The human singing voice and the acoustic guitar primarily function in the 50-500hz range.
Most hearing aids don’t have much (if any) fine tuning for equalizer bands in this range.
What aid has the most control in that range?
Thanks,
Dave
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Most aids seem to start at 500 Hz to 6 or 8Khz. I doubt if you can find aids that can correct from 50-500 Hz. That is way too low for the tiny receiver to be able to deliver that kind of correction.
But I would say that the human voice and guitar have a range that extends way beyond 500Hz. So the hearing aid can still help a lot, depending on your loss.
Low E on a guitar is 82+hz, and an A on the fifth fret of the high E string is 440hz. Playing acoustic, most of my notes fall in that range, although it can go higher, but not “way beyond” (880hz would be an A on the 17th fret).
My vocal range encompasses most (not all) of that Low E to high A (fifth fret) range (G to G, 2 octaves up) and the female I sing with most often goes up higher, but again, not “way beyond”…
So a hearing aid devoted to fine control in the range of 50hz to 800hz would be extremely beneficial.
I think you’re talking about the pure tones. But there are harmonics and timbres from the guitar that also make guitar sounds pretty bright. Same with the human voice.
What I mean is take an equalizer and cut out all sounds above 500Hz and you’ll notice how dull your voice and your guitar would sound. OK for an acoustic guitar it may not be as dull, but hopefully you get the point.
Thank you.
I am not talking about deleting all the “normal” frequency ranges found on a hearing aid.
But I am talking about hearing aids made with a singer/musician in mind that have expanded fine tuning in the area I’m speaking of.
I just wonder if it - A. Could be done, and - B. Would help.
A. would involve testing the hearing at a more granular level in those areas, of course, so the technician would know where to fine tune the adjustments.
Does anyone know of hearing tests performed in that manner?
Thanks again!
We’ve had a few guitar players – acoustic and amplified. They’ve found ways to work with aids. Bernafon have been popular with musician in all forms. They use a program with no compression or extra processing when making music. A number of sound engineers too. Hopefully, some’ll show up and add to this.
Thanks. I worked with engineers at America Hears on my current, but old, CIC aids. I had them remove compression and active processing and it works great. Just that the aids are going to die one of these days.
Meanwhile, as I’ve gotten into Medicare years now, I decided to try a behind the ear hi Healthinnovations hearing aid. With Medicare plus through United Health, those only require a $330 copay. So I got one for the right ear and originally was going to return it. However I managed to speak directly with a tech who offered to create a program as described above. We are in the process of fine tuning that. If it works out, if nothing else, for $660 I can end up with a backup pair of hearing aids.
Ideally, I’ll eventually come up with the money to buy another set of CIC aids and go through the programming dance. I could get used to the annoying parts of BTE aids, and some aspects I actually like better. But I do prefer CIC.
It annoys me to no end that hearing aid prices remain so high, when everything else computer related has come down in price with progress in the field.
Thanks,
Dave
With the tiny receivers that hearing aids have to work with, I really doubt you’ll find a brand and model that can provide 40-50db boost at 50 Hz.
What I’ve been trying to say is that even if hearing aids can’t be of help to you at 50Hz, they’re still very helpful to you based on the loss that’s shown on your audiogram.
Your hearing loss can still sure use help at 500Hz and above. But to answer your questions, I’m not aware of any hearing aids that can provide the kind of correction at the kind of ranges you’re looking for. Maybe you will have better luck looking at PSAPs instead.
Thanks. I post this in Paul’s thread to which you linked:
I’ve been wearing hearing aids for 17 years now and learned a bit about them from the angle of a musician (singer/guitar+).
The programming away from the audiogram brings up the point I am still unclear about.
How best to capture as close as possible what my wonderful Martin guitars really sound like, relate that to my particular hearing loss, and create a program which will capture and reproduce that wonder sound accurately to me… Frustrating as it seems that there is really only one “REAL” EQ setting on an aid which would really realize that, for instance a 82hz low E string on my guitar - say I’ve lost 30 DB at that frequency, and lost only 20 DB at the G string 196hz frequency, but lost 35 DB at the high E string 330hz frequency.
It seems to me that, IF an aid could address those frequency bands (as we’d call them on the rack mount recording studio equalizer), there would only be one setting or curve if you like, which would accurately correct and boost the DB level for each of those frequencies to let me hear the guitar accurately again.
How far off base am I in that supposition?