Isn’t it that frequencies of superb headphones get from 20- 20.000 Hz.
My HA have I think 250- 7.000 Hz.
So I think bass tones are not available for small earbuds either.
You will only miss something if you don’t use headphones and push up the volume… although bone conduction is available thru the HA but not processed by I would think. But then the sound has to come to the hearing buds thru the air to be conducted by the HA.
I cannot speak for @Volusiano. I approach this as trying to make things work or work better. Sometimes it is just easier to buy new things, though a few like to tweak their own stuff and squeeze all the juice out of those gadgets. Besides, I am an engineer by training, my curiosity most times gets the better of me!
I’m just sharing my personal experience about how I found the Airpods Pro 2 delivering better low bass than some of the headphones I have like the Bose Quiet Comfort, the Sony WH-1000MX3, and the Sennheiser HD 280 Pro. It’s a personal observation and I’m not asking anyone who reads this to agree or disagree with me. So it’s not a debate about whether they match the quality of sound of good headphones that have been around for the last 40 years. If anyone is curious, they can try it out for themselves and form their own opinion. Me, I tried it out and form and shared my opinion of it here, simple as that.
Yeah, you’re missing something here alright. What? First of all, if you had read what I said, I tried out the Boom 3D app which has a built-in equalizer and it has only a + and - 12 dB adjustment range. For a dummy who doesn’t understand, this is nowhere near the 40 to 60 or even 80 dB loss a hearing impaired person can suffer. An equalizer is intended to add or subtract tonal characteristics to make the overall sound different. It’s not really intended to aid in hearing loss, except only in very mild cases. I tried out the Boom 3D and its 24 dB range adjustment does meet anywhere close to my hearing loss need. If you know of great equalizers or apps that can meet my hearing loss needs, I’m all ears (pun intended).
On top of that, an equalizer dummy probably also doesn’t grasp the concept of wide dynamic range compression (WDRC, see screenshot below for an illustration of it) where hearing aids are designed to make on-the-fly adjustment to boost softer sounds and avoid boosting (compressing) louder sounds at each and every frequency channel independently across the whole frequency spectrum, automatically, to amplify and aid where it’s needed but to suppress and compress where amplification is not needed. This is way above and beyond a simple equalizer for dummies.
Based on what I hear from the Airpods Pro 2 aided by the audiogram accommodation when I watch a movie, it’s not just a dumb equalizer. I would contend that Apple has designed some kind of WDRC type algorithm into the audiogram accommodation aid, and from what I hear, the Airpods Pro 2 is designed to treat up to moderate hearing losses of up to the range of 60-70 dB range → not just the 24 dB range that a paltry equalizer like the Boom 3D can deliver.
And now that we’ve covered the concept of WDRC, even if you can show me an equalizer with an 80 dB range of adjustment to meet my hearing loss need, I’d still not want to touch it with a 10-foot pole because a dumb equalizer with that kind of range but no built-in WDRC to tame it can easily blow my ear drums out of the water when a loud sound comes along.
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Big call from someone with a hearing loss! You might be right, but the next question is ‘so what?’. Barring a medical miracle, I’ll never be able to hear in the same way again. An audiophile’s set of headphones is useless to me. I need something that addresses my needs as a hearing-impaired person. Your hearing loss is pretty flat. Trust me. For a sloping loss, using equalisers to compensate is not a straightforward process. The airpods make it relatively easy.
And then you’ve got the ‘fruit’. Transparency mode (which does assist hearing up to a point), adaptive transparency (some protection against sudden loud noises), some ability to monitor the decibels that you’re pumping into your ears, very strong noise cancellation, and the spatial sound processing.
I’m an Apple hater from way back and with the Airpods I dislike the way they’ve limited functionality to within their own ecosystem. But credit where it’s due. It’s a strong product, even though overpriced. Come on Google and Samsung. Do something better.
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You really cut a nice thread with great discussion over here @a13z . Wonderfull topic, thanks to the contributors 
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Not knocking Apple at all, I am a big fan and use multiple Apple devices every day. But, they are what they are and are not what they are not.
Also recently picked up the Pods Pro 2 for the audiogram ability. Loving music again, and for music, far better than any streaming HA. As a hearing aid, functional but unnatural own voice. The Airpods were purchased for when going out walking, being able to listen to music and being aware of surroundings with transparency mode. For those reasons, they are perfect!
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@auGMS → Congrats! Your type of hearing loss (moderate in mids and highs) is well suited to be able to get good result from the Airpods’ audiogram accommodation. And you very mild (if even any) loss in the lows allows you to fully enjoy the wonderful bass it can produce.
By the way, I’ve tried the Conversation Boost feature and find it quite effective at blocking the surrounding sounds and just beam form toward the front sound only. But I wasn’t really in a real noisy environment with lots of people talking like in a restaurant. My test was just at home in a noisy great room right by the kitchen with the fridge running, listening to a speaker in front. Anybody who’s been able to try the Conversation Boost feature in a real noisy place like a restaurant, please share with us here on how well that mode works for you in terms of front speech clarity/enhancement.
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Me, this morning. I switched the OPN1s for the APP2 and the group broke up 2 minutes later. Anyway, my impression in that 2 minutes was that comprehension was better with the APP2. Much quieter overall and the lack of amplification compared to the aids was obvious but the directionality and noise reduction seemed to compensate. I thought how good it would be if they had just a little more power.
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Yes, I agree. I don’t find that the Transparency mode can give me good amplification in the highs like my OPN does, although the lows and mids are OK. And even though I have the Amplification volume set to maximum already in the Custom Transparency Mode settings, it’s still not loud enough for my liking. It would have been nicer to be able to make this Transparency Amplification volume to a little bit louder so I’m not missing out on something, even if it makes it artificially a bit louder than the real volume.
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I’m thinking of ordering some and trying them (Airpods Pro 2). Some of the reviews on Amazon sound v. positive. Of course, one doesn’t know the extent of their hearing needs. With the generous return policies, it’s worth a try for many of us. For me, most things that say “only good for mild hearing loss” tend to work for me and my loss is certainly 'moderate" and worse. Having them would be back-ups for me and for certain situations.
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Just a quick update that I was able to get the (retired) Windows version of Airfoil to work sending audio from my Windows 11 laptop to my iPhone to drive my APP2 with the loaded audiogram. And I have to thank @e1405 in helping me to figure out how to get it to work in PMs. But I’m updating anyone who’s interested in trying it out for Windows here to let them know not to bother wasting your time trying to get it to work, because Airfoil for Windows has been retired and it requires a license which you can’t even buy if you want to because it’s no longer supported. And the legacy Windows download is a trial version that only provides you with 10 minute of good audio before they mess it up with noise to force you to buy a license, which you can now no longer buy even if you wanted to anymore.
Am just reading here a bit and saw the discussion about airfoil so googled it to read a bit what you guys are talking about. Then I found this one, maybe interesting for you I hope….
https://alternativeto.net/software/airfoil/?platform=windows
Thanks for the link, @emile.heilbron ! I have read that link you provided before and have tried all of the options they mentioned, but without much success for one reason or another. I have scoured the internet for a few days after I got the APP2 to find a workable solution but so far the only viable workaround for me is to use the VLC Streamer Helper on Windows. But like I said, this involves manual sync’ing what you’re watching on Windows VLC to what’s streaming on the iPhone VLC Streamer and if you have frequent interruptions when you watch, it makes the manual sync’ing again after each interruption annoying. But it’s still worth it for me because the audio experience I get from the APP2 is rewarding enough to put up with that workaround.
I’d be very interested in hearing if anyone has found another viable and more easy solution to stream audio from Windows to iPhone beside Airfoil and VLC.
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Just to square off on this topic as @WhiteHat indicated above, I just got my (bought used but new to me) iPhone 12 Pro Max today on iOS 16.2, and I was able to find this pair of Airpods Pro 2 from this iPhone set up with my Apple ID just fine. In the APP2 menu in Settings, I can enable the Find My Network then click in Show In Find My below it. This feature was not available in iOS 15.7.1 in my older iPhone 7 Plus.
As for the “hook” that @WhiteHat mentioned in the above post, meaning the attachment of my APP2’s serial number to the Apple ID on the store iPhone that I was playing with, I really don’t know if “that” hook is still there, and now there’s a second hook created between my APP2 and my own iPhone 12. Or if “that” hook never took place, thereby allowing me to create my own hook now.
It’s not clear to me if there’s any exclusivity to a “hook” such that you have to remove that hook first before you can hook it to another iPhone/Apple ID (meaning I’d have to return to the store to unhook), or if there’s no exclusivity, and you can have as many hooks between the same APP2 and multiple iPhones that you pair with or not. If the later, then not removing the hook with the Apple store’s Apple ID may not be a big deal, as long as you can still hook it in with your own iPhone to be able to find it if you lose it later on.
The only inconvenience I can see is if the owner of the store’s Apple ID can try to “find” my APP2 whenever they want, and they can choose to “ping” it by creating a loud sound through the ear buds to try to locate it, which can be annoying if I happen to be wearing it at the time. If that’s the case, then I’d have to take some remedy, like resetting my APP2. But I read somewhere that resetting your APP2 can make it lose the ability to hook with any iPhone anymore, and therefore lose its Find My functionality for good. I really don’t know if there’s any truth to it or not. Maybe somebody with a much better understanding of how all this Find My for the APP2 works can chime in and comment on this?
Perhaps @WhiteHat)?
Only one AppleID can claim the airpods. If you had the option to turn on findmy, then you didn’t do it in the store’s phone. When my son still had findmy turned on for his airpods, I didn’t even see the option. It was there after he turned it off. I claimed them to keep findmy turned on in case I leave them somewhere. I had a trip into Boston last week, and I was pretty concerned.
Wishing my HA was back from Phonak already.
WH
Thanks for the clarification, @WhiteHat . OK, so now it makes sense because I didn’t actually play around with turning on the Find My to look for my APP2 using the store iPhone to locate my APP2 at all so it was never hooked. Whew…
@Volusiano
How did your story end with your Airpods Pro 2.
Which version of Airfoil did you use BTW, and you wanted it on Windows 11 wasn’t it…
Like I mentioned in my post #112 on this thread, I was able to get the retired Windows version of Airfoil to work for me, but it’s all for naught because this is only a trial version and they add significant noise to the audio after 10 minutes of use to force you to buy a license, which they won’t sell to you anymore because the Windows version has been retired. If you have a Mac, then you can buy a license for it to get it going. Do note, however, that there’s a lag in the audio played on the iPhone, so you’ll have to delay the video from the PC accordingly to sync up. Both VLC and YouTube does have an audio adjustment feature and I had to add -1 sec on VLC and -3 seconds on YouTube to sync up the audio and video. But @e1405 has a Mac and got the Mac version of Airfoil to work, but IIRC, he said that he found the Mac Airfoil to be gllitchy.
My workaround now is the approach I outlined in my post #95 on this thread → to use the VLC Streamer Helper on my Windows laptop and the VLC Streamer app on my iPhone. This approach requires you to sync up the audio that you hear from the iPhone to the video that you watch on the laptop. It’s fairly trivial to do once you’re used to it, but it’s an inconvenience because any interruption (pausing the video to do something else before resuming) would usually require a re-sync afterward. And it only works with watching videos with VLC. YouTube videos are no good with these apps. But usually, YouTube videos are mostly short and informational so a good audio experience is not required. For YouTube videos that require a good audio experience, like a music video or something, then I’d just watch it on my (used by new to me) iPhone 12 Pro Max which has a decent size screen for watching such things.
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yes, you are correct!