. It allows me to get back my experience with the full bass sounds, while the audiogram accommodation provides me with the amplified mids and highs that compensate for my hearing loss in the mids and highs. It’s not a replacement for my hearing aids, but it gives me a much better listening experience when streaming audio.

Since you don’t post your audiogram so we don’t know what kind of hearing loss you have, I can’t really say whether the Airpods Pro 2 audiogram accommodation would work for you or not.

There’s a long thread on this forum on whether the Airpods Pro 2 can be used as a hearing device or not, if you want to search for it to read.

One of the reasons that hearing aids tend to dissapoint in comparison to “regular” bluetooth earbuds or headphones is because of the underlying sound reproduction technologies.

The reciever that produces sound in RIC hearing aids is, I think, generally a “balanced armature”. This is essentially a little vibrating reed matched with a small, stiff diaphram rather than a larger cone dynamic diaphragm “speaker” that you might expect.

This video from a leading manufacturer of balanced armatures presents a reasonably good overview:

Most consumer headphones use a larger dynamic driver, but higher-end earbuds may combine multiple balanced armatures tuned for different frequency bands or even balanced aramtures plus a dynamic driver for the best of both worlds. This is somewhat analagous to the way a home stereo speaker system could include bookshelf speakers with a tweeter (for higher-frequency sounds) and a woofer (for mid- and lower-frequencies), plus a sub-woofer (for the low-end).

A balanced armature is great because it’s so small that it can be nestled deep inside the ear to provide maximum amplification, and can be easily tuned for reproduction of the frequency band for human speech. On the other hand, lower-frequency sounds won’t sound as good from a single balanced armature reciever.

A logical solution would be to incorporate multiple balanced aramtures into the reciever, or to adopt a hybrid balanced aramture-dynamic driver solution into a hearing aid. The drawbacks are obvious: larger size and a significant increase in power consumption. A hybrid reciever would not fit deep into the ear canal, but would need to rest in the same place as a typical earbud.

It’s possible that some of the OTC hearing aids coming onto the market will address this since they are not all attempting to be as small as prescription hearing aids (that is, many of them look like “true wireless earbuds” and seem to settle for less than all-day battery life). In theory, I don’t think there’s anything stopping other hearing aids from taking this route except for the assumption that hearing aid users would prefer not to spend big bucks for a larger device with shorter batter life when they could simply purchase a more affordable set of headphones as an adjunct to their “real” hearing aids… but it’s possible that advances in battery technology or changing attitudes regarding wearable technology will affect product development in this market.

If I’ve misunderstood anything or explained anything incorrectly here I’d welcome corrections. The above is what I’ve come to understand in my own research on this topic.

Thanks. I’m aware of the drawbacks, exactly as you posit here. I think I suggested that size, incovenience, looks are unimportant to me.

I am heartened that you are thinking some new designs might appear on the market. I would hope they would have the power necessary for my hearing loss.

Thanks for posting up your audiogram. Wow, OK, I can see where you’re coming from now. And that’s why the need to post your audiogram, because it says a lot about how your loss is like.

I can see why an amplifier and a pair of headphones and a mic can serve you better than your hearing aids now, because you just need mostly flat but very powerful amplification, where the tiny little hearing aids just can’t compete against a pair of big and well amplified headphones.

But that’s for sitting around watching TV. I assume that you hearing aids is some kind of Utra Power BTE type of aid? I just don’t see any headphone-like product on the market bigger than a BTE HA with a mic built-in that can give you more power.

When I mentioned the Airpods Pro 2, its audiogram accommodation is limited to using it with the iPhone only when streaming audio from the iPhone. Its transparency mode (to hear the ambient environmental sounds) does not have audiogram accommodation, so it can’t really serve as a hearing aid in the sense of hearing things around you either.

I hope that in the long run, non-Apple earbud mfgs like Samsung or Bose or Sennheiser, etc. will put audiogram accommodation into their products to compete with Apple, and not limit their audiogram accommodation to anything (like how Apple is limiting it to the iPhone only). Then we will have true OTC external larger-size amplification devices that can compete with hearing aids.

@Volusiano said:

I can see why an amplifier and a pair of headphones and a mic can serve you better than your hearing aids now, because you just need mostly flat but very powerful amplification, where the tiny little hearing aids just can’t compete against a pair of big and well amplified headphones.

Exactly.
The OP’s relatively flat hearing loss makes such a difference with sound equipment.
Thanks

Soundcore (Anker’s headphone brand) has released some earbuds with a hearing test feature, which they call “HearID”:

HearID - soundcore Canada1

HearID intelligently tests your hearing and creates a tailor-made sound profile just for your ears.

HearID works with Android as well as iPhone.

Soundcore’s Liberty 4 and Liberty 3 Pro earbuds include this feature:

Buy Liberty 4 True Wireless Earbuds1

Shop Liberty 4 with crisp, clear sound powered by ACAA 3.0 technology, 360° immersive spatial audio, and heart rate sensor.

soundcore Headphones & Speakers - Hear it, Feel it - soundcore CA

Shop from Anker soundcore bluetooth headphones, true wireless earbuds, and Bluetooth speakers. Enjoy a greater listening experience at soundcore official website.

I have no experience with these specific earbuds, although I understand they are well-reviewed. I have two pairs of noise-cancelling headphones from Soundcore rather than earbuds, but am considering the earbuds specifically because of this feature.

@Volusiano said:

. Quoting some lame article to show that I’m wrong is not going to faze me into agreeing with you.

@Volusiano: Bingo, MrV … Bingo!

“…Nice work! Your AirPods Pro 2 are now customizing sound (both transparency and streaming) to match your specific hearing loss shape….”

This video is a good resource also https://youtu.be/F67dX61wB-Q2

I works for transparency mode, I have the AirPods Pro and I’m using it every day.

Edit. Now you can import your own Audiogram from a file, picture or manually.

Yep. They definitely work. Not enough amplification but better than nothing.

@SOL said:

“…Nice work! Your AirPods Pro 2 are now customizing sound (both transparency and streaming) to match your specific hearing loss shape….”

This video is a good resource also https://youtu.be/F67dX61wB-Q

Thank you for showing me exactly where that article said that the audiogram accommodation is for both transparency and streaming. I do admit that I missed that part, so you did show me up as I asked for it.

Also thank you for that YouTube video link where they did the REM of both the APP2 and the P90. That is very informative.

So here’s my position on this. First off, I take that statement from the article with a grain of salt because the author of that article is not an official Apple Tier 2 Technical Support person. He can only “assume” that the audiogram accommodation is applied to the Transparency mode, but his word is not golden. At least not compared to the Apple Tier 2 Tech Support person who told me the opposite (no audiogram accommodation for Transparency, only for streaming). So I’m still dismissing the quote from the article as having no value to me. I’m not being stubborn here. I just choose to believe the Apple Tier 2 Tech Support person more because 1) they work for Apple, so they should know what they’re talking about, and 2) what they told me is consistent with what I’m not hearing in the Transparency mode → I don’t hear the audiogram accommodation in Transparency, not in the same obvious way that I hear it when streaming.

Now let’s move on to the YouTube video. This is worth discussing more than the article, because it’s data driven and the data is shown live for everyone to see. Without making it too long,

1. At 7:40 into the video, the audi said that “The real takeaway here is that the APP2 does amplify”.

My comment: I don’t disagree with this. I never said that the APP2 doesn’t amplify. I can hear the amplification in the APP2 during Transparency mode just fine. What I said is that the APP2s don’t amplify anywhere enough in the mids and highs to compensate/accommodate enough based on my audiogram input like with streaming.

So the question here is “why in streaming mode from the iPhone, the APP2 seems to amplify enough for me, but in Transparency mode, it doesn’t amplify enough to sound as good as in the streaming mode?” Certainly it can if it wants to (because it does it in streaming), but it won’t amplify as well in Transparency. My only conclusion is that because it doesn’t do audiogram accommodation in Transparency.

The REM result kind of supports this. The P90 amplification is up to par with what the patient needs, but the APP2 amplification is barely above what the patient needs. Although the amplification trend seems to track the hearing loss outline of the patient somewhat, there are just too many factors to know for sure whether this is actually based on the audiogram of the patient, or more or less a coincidence because perhaps this is the de-facto amplification for the Transparency mode, or perhaps this is how the APP2 chooses to respond to the kind of REM stimulus that was applied. We’ll never know. The audi in the video at 7:45 said that “there’s a lot of variables that we don’t have control over”.

The experiment in this video did not do a REM test in the streaming mode. It looks like they only did the REM in the Transparency mode generated by speakers over the air. I wish they had done it in the streaming mode to see what the audiogram accommodation in streaming looks like compared to that in the Transparency mode. If it’s like anything I experience, there would be more amplification in streaming, because that’s where the audiogram accommodation actually takes place.

2. At 7:50 into the video, you can hear the Hearing Tracker guy said “Um, if that was the change in the future, maybe like if we were able to be able to create a custom audiogram for the AirPods, maybe it’ll get better.”

My comment: while there is acknowledgement that the APP2 does amplify in Transparency, there is a consensus that the amplification is not up to par with what the audiogram requires (as seen on the graph, not to the level that the Phonak P90 amplifies). So that’s why there’s a mention of “creating a custom audiogram for the AirPods” in the future to make it better. That right there is acknowledgement that the audiogram accommodation is not anywhere near sufficient (or I even contend that it doesn’t even make use of the audiogram in the Transparency mode), except for people with only mild hearing loss, to be able to use the APP2 as a hearing device effectively.

3. At 8:56 into the video, the audio concludes that the APP2 is only suitable for “mild, maybe mild loss, maybe moderate, but probably not enough amplification… More so I say with a mild loss”

My comment: This pretty much sums it up right here. The conclusion from the audi is that while there is amplification by the APP2 in the Transparency mode, it’s only enough for folks with a mild loss. So my conclusion is that the APP2 CANNOT really be used by most folks on this forum because most of us have moderate if not severe and even profound loss. Many, if not most, folks with mild hearing loss usually don’t even bother with getting fitting with hearing aids. So the APP2 may be suitable for those folks, but definitely not for the mainstream folks on this forum who need to wear hearing aids because the APP2 is not a suitable replacement as a hearing device for them.

Last but not least, with the kind of hearing loss the OP (original poster) of this thread has, the APP2 is definitely not a suitable hearing device replacement for him, which is what I said in the first place before we got engaged in this debate. So the debate whether the APP2 Transparency does amplify or not is irrelevant because even if it does amplify like the YouTube video shows, it does not amplify anywhere “enough” for folks with worse than a mild loss.