Agree on bass. I don’t know whether it’s worth it but my headphones come with an equalizer function and a number of presets for the equalizer. I just leave the equalizer set at “FLAT”
Use ear bud tips on your HAs with a good seal and bass is very good.
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I have had Stax Electrostatic SR3 “Ear Speakers” for over 40 years and they still put out awesome sound. But headphones with this technology need a dedicated Electrostatic amplifier to drive them and the combination was dreadfully expensive! But once you slip them on your are taken to another world. I don’t know if anyone even makes electrostatic headphones any more, but for clear, transparent sound, there is nothing quite like them. Another great thing about these earphones is that the pads are covered with a special kind of leather that never wears out and never needs replacing.
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could you clarify do you use integrated equalizer or installed it separated, as a plug in or addon?
Just using the one that is in the music app.
I must have missed this comment in first participating in this thread. I accidentally added the Acoustic Phone program to my Quattro’s and sure enough, every time I put on my Surface Headphones over my HA’s, I activated the phone program because of the headphone magnets. Usually when I went into the Smart 3D app on my smartphone, I could switch the program back to the program that I really wanted to use with my headphones but after awhile I decided that I really had no use for the Acoustic Phone program since none of our regular cordless phones have enough magnetic flux to activate the program and so I just got rid of the phone program.
I see people have commented on headphones activating landline phone programs in threads here at least as far back as 2011 - so it’s something to look out for if you need a phone program but also want to wear headphones over your HA’s. You’d think in a HA app, they’d offer a way to turn the Phone program on or off - so it’s there when you want it but off if you want to use headphones, etc.
The suggestion to try before you buy is good. But please, in the interest of fairness and local businesses, buy where you try.
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I had this problem when I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 195 headphones. These headphones are the only ones that I have come across that are so powerful that even with “profound” hearing loss, I am still able to listen to voice and music clearly with my hearing aids removed. But with my hearing aids installed and the signal turned down a bit, I can also hear music and spoken word very clearly. I liked them so much I had my audiologist take the automatic triggering of the Telecoil function out and put in a separate program so that I could trigger it only by pushing the program button on my HAs.
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I have Bose QC35’s and they work pretty good.
I recently tried the new Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 (BT) at an airport accessory store and A/B testing them for fit and comfort, they felt better than my QC35’s. Felt like they had a bigger earcup footprint and it felt more comfortable than the QC35’s after 3 or 4 hours of in-flight usage.
Didn’t have a chance to really dig into the audio performance or figure out the Augmented Reality features.
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Hello Mark. Success, yes. Part of my day job involves checking quality of speech and occasionally music, Unassisted hearing aids are, of course, misleading at best. No bass, compressed etc.
So I use open backed headphones (Sennheiser HD580) on top of Phonak Naidas, switched to telecoil. The earmoulds have quite large vents, so I hear good bass and middle direct from the cans, and upper range from about 2k via the Naida’s prescribed boost.
I have experimented with just the headphones, adding EQ for more top end - but without dedicated dynamic control they can sound a bit painful. Don’t want to stress fragile ears!
I had better add to my post of today: apparently some hearing aids switch to telecoil when they sense the magnets in headphones. Might help, or might not if you preferred to use the mics so you could hear family etc.
Even some hearing aids like the ReSound Quattro’s, which don’t have telecoil functionality per se, give preference to the hearing aid near the receiver of a classic landline phone and have a “Phone Now” function that turns down the external mics exposed to the room environment on the other ear. I turned off the “Phone Now” function in the fitting software so it wasn’t activated by the magnets in my over-the-ear BT headphone “speakers” and one can ask one’s HCP if a similar OFF switch is available and/or under smartphone app control for one’s HA’s.
The funniest thing about Phone Now is that at one point ReSound actually provided a small disc-shaped magnet in the product box and instructed the new user to glue/tape the magnet in the vicinity of the phone receiver on the touchscreen of your smartphone!!! Talk about people worrying about bezels, camera/speaker notches, … and now you want them to glue a magnet to the face of the phone!!!
I was disappointed. I didn’t find a magnet when I first opened the Quattro box in October, 2018. I think some provider on the forum (Um_bongo?, Neville?, …) mentioned that they and other providers were simply removing the magnet before handing over the HA’s to the new user as it just confused new users. But maybe ReSound finally wised up and realized that the idea of taping a magnet onto your $1K beautiful smartphone screen is a bit ludicrous unless you’re amongst the 10%, 5%, 0.1%??, that truly need this functionality…
Oh dear! I wouldn’t want to be without a coil. Desktop telephone receivers don’t reproduce very well as you’ll know: magnetic pickup is far cleaner. And coil is needed for loops in theatres, retail checkouts etc.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind sticking magnets any old where if it helped to hear! But surely a push switch works well enough for the occasional call.
OTH, if you can stream the phone call directly to your HA’s, it can be a lot clearer that trying to listen to it through a classic landline because, if necessary, you can turn off your external HA mics entirely-does telecoil functionality typically do that? There have been whole threads on this forum on how to set up a classic landline or a PBX phone (think I recall) to stream directly to one’s HA’s. Don no longer seems to be with us, unfortunately (hope COVID is not involved) but if I recall correctly, he was one of the forum experts on getting BT streaming from classic landline phones. I may be exaggerating but usually telecoil is not in the main model of most HA brands these days - you have to buy a special model that has it and takes a larger battery (usually) because telecoil functionality costs HA battery, whereas BT LE is more energy-efficient so there is an advantage there - and with the ReSound Quattro’s and a Multi -Mic, I can have telecoil whenever I want it for churches, auditoriums, etc., without taxing my HA’s any more than with BT streaming as the telecoil pickup in in the Multi Mic so the cost of the telecoil comes at the expense of the battery there, not the batteries in my HA’s, particularly.
Hi. I have good success with semi open superlux hd681 headphones. I use them for playing guitar along to cd’s / apple music and they do the trick pretty nicely (and only £25 too).
I turn on the music programme on my aids have them set at normal volume.
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Thankyou, Jim. I had to Google BTLE - Bluetooth Low Energy! The very latest thing.
I have no Bluetooth of any kind and hesitate because with music my priority (and pipe organ, at that!) I’m not sure that HA transducers are really up to the task. Maybe I am wrong about that?
Currently I listen to music playback through big speakers and subs, with earmoulds slightly dislodged to let the bass squeeze past. Guess I could not involve Bluetooth in that mixture because of processing delay.
Yes, there are one or more threads on the forum about how true music aficionados prefer music through headphones or big speaker systems vs. hearing aids. Sound is not one-dimensional, though, and there are many aspects to listening via BT in a battery-limited device. d’ Wooluf is nurturing a thread devoted to the forthcoming promise of Bluetooth Low Energy Audio, which is something entirely different from plain old BT LE (the people who cooked up the nomenclature are crazy!). LE Audio and the Future of Hearing
The BT SIG site has a link to a blog post (from another website) on BT LE Audio that makes it sound like the technology is going to solve every problem known to man: Bluetooth LE Audio: Where Innovation, Market Needs and Inclusiveness Converge - Imagination (imaginationtech.com) Edit: Sorry! The link on the BT Sig site is to another website, imaginationtech.com)
The How To Geek site, which usually has very good information, has a post from earlier this year laying out why BT LE Audio is important. They might have it a bit wrong, my understanding is that with BT LE Audio you can either get much longer battery life in your listening device or if you are willing to sacrifice battery life, a higher bitrate and better audio than with the classic SBC BT codec - but I may have it wrong and perhaps BT LE Audio can’t do aptx audio, which is the best audio codec? Someone like @d_Wooluf would have to straighten my meandering vague understanding here out: The How To Geek article claims classic high-bitrate BT audio is still likely to be better sound fidelity than the upcoming LE Audio standard: What Is Bluetooth LE Audio, and Why Will You Want It? (howtogeek.com)
Latency is all relative - if there is no video to compare it, too, and all your audio is coming from the same source any built-in latency shouldn’t be a problem. BT devices using the proprietary Qualcomm aptx protocol can have latencies as low as about 50 ms, about the range that humans can’t detect the latency, but I don’t know of any HA’s that support that protocol. The Phonak Paradise HA’s?
Edit_Update: BT SIG comparison of SBC (classic BT audio) to LC3 (LE Audio codec)
The speaker says a 5.0 rating is PERFECT audio reproduction, 4.0 is excellent, so the LC3 audio quality is supposed to be very high indeed at a reproduction rate of 1.5 Mbps uncompressed sound. From third video down to the right on following page: LE Audio and the Future of Hearing | Bluetooth® Technology Website
@ellisonvoice See also the review, too, from the NY TImes Wirecutter. The writer claims that the innards of the sound equipment that you’re using make more difference than any audio codec to the listening sound quality What You Really Need to Know About Bluetooth Audio | Wirecutter (nytimes.com)
The longer battery life is pretty much given I think. About double what you get with Classic Audio/SBC. With bitrate, it’s not so much about more or less but about how much bang you get for your bitrate buck. There’s a graph that shows subjective ratings of audio quality for LC3 and SBC at increasing bit-rates. You can find it here: LE Audio | Bluetooth® Technology Website. LC3 at low bitrate (apparently) sounds better than SBC at more than double the bit-rate. I suspect that you and I probably couldn’t tell the difference. I also suspect that audiophiles with golden ears would turn their noses up at both.
It will be like Classic Audio. There is one mandatory codec (LC3) but other codecs can be added. So, I’d say AptX almost certainly.
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Hello, d_Wooluf. With apologies, I’m trying to answer Jim here but can’t induce the site to do it. So…
Hello Jim. Brilliant information again, thankyou. All followed up. The Wirecutter/NYT A/B music test shows up the shortcomings of mp3 compared with wav (apparent enough run through AptX, which probably confirms that’s a good codec just as you say), though I would hope that hearing aid developers will trial more challenging music than that.
Classical music, piano in particular, seems extra vulnerable when it comes to lossy encoding - detail in the low-level ‘shadows’ falls away into a crumble. It’s slight these days but always there. Sorry to ‘turn up my nose’ but I remember truly perfect analogue FM from the BBC before anything at all, studio links and recording included, changed to digital!
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Just to be clear, I hadn’t been following the discussion between you and Jim. That phrase wasn’t uttered with you in mind.
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