Apple Airpods Pro 10 months later - Hearing aid user's perspective

My son says they are v1. I had thought they were v2. But the 2 I saw was they were a second pair.

WH

This might be old, but even now the audiogram values has very minor changes.

Apple Airpods Pro only works for mild to moderate loss, but if you want to get enough boost volume (there is no settings for that in iOS settings or in health app), use 3rd party app called iHearit ‎iHearIt on the App Store, here you can manually enter dB values in this app. The trick is to input 10% more loss than your audiogram while entering dB values in the app, so that it will give you more gains.

I didn’t have to use iHearIt to enter my audiogram into the Apple Health app. You can just go to the iPhone Settings → Accessibility → Audio/Visual → Hearing Accommodations → Custom Audio Setup, and in there select a photo snapshot of your audiogram, and it’ll try to decipher it and enter the values into the Health app audiogram for you. The recognition software to decipher the photo of my audiogram is pretty dumb, so it was missing most of the data, and because of this, it asked me to manually fill in the missing data in the incomplete audiogram it came up with. So I did, and voila, got myself an audiogram in the Apple Health app.

Of course if you prefer to use the iHearIt app, that’ll work just fine, too. But it’s not a free app from what I understand.

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ya, thats right, i completely forgot it. You can just upload any image as audiogram to open into manually enter audiogram values.

@Volusiano and d_Wooluf:

I very much appreciated the discussion in the other AirPods thread, and I agree with you both: for people with moderate-plus losses, the Airpods in Transparency mode are not a substitute for prescription hearing aids and maybe not even a substitute for the better OTC hearing aids coming out now. They are better than no hearing device at all and could serve as backup aids while prescription aids were being serviced.

I got AirPods for listening to music, particularly at night in bed while my aids are recharging. At that they’re quite good, using an audiogram entered on the iPhone. It is annoying that Apple insists on using the Health app for this feature, which as Volusiano said has never been available for iPad, which I get in the sense that one is not going to count steps with an iPad they way they might with an iPhone. Storing the audiogram in the Health app should only be an option, not a requirement for using an audiogram to adjust sound in AirPods.

However the iPad can do Custom Audio Setup under Headphone Accomodations as seen in the link below. Custom Audio Setup isn’t quite as good as entering the audiogram, but it’s pretty good and sounds much better than not making any adjustment for people with significant hearing losses.

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When I couldn’t enter the audiogram in the Custom Audio Setup, it gave me an option to go through some kind of A/B comparison to get some kind of customized setup, but it’s still very much out of your control in terms of trying to dictate how you want it to be other than A is better than B, etc. You can also choose between Balanced Tone, Vocal Range or Brightness if you don’t want or have the Audiogram option.

For someone with a severe hearing loss in the mids and highs like I do, I don’t find any of the options outside of the Audiogram option to be helpful for me. But for someone with a milder hearing loss than mine, then I guess some of the other non-audiogram options may be helpful and better than nothing for them.

The more and more I use the AirPods Pro 2 to watch movies and YouTube videos and music, the more and more I appreciate not missing out on the bass like before with streaming using my hearing aids. It’s possible to do dual Bluetooth transmission on my previous Samsung Note 8 phone so that you can wear a RIC and still stick an AirPod bud on the outside to be able to experience the best of both worlds, the clarity from the HAs and the ooomp of the bass from the AirPods. Unfortunately the audios between these 2 BT streams are not in sync. Only if the phone mfgs can get smarter and allow you to adjust one of the 2 streams to get both sync’ed up with each other, then you’d no longer need the audiogram accommodation from the AirPods to get the best of both worlds. However, the spatial audio is another almost must-have feature once you get spoiled by it. The combined HA and AirPod experience may water down the spatial sense if the highs are not strategically set at the intended locations anymore.

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