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.

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  • No_Entertainment_764OPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Perhaps I could approach this question from another angle. How does one go about EQing headphones to a reference - say the Harman target?

    1. Rig measurements? Even if I had this option, that wouldn’t work for me. If we imagine that hearing aids are two little IEM with integrated DAC/AMP, I still wouldn’t be able to know if I am properly compensating for my hearing loss.
    2. Empirically, listening to music/sounds and tweaking as needed? It wouldn’t work either. I do not know if my reference (hearing aid program) is calibrated.

    As I cannot rely on options 1 and 2, I’ve considered using an audio file calibrated to the Harman curve (or the 226 standard) to tune my hearing aids. I play and listen to 24 frequencies, doing my best to assess if I perceive them with equal intensity. That’s my current method, but I wonder if there’s a better way to do this or ways to improve what I am doing.