Yeah, I’m not a musician per se. I played trombone from age 10 to age 34, but realized I really don’t have that kind of talent. But I have worked with sound systems since about age 15, I have built recording studios, I was into speaker building as a hobby, I have run live sound most of my adult life, until I started losing my high frequency hearing response. I have a 4-year degree in electronics and a masters in computer science from California Polytechnic.
I’ve been somewhat surprised that I haven’t found anything in internet searching relating to hearing aid needs of musicians and audio engineers. None of the promotional materials that I’ve seen have any mention whatever of our needs. It’s all about speech intelligibility, and maybe mention that there is a “music” program you can switch to, but no indication of what that means. Forum discussions sound mostly like laments.
I see a market niche waiting to be filled. If a manufacturer would sell an OTC hearing aid with a mobile app that gives the same controls that a live sound engineer has on his console – real-time spectrum analysis, 1/3 octave band EQ, parametric EQ, compression on multiple frequency bands – as soon as the word got out it would be an instant hit and they would sell thousands.
Another feature that would make them even more desirable would be frequency response down to 30Hz on the low end. That would take multiple drivers similar to what you find in in-ear monitors. I noticed in my KZ-ZST’s, the high frequency transducers look just like hearing aid receivers.
I wonder if the hearing aid industry even has a notion of how many old rock and roll musicians and sound engineers have blown out their hearing (that would not be me), and even those that have tried hearing aids mostly just leave the volume cranked up rather than try to deal with hearing aids.