Hearing loss, hearing aids and music/mixing

[jdstamper]

Hi David,

This makes me wonder if there are any true "HD hearing aids" ... perhaps room for some new technology in the market.

Mixing by sight using an audio analyzer is a good starting point, and comparing that to a reference mix.

In addition you might want to have the final mix checked by someone else with good mixing ears. Ideas for that ... use Taxi forum Peer to Peer, find a collaborator to give you on-going reviews (Taxi forum or otherwise), network locally to find a local peer to check your mixes (try NSAI local chapters, etc), contact a mastering service or recording studio / demo service to review your mixes for a small fee, or if you're submitting directly to a library they might be willing to give feedback on a mix during submission and give you a chance to tweak it.

Best of luck. Jim

[ChrisEmond]

Boy am I glad I decided to surf the posts this morning.
I've had in-ear Phonacs for the past two years and it's taken almost that long to get used to them. Recently, I noticed I wasn't hearing my mixes correctly and after reading these posts I better understand why. I'll be seeing my audiologist next week and will discuss the programming possibilities as described by Vikki. I sure hope so because a new set would set me back close to 5000$ Cad

Thank you all for this valuable information and I 'll let you know how things turn out.

Chris

[daveydad]

Chris, I just ordered those in-ear Phonaks. Not sure if they will be able to make them as small as I need. But I don't plan on using them to mix with headphones. Only with monitors. Weird that it's taken you so long to get used to them. I was told maybe a couple of weeks.

[Paulie]

Boy can I relate.

I have a hearing aid for my right ear only (irreversable nerve damage caused by fevers as a toddler). I tried mixing with the aid in and it didn't help at all. I've played gigs with it in as well, doesn't really help. The only reason I got it was to hear music more accurately, so it was a little bit of a letdown. So now it's just a tool I use during my day job for important meetings.

That being said, I've got three recommendations:

• Get the popular Magic A/B plugin. Once installed you put it on your master bus and then load one (or more) tracks that you want to compare your mix with. You just click on the big B button to hear your a la, then A to go back to your mix. It takes care of bypassing your effects for you. With that, you can hear with your own ears what a good mix sounds like and constantly tweak your mix. Bass levels, stereo spread, EQ, etc.
• Mix in mono often. Different ways you can do this. You might have an interface that has a mono button, or you can add a stereo-->mono direction plugin on the master bus that you can turn on and off. Tools like Ozone also have a Mono listening option.
• When listening in headphones, flip them around occasionally. My left ear is my good ear so sometimes I'll reverse the headphones so that the L os on my right ear. I do this a lot when adding instruments I can't hear in my right (claves, shakers, triangle, ride cymbals, other high freq instruments). If I pan these hard right I can't hear them, and if I have claves right and shakers left, I need to flip the headphones tovmake sure the levels are right.
• If you have anyone in the house with you, ask for their feedback. My wife is also a musician so I can ask her for input... usually she says "it's very bright."

Hope this helps!

Paulie

[Len911]

The audiogram would be the place to start. It's going to tell you how many db's you need to increase at what frequency to hear normally. You could either use an eq like https://www.meldaproduction.com/MFreeformEqualizer (draw your own eq-on sale for ~$31 this week), or compensate by not boosting the eq at the frequencies you are deficient in, sometimes not doing anything is the safest thing.

The problem might be if you had a severe hearing loss at a certain frequency and needed to boost a ton of db, that would probably create distortion.

The goal of a hearing aid primarily is for speech intelligibility, not high fidelity. Speech intelligibility is about 1-3k. The question is how is that achieved? By filtering everything else out?? Telephone voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency

My sister has worn hearing aids since pre-school. A few years back she got cochlear implants, mainly so she could hear "music" better, which was one of the promises. She said the voices sounded like Alvin and the chipmunks, so she wanted me to go along and explain to the audiologist because she had been to several adjustment appointments. They can make adjustments, but the sound is resynthesized, ding, ding! It's not analog. For a person who's never heard analog, or never heard before period, they don't know the difference, so yes they can enjoy music.

There's a program called S.P.E.A.R. http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/ that you can take a sample, make adjustments and it resynthesizes the outcome. It's additive synthesis, constructing any sound by adding sine waves, however no one has enough computing power to create all the sines for complex waves, the limitation, so they only use a few to resynthesize. So it sounds chippy or robotic, though not as noticeable in this program as maybe some others.

Probably the best bet for hearing your mix in a "normal" way, is to adjust the eq to your hearing loss, turn down the volume, and feed it to a really high power amp, and matching speakers and crank it, but getting everyone and the dog out of the house first,lol! If your hearing loss in a particular range is severe, you may have to decrease the db's proportionately in all the other frequencies to keep from increasing the affected range from distortion. For example, if you needed to increase 5k 70db, but 55db is the maximum before distortion, you'd need to lower the other frequencies by 15db.

If one was designing a hearing aid for music even, most people listen to songs with vocals, and what is the most important instrument in a song, a vocal of course,lol!

It's probably easier mixing if you stay away from arrangements that include instruments that have frequency ranges in the area of your deficiency if possible, or use a visual aid. Don't eq frequencies you can't hear.

[daveydad]

Wow!! Lots of great advice from you guys!! Thanks!!! I know getting used to hearing aids will be tough. Like getting used to new glasses which I also hate. I guess I've done pretty well even with my loss, I have never been told by libraries to remix my tracks and have had dozens of placements in TV shows so far. A couple of times someone would comment they heard a click or pop that I didn't catch and I would have to solo tracks until I found the culprit.

I never boost any of the higher frequency levels because I know I would just overdo it. It's just things like bells, shakers, hi percussion where I might not hear how loud it is. I do A-B comparison a lot. I guess I was hoping aids might help with mixing but it sounds like they're more for everyday life. I'll try them out with my monitors more, which I rarely used because I couldn't hear higher frequencies anyway. I'll keep ya'll posted once I get my hearing aids and begin this new journey!

[sansharbour]

It's amazing what hearing aids can do for someone who suffers from hearing loss. I have two and in the beginning I didn't use them much but now they are in everyday.
High end stuff was my problem and now birds chirping, crunchy dry grass, squeaky shoes are heard and appreciated and most importantly understanding clearly conversations TV etc.

BUT i don't use them for mixing.

Theres an alternate setting for listening to music and you can go back and forth if you wish but I still mix without them.
I do listen to mixes with them in the car though

I mix at low levels and then in mono sitting right in front of a single Avontone speaker, then gradually move further away

All one can do is their best

Good luck with the hearing aids

Don

[lesmac]

Came across this device today. It could be of some benefit?

https://www.amazon.com/Aumeo-Audio-Head ... BETVE&th=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRPuZGxEdhg

[jaymz]

I suffer from tinnitus and have some sensitivity around 1khz (a little distortion). The tinnitus isn't all that bad for mixing, but the sensitivity is, I can't ever tell if the midrange in my songs is too much (because sometimes it grates on me) or if it's just me. The answer is to have someone else mix and master, but that's no fun!