Music Quality: Hearing aids or alternatives?

We have a lot of discussion on the forums about the poor music quality of hearing aids. I recently got a pair of wired earbuds for less than $15 after reading Consumer Reports reviews. Plugged into my smartphone, they sound really good to me. Admittedly, they’re not tuned to my hearing loss, but I could remedy much of that with an equalizer app. If you like listening to music, I wouldn’t count on your hearing aids to give you listening pleasure, but they’re plenty of inexpensive alternatives.

I get very good results from using my Roger System. I use music Roger program and it sounds much better then a standard Roger program.

I’m a huge music enthusiast, and listen to music hours a day, while at home, walking around town, sitting outside a coffee shop sipping and reading. At home of course i had a system with excellent speakers, outside it was high quality earbuds. When I got my first aids I tried to stream to them, with limited success due to the small speakers (receivers) and lack of bass, and not good reproduction of mid to high ranges.

My Costco fitter was great at trying to help. He increased the bass in the Music program, increased bass boost in the Phone Clip+. gave me bass domes (I was correctly fitted with open domes due to my loss), and some test bass domes a size larger for better occlusion. Still not content with the music sound, I tried some high quality over the ear noise cancelling headphones that would go over the hearing aids, thinking I would get the music bass to mid range notes direct and the highs restored by the HAs like I did with my home music system. What I got was horrendous feedback with my ears covered and sound reflecting out of my ears to the hearing aids. Ugh, back to more research.

I started with an Android phone and had so many frustrations with it and the Phone Clip+ that I finally tried an iPhone at the Apple Store, and bought one to test with a two week return window. The iPhone was much better for me, even though I did not like many aspects of the Apple Business Model, I was not going to spite myself to get the best hearing aid experience I could, so I bought one and Apple Watch. I never even looked at the Apple earbuds since every phone I ever bought came with low quality earphones. My beloved BT earbuds would not go into my ears, so after a month I looked in the box at the Apple earbuds to see how they worked.

Lo and behold, they sit in the outer ear with no interference with the hearing aids. I tried them for a day, and was pleased. I just don’t like dealing with the cord on earbuds, even though I did for many years starting with the Sony Walkman. Two day later I went back to Costco and bought the Apple Air Pods, and I have been completely satisfied with them.

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I have OPN miniRITE with open domes. I listen to music with over the ear headphones while wearing HAs and get great results. Kind of the best of both. I don’t get any feedback. Not so good with on the go listening, but still worlds better than streaming music.

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The Quattro sounds very good…better than any other for streaming…that said, it still isn’t as good as a good set of headphones or buds. The Westone earbuds are simply awesome. FYI, Westone also makes molds.

I have had similar experiences with trying to get “bose quality sound” from my expensive hearing aids. It does not exist. I currently use inexpensive earbuds to listen to music, etc. when I work out in the morning. The mp3 app I use has an equalizer (minimal) and I set the treble up to its highest setting - this allows me to hear speech. I wonder if there is an app that could be set to an audio profile (like a HA) and be used to filter ALL audio from my android phone. Is there such an app?

I don’t know what kind of android phone you have, but Samsung has some sort of equalizer app built in. It’s called Sound Assistant. If you have a Samsung Galaxy, it might be worth looking into.