Hello,
I have just started using a hearing aid and am discovering a new world but…
I have also always loved music and if I were to count the number of headphones I own, it would be too many…
I understand that a hearing aid focuses on speech, clarity and hearing comprehension and I can of course take out my hearing aids and listen to music as I always did, with headphones.
But to be honest, I was a bit disappointed with how bad streamed music sounds in my Phonak Lumity and I am now wondering if there is a hearing aid that understands when I’m listening to streamed music and can adjust my hearing aid so that the sound is not focused on speech and clarity?
Quite simply, is there any brand of hearing aid that can deliver a little more “hi-fi feeling” in the sound image?
Or are all sound membrane/driver in hearing aids simply not made to deliver music like a pair of headphones or in-ear buds?
Music is so much better with the activevents. Do you know if your loss is compatible with the activevents? They should be an easy and quick change to your receivers. I love mine, no going back if I can help it.
WH
You don’t post your audiogram in your profile so we have no idea what kind of hearing loss you have in order to respond more appropriately.
It’s not so much about hearing aids focusing on speech over sound quality, but it’s more about the inability of a tiny little receiver to pump out big voluminous bass sounds compared to headphones or even earbuds. It’s just a limitation of physics. When you listen to music over loudspeakers, the low bass sounds travel through the air to your ears so you hear all of this and don’t miss out on it. The hearing aids just amplify the mids and the highs where it can do a better job, and the lows are heard mostly from the loudspeakers and not enough from the hearing aids due to the receiver size limitation.
But for streaming content, there’s no loud booming bass sound coming from the loud speakers through the air to your ears. There’s only weak bass sound coming from the tiny little receivers to your ears. On top of that, if you have wide open vent due to a mild ski slope hearing loss, a lot of what little of that low bass produced by the tiny receivers are leaked out and lost before reaching your eardrums, making the sound even less “hifi”.
So your misunderstanding that hearing aids don’t sound “hifi” because they’re focused on speech clarity is misguided. None of them can produce the “hifi” sound like your countless headphones or earbuds in the first place, simply because they can’t physically reproduce the low sounds due to their tiny size.
If your hearing loss is ski slope and mild to moderate, you can try to use the Apple AirPods Pro 2 to see if it helps, because they now (have been for a while actually) do audiogram accommodation to compensate for your hearing loss. Don’t expect these AirPods to sound as good as your hearing aids in the mids and highs, though, if you have moderate to severe hearing loss.
You can also just put your hearing aids in tcoil mode and wear any of your streamed headphones over them to retain that “hifi” sound. That’s they way it should be done normally if the hifi sound is desired.
I so appreciate you taking the time to write and explain, thank you.
And I am now also very curious about the potential of my hearing aids and maybe my audiogram can clarify what is possible or not for me.
But I also wonder, now that I read what you wrote again, about why I feel that the mids and the highs sound canned, almost with distortion and a lack of warmth and depth. Of course it’s hard for you to know why I experience it like that 
but I think you understand that my question is really about, is that’s how hearing aids sound!?
Lately I’ve been listening a lot to Sony’s In-ear: wf-1000xm4, which are not like Apple AirPods Pro 2 and lack some of Apple’s functions, but they have a Bypass to listen to conversation in a room.
I like their soundstage when I’m streaming music but not when I’m using the microphone to listen to conversations in a room.
Then it’s incredibly cool to discover how much of the mids and highs I haven’t actually heard… even though I feel the sound as tinny and not so nice.
Thanks for showing your audiogram. It’s better if you attach it to your profile like many of us do here, so that every post you make will have your audiogram accessible at all times, not just on an obscure single post you show it to in a single thread. As you can see, even that thread gets long enough, nobody can tell quickly what your audiogram looks like unless they scan through the entire (long) thread and happen to see your audiogram in a single post.
Anyway, it looks like you do have a typical ski slope loss with good low frequency hearing. So you most likely have open vent dome for your fitting, meaning that streaming low sounds amplified by the hearing aids receivers will leak out through your vent, making what is already a weak bass sound even weaker. This is consistent with your complaint about the lack of hifi quality.
The warmth of the sounds usually is mostly associated with the lows. There’s really no warmth on the mids and highs. There’s mostly clarity, sharpness, edginess, or tinniness in the mids and highs. So complaining about the lack of warmth on the mids and highs is not really applicable anyway.
As for the lack of depth in the mids and highs, that depends more on the “openness” of the soundscape that the hearing aids deliver to you. This “openness” usually includes sounds in the background, reverbation, subtle or not too subtle noises that the hearing aids may or may not let you hear. Oticon aids prescribe to the “open” paradigm and strives to let you hear many if not all of the sounds around you, even in its main default program, with minimal interference to try to subdue them too much. Therefore, you may feel more “depth” with Oticon hearing aids. You mention that you have the Phonak Lumity. I don’t know much about it, but you can try to see if you can get your HCP to set up a program for you that’s more open and less aggressive in subduing surrounding noises. Typically a Music program would tend to be more “open” compared to a speech in noise program or a Comfort program where external noises are subdued aggressively. But this is probably the lack of depth that you’re complaining about with regards to the mids and highs.
I have been very, very happy listening to lossless music with my decent over-the-ear cans & my music program that I tailored to my classical guitar. In all my experiments, that has been the best way to go so far: a big pair of quality cans on top of an “analog-mimicking” music program.
Excellent, as you can see am new to the forum but I will add my audiogram to my profile and a picture.
Yes I have a open vent dome.
I understand and your description sounds exactly right about the sound image, maybe I’m using the wrong words to describe what I hear and it could also be that I’m not used to my new sound image but I experience the sound almost broken.
If I change and raise the mid or high frequencies in a mixer or in software and listen in headphones or speakers, I don’t experience the same sharpness in the sound image, so I don’t think it’s because I’m not used to it.
Thanks again for your input, it helps me understand and search further. I will talk to my audiologist and try to get a chance to try some different settings and hopefully other brands as well.
I don’t know but wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a dedicated music program for streaming that compensates for the bass loss I get with open vent dome?
A program that raises the bass and also turns off the external microphones.
I know I won’t hear my surroundings but I don’t with my closed headphones either and sometimes that’s what I want when I listen to music.
As it is right now, I take off my hearing aids when I want to listen to music for an hour or two.
It’s a very good input and I have a pair of Bose QC and have been fiddling with the controls for a while but so far haven’t found the right setting.
But then I will continue testing and maybe even ask my audiologist for help with the fine-tuning. As it is now, I can’t access very many controls in the app. Just a 3-band EQ as an example.
Exactly, The way I do it, your first step would be tweaking a live music program in your hearing aid. There are plenty of info on this forum about programing for music.
First off, a correction now that your audiogram is more clear to me in your profile. You don’t really have a ski slope hearing loss. You have more of a “cookie bite” hearing loss, meaning that your loss is more in the mids and less in the lows and highs. Do note that cookie bite hearing losses are usually a little tougher to fit than the normal ski slope loss, specifically when it comes to speech clarity.
But since we’re not focusing about speech clarity in this discussion, but more about full spectrum high quality music type sound, it makes the discussion simpler here. I don’t think you have grasped well enough yet the idea of the physical limitation of the hearing aid’s receiver here, because you still seem to think that if you crank up the low frequency amplification much louder on the hearing aid’s receiver to make up for the low frequency leakage out of the dome’s vent, then it’ll sound better in the low frequencies for you.
The reality is that there isn’t enough low frequency amplification that can be delivered by the tiny little receivers to be had in the first place. All you can do is to plug up the vent in the dome (maybe using ear plugs) to be able to prevent what little there is of the amplified low sounds from escaping. And even without any of the amplified low sounds escaping, it’s still nowhere enough lows for you to be happy enough with it to call the streaming music “hifi”. You’d be lucky enough already that there’s even a little bit of bass that can be reproduced and heard to make speech sound OK, let alone to expect to be able to hear any low thumping type bass music reproduction, like of the bass drum or full sounding bass guitar.
The obvious analogy to the small hearing aid’s receiver size is the speaker on your smart phone. Not even the speakerphone that you can share to be heard by people around you, but the speaker on the top of the smart phone that you’d have to press against your ear to hear the caller in private. Would you expect to be able to hear hifi quality music out of it? If not, then the hearing aid’s receiver is at best only able to deliver that kind of sound quality, if not even that. You’re never going to get any kind of thumping bass sound out if either one of them, no matter how much you can crank up the volume to make up for any amount of leakage.
By the way, you can mute your mics (in any program) when streaming audio to your hearing aids. There’s no need to have a special program to do that.
Just my own 2-cents’ worth here: I have Phonak Lumity Life aids and have had a special “Music” program added to the line-up. I put my aids into “Music” if I’m listening to the hifi at home or at a concert, etc.
Thing is, it will increase the dynamic range, so there is less compression/distortion. Granted, my audiogram is flat as a snake’s belly, but I find that music sounds RICH and FULL with my Phonak Lumity Life aids - even if I’m just streaming Quboz or ROON tunes through my cell phone.
Have you looked into getting a dedicated “Music” program set up on your aids?
I just want to qualify some things here just so that it’s clear what we’re talking about here:
Rich and full music implies different things to different people. In general rich and full can apply to any frequency range. Listening to a streaming content of classical music full of violins and wind instruments (like flutes and clarinets, for example), many of which sound components take up most of the mid and high frequency regions, that’s rich and full for sure. And the hearing aids can deliver this.
But if you listen to a streaming rock music content via hearing aids with heavy emphasis on the bass guitar and heavy thumping drum kicks, low booming tomtoms, along with guitars and keyboards and vocals, etc, sure, it’s also rich and full of sounds as well, but it’ll still be distinctly lacking in the fulfilling low frequencies of the heavy bass thumping, drum kicking components that you’d expect to hear from a rock band.
So while you can call a musical experience rich and full, it’s still not FULL RANGE HIFI per se, unless it has the ability to deliver everything including the low frequency response that one is accustomed to getting when listening through a good set of headphones or even a pair of nice earbuds, in addition to the full range of mid and high sounds. And we all know that hearing aids simply cannot deliver adequate low frequency response for a full range of hifi music, simply because the receivers are tiny.
Using a highly customized built-in Music program is not going make up for this low frequency inadequacy.
My 2 cents here. For a good music (classical + soft rock) experience I listen to CDs using Bose QC25 headphones and a Sony CD Walkman (one of of the models with a quality sound reproduction output).
I remove my Widex hearing aids first as I consider they cause distortions/problems to the sound with their internal processing I have removed their hearing aid Music program after reading a technical report on the program’s behaviour wrt audio reproduction.
The OP says that they have " Sony’s In-ear: wf-1000xm4" headphones. The Sony smartphone app for these headphones has a equalizer feature so a user can program the headphones to provide some compensation for their hearing loss at higher frequencies (similar to what people do with Apple Airpod Pros). This is an option that the OP may like to explore?
Currently I am searching on the secondhand market for one of the high-end Sony CD Walkmans that has inbuilt parametric equalisation + high quality sound reproduction so I can apply the approach of equalization to compensate for my mild high frequency hearing loss.
PS Sony Discman/CD Walkmans vary by model as regards their headphone sound reproduction quality - from poor to very good.
Yes, thanks for clarifying! I should also add that with my hearing, “rich and full” would be way different than that for my hubs, who doesn’t need hearing aids. I often wonder what he’d think if he put my aids ON and heard music, speech, et al, through that filter.
But! I do have to say that whether I’m streaming music or hearing it on our home hifi, it is noticeably better with these Phonak Lumity Life aids than even the Marvels of 4 years ago. 
It’s like everything is relative.
I can commiserate with your predicament. I’m also a music lover, and have run the gamut of tweaks, and tunings.
As @WhiteHat suggested, ask your audi about the Active Vents. Also have the Phonak Manual Music program enabled for starters.
If your wish is to stream “Hi-Fi”, you are facing a real challenge, as @Volusiano shared, those receivers are only able to go down to 125Hz.
My 1st work around was to add all the bass boost in the streaming program for my HAs. Your audi can do this in Target.
If the Active Vents don’t do the job of giving you enough seal, try wadding up some cotton, and stuffing it behind the earmolds. Mute the mics, and you’ll get some Bass.
I decided that I preferred to remove my aids, and use my Etymotic ER3SE IEMs with Shure Olive foam eartips.
For my loss, no EQ needed, for you probably a lot in the mids, and lower treble region.
If you use a PC there are some good Parametric EQs. On Android, Wavelet has great options, you can customize.
My other solution is a pair of Sennheiser HD 6XX Over Ear cans with my HAs in Music Program, running off my PC’s Xonar Essence STX soundcard.
I now enjoy “HI-Fi”!!
Aha, thanks! I understand what you write but am not fully convinced about the possibility of making small receivers sound good. I see your point about the smart phone but don’t think it’s entirely fair as the small speaker for private calls is configured to handle low bandwidth phone calls and is meant to be on the outside of the ear, not inside the ear canal. Similarly, the speaker that makes others hear what is being said in the room is made to sound a lot with as much clarity as possible.
But I understand what you’re trying to demonstrate but don’t know if I’m convinced.
Small receivers can sound good and in Sony’s case the driver unit is a few millimeters big with a lot of bass.
in my world the limitation lies in how close to the eardrum you can get the element and how much of the leak you can prevent. Not in the receivers ability to produce full bandwidth sound.
Thanks for your input, i will ask my audionome for a dedicated Music program
I’m entirely happy with Music in my HA’s. I have Marvel M70’s with ear moulds. It brings back the hearing loss my guitar playing has given me. Recently, I purchased Paradise P90s, and they arrived with domes. Two weeks later, My Custom slim tip moulds arrived and were fitted.
The difference between domes and moulds was huge. With domes, you lose loads of bass and mids directly out of you ears, with the result of it sounding like an old transister radio. Custom moulds return it to a fuller spectrum. It returned the Paradise to the same as the Marvels.
I’ve also read that your cookie bite hearing loss is difficult to program.
Hope you get it sorted
Peter
TL;DR HAs are aids, focused on aiding speech, not a replacement for headphones/earbuds/IEMs. I have trialed Lumity, Paradise and Moment and streaming is the same.
In my experience, the best solution for a hi-fi feeling is to use your headphones while wearing the hearing aids, or remove the HA and equalize your headphones’ sound against your audiogram.
…are all sound membrane/driver in hearing aids simply not made to deliver music like a pair of headphones or in-ear buds?
Yes, the industry is very much focused on speech and intelligibility. So much so the HAs specifications top out at 10KHz, they internally operate up to 8KHz, and streamed audio to HAs is resampled accordingly. The streamed audio the HAs receive is a low resolution second generation copy of the music. The Android spec is a 16KHz sampling rate and iPhone sounds about the same… basically, like FM radio quality, with little-to-no harmonic detail and capped at 8KHz.
Music modes, changes to mold/dome types, venting, etc, are basically working towards getting your to custom IEM concept, but with the inherent bandwidth limitation and that same low 16KHz resampling rate.
To maximize the steaming capability I have found the following helps: The higher quality source the better, there’s a audible difference between free Spotify and a high-resolution file after the resampling.
- Experiment with modes, settings, and in-HA equalization using the HA app as you may find you need to make tweaks for different sources, content and listening levels. You can expect to need to fine tune depending on what your listening to; Daft Punk, Dire Straits, Saint-Saëns, etc
- A 3rd party equalizer, providing more channels and options can help.
Is there a brand that offers a more hi-fi feeling?
For streaming, no. (Other than models’ distortion specifications.) Despite that HAs can produce better clarity, the streaming 16KHz resampling rate is a hard limit. For live performance/in-air playback/over-the-ear headphones, yes. The standard in-HA digital to analog conversion sampling rate is, understandably, 20-24KHz for speech. There are better specs for sampling resolution and processing lag varies between brands/models
The Widex Moment models use a 32KHz sampling rate and that does make a noticeable difference for listening in-air and over-the-ear headphones. However, unlike your Phonak’s using BluetoothClassic, Moments use BluetoothLE (not the same as LE Audio capability) which is more limiting for connecting to phones, TV, receivers, etc.
I hope all that helps clarify what your experiencing. It’s probably not what you wanted to hear.
That’s perfectly fine. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You created the post to ask why hearing aids can’t give “hifi” quality sound, so I simply provided an explanation.
You seem to have the opinion that it’s because of the subpar settings in the hearing aids focused on speech clarity that is causing the lack of hifi level sound. Most hearing aids have a built-in Music program. If you try out their built-in Music program and you’re happy to accept it as hifi quality, then you will have answered your question in the first place, because the built-in Music programs in hearing aids are geared specifically for music listening and not speech clarity. You can try to customize your own, but why reinvent the wheel when the manufacturer has already done it for you and they’re the expert in their hearing aids.
But if you’re streaming music using the built-in Music program that the Phonak Lumity has, and you still find it not having enough hifi quality for your liking, especially on the bass end, then perhaps you’ll be more convinced of the limitation of the low frequency sound reproduction of the hearing aid’s receiver.
Of course the adequacy of the low frequency sound reproduction is purely subjective to personal opinions. It also depends a lot on the music content that you listen to, whether it has a lot of heavy, low frequency sounds or not. For me personally, I find the hearing aids’ low frequency sound reproduction very lacking for my taste and the kind of music I listen to.
Why other small receivers have good low frequency reproduction, but hearing aid receivers don’t? I don’t really know. My opinion is that receivers used in outside-the-canal earbuds, while they’re smaller than headphones’ speakers, are still of bigger size compared to inside-the-canal receivers used in hearing aids, hence they have better low frequency reproduction in comparison.