Anyone mix with hearing aids on?

[Bill Phillips]

My wife and ENT tell me I need hearing aids (down more than 30db with a significant L/R difference, and huge 40db dips at 3-6k recovering at 8k. So not flat at all. I no that hearing aids are "tuned" for speech and to enhance the listening experience. So, I'm thinking they wouldn't be very useful in trying to determine how the music you're mixing sounds to everyone else.

Hopefully some of you have tried it and can provide some guidance. Thanks.

BTW, I searched the forum for "hearing aid" and only found a couple of instances where the phrase was used as a pejorative. No I'm guessing mixing while wearing hearing aids is a bad idea.

Edited August 27, 2023 by Bill Phillips

[Colin Nicholls]

I recently got hearing aids and I can tell you that I would not try to mix with them in. But I guess it depends on the shape of your audiogram. I have some low-mid-range loss and regular music sounds good to me when i turn it up a bit.

If I have my hearing aids in, they tend to do strange things like, comb filtering and sudden adjustments. I know there are settings for reducing this but they still try to be "intelligent, reactive" devices rather than passive.

I much prefer taking my deficiency into account during mixing, and paying attention to the frequency spread visualization to make sure I'm not missing something. 

But you may not have that luxury.

[John Vere]

They will always tell older folks that they need hearing aids. I took the test at the request of my wife when she was being fitted for her 3rd pair. This is a very expensive handicap!  They give you a print out that shows your EQ curve which for us audio engineers we  can fully understand what that is. My results look almost exactly like my wife's!  A drop off beyond 800hz that falls off the scale.   

But- my wife is very hard of hearing.  I will agree my hearing is fading but not any where as bad as hers. If she is not wearing them somebody can be ringing the doorbell and she won't hear it. Lot's of examples of how my hearing is possibly still at 85% but hers is probably as bad as 50%.  I can hear a high pitched whine from dimmed lighting!   So why the same results and advice to purchase a pair.

I play in a duo with long time music partner Curt. He's still a smoking Banjo player as well as he  plays bass in a 12 piece R&B band. He is like my wife and has used hearing aids for over 10 year now too. He is the guy who asks for the floor wedges to be on the edge of killing you. He insists on using  vocal mikes in the front room for rehearsals. His newest aids have a special EQ setting for music which he say's is working a bit better, in the past he couldn't wear them as it sounded awful. We can't convince him he needs in ear monitors! At least bass is an instrument that is usually easy to hear on stage, but he always wants his amp louder than the sound man and band mates do. And Banjo's are REAL LOUD. but he still struggles in coffee house acoustic gigs. With his aid in! 

We also have a close friend Michael from Arizona who spends the summer here who finally bought new hearing aids. Last year we noticed he wasn't understanding other sides of conversations and had a bad habit of always going " Hmm, and uh Hau"   you talked. He was a social outcast. He had cheap hearing aids that obviously were not working. He is like a different person now.

What I learned from these 3 people is that you need GOOD hearing aids. Some brands just don't work as well. The good ones are well over $3 grand in Canada.   Michael and my wife are now using Oticon aids. Curt bought his from Costco as were my wife's last pair, and seems they are not really working to me. 

A hearing aid is an overpriced In Ear monitor ( headphone ear bud) with a built in mike and pre amp. The good ones have processing which is very basic EQ. 

Which brings me to my other experience with hearing loss.  I worked in a Care Facility for 6 years. Hearing aid don't go well with dementia. They will  take them out and loose them in a short time. For our events we bought what are known as "Pocket talkers." A set of cheap airplane style, foam  headphones paired with a body pack with a mike and a amp built in. The price range of these goes from $30 to $1,000. We found a brand for $150 that were outstanding sound quality. I highly recommend these for people who would still need a boost for things like church services. Better sound quality at a fraction of the cost. 

Sorry for the long story but I sort of needed to qualify my answer which is "no"   

Your brain adjusts to deficiencies as we age. Our studio monitors have been with us for a long time and we learn to know what a good mix sounds like on those even as our hearing declines.  And any set of good studio headphone will have way better sound quality than even the highest priced hearing aids.  

 

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by JohnnyV

[Bill Phillips]

7 hours ago, Colin Nicholls said:

I recently got hearing aids and I can tell you that I would not try to mix with them in. But I guess it depends on the shape of your audiogram. I have some low-mid-range loss and regular music sounds good to me when i turn it up a bit.

If I have my hearing aids in, they tend to do strange things like, comb filtering and sudden adjustments. I know there are settings for reducing this but they still try to be "intelligent, reactive" devices rather than passive.

I much prefer taking my deficiency into account during mixing, and paying attention to the frequency spread visualization to make sure I'm not missing something. 

But you may not have that luxury.

Thanks. That matches what I was expecting from hearing aids. Looking at curves from my hearing test which are steadily getting worse, you'd think I can't hear at all. Bit that's not my experience when I'm listening to music in my monitors or headphones. I can usually hear EQ changes; and, I too, have a frequency spectrum display up any time I'm analyzing and adjusting EQ or levels.

[Bill Phillips]

7 hours ago, JohnnyV said:

They will always tell older folks that they need hearing aids. I took the test at the request of my wife when she was being fitted for her 3rd pair. This is a very expensive handicap!  They give you a print out that shows your EQ curve which for us audio engineers we  can fully understand what that is. My results look almost exactly like my wife's!  A drop off beyond 800hz that falls off the scale.   

But- my wife is very hard of hearing.  I will agree my hearing is fading but not any where as bad as hers. If she is not wearing them somebody can be ringing the doorbell and she won't hear it. Lot's of examples of how my hearing is possibly still at 85% but hers is probably as bad as 50%.  I can hear a high pitched whine from dimmed lighting!   So why the same results and advice to purchase a pair.

I play in a duo with long time music partner Curt. He's still a smoking Banjo player as well as he  plays bass in a 12 piece R&B band. He is like my wife and has used hearing aids for over 10 year now too. He is the guy who asks for the floor wedges to be on the edge of killing you. He insists on using  vocal mikes in the front room for rehearsals. His newest aids have a special EQ setting for music which he say's is working a bit better, in the past he couldn't wear them as it sounded awful. We can't convince him he needs in ear monitors! At least bass is an instrument that is usually easy to hear on stage, but he always wants his amp louder than the sound man and band mates do. And Banjo's are REAL LOUD. but he still struggles in coffee house acoustic gigs. With his aid in! 

We also have a close friend Michael from Arizona who spends the summer here who finally bought new hearing aids. Last year we noticed he wasn't understanding other sides of conversations and had a bad habit of always going " Hmm, and uh Hau"   you talked. He was a social outcast. He had cheap hearing aids that obviously were not working. He is like a different person now.

What I learned from these 3 people is that you need GOOD hearing aids. Some brands just don't work as well. The good ones are well over $3 grand in Canada.   Michael and my wife are now using Oticon aids. Curt bought his from Costco as were my wife's last pair, and seems they are not really working to me. 

A hearing aid is an overpriced In Ear monitor ( headphone ear bud) with a built in mike and pre amp. The good ones have processing which is very basic EQ. 

Which brings me to my other experience with hearing loss.  I worked in a Care Facility for 6 years. Hearing aid don't go well with dementia. They will  take them out and loose them in a short time. For our events we bought what are known as "Pocket talkers." A set of cheap airplane style, foam  headphones paired with a body pack with a mike and a amp built in. The price range of these goes from $30 to $1,000. We found a brand for $150 that were outstanding sound quality. I highly recommend these for people who would still need a boost for things like church services. Better sound quality at a fraction of the cost. 

Sorry for the long story but I sort of needed to qualify my answer which is "no"   

Your brain adjusts to deficiencies as we age. Our studio monitors have been with us for a long time and we learn to know what a good mix sounds like on those even as our hearing declines.  And any set of good studio headphone will have way better sound quality than even the highest priced hearing aids.  

 

 

Thanks. I like long stories. They tend to put things in perspective. My wife's hearing aids were expensive. She bought them from her audiologist. But on the rare occasions we go out to listen to live music she ends up taking them out because of the strange loud sounds they make.

I've used single speaker Shure in ear bluetooth monitors for years for casual listening and ambient noise cancellation; but they can vary from too bassie to no bass at all depending on placement in my ear canal. So I don't use them for mixing, and there's also that bluetooth latency.

I've also thought about apply EQ  to the master channel after all other effects including analyzers aimed at canceling my hearing loss to see what that does. I have lots of bass trapping my small room and the sound, when I've tested it, is pretty good at the listening position. I have a big high Q cut at 6k (about 30 dB). I've got a feeling if I mirror that with a boost it isn't going to sound very realistic even to me. And  it might be down right annoying to my wife in the living room watching TV:)