I am hearing impaired and my loss is mostly conductive (I have otosclerosis). I’ve been wearing hearing aids for the past two decades. Hearing aids are great for speech in different situations, but when it comes to music, they’re are kind of lacking.
I really enjoy music and have a few mid-fi headphones and dac/amp (DT 770 Pro, DT 900 Pro X, AirPods Max, FiiO Q3, and Dragonfly Red). I have the APO/Peace combo installed on my PC and use the Oratory 1990 references for my headphones.
Problem is… I also really need to “eq” my hearing aids, if you know what I mean. I program my hearing aids myself and I think I have crafted two pretty decent “music” programs. One with a more linear compression scheme that I use when I play my acoustic and classical guitars, and one with compression for headphones and music in general. I created two audio files based on the equal-loudness contours that I use to adjust the 24 bands of my hearing aids. Here are the 65 phons and the 85 phons files.
How can I really be sure my aided hearing is “flat”? Or as flat as possible, given the constraints of hearing aids. Is there any way, tool, app, website that could help me assess whether my music program is flat (say, compared to the ISO 226 standard)? Any tips are really appreciated.
Thanks, /u/flashb1024. We have exchanged some messages in the hearingtracker forum. I posted this.
I also have many guitars (classical and acoustic) coming and going. I could have a music program that would EQ a particular guitar, making it sound excellent, but it might sound really bad for the next one. Hence the need to a program tunned to a equal-loudness courve. Although I think I am close to achieving my ‘flat’ music program, I am still trying to ensure that I can discern a good-sounding guitar from a bad one. From this program crafted for guitars (little to no compression), I simply add some compression back, usually following the scheme of my main program, and create another music program for my headphones.