[tfunk182]

My left ear is drastically worse than my right ear, which makes the stage seem to be farther right that it should. Do you guys tune for hearing loss? And if so do you still eq to match and just make up the difference with volume?

 

[ckirocz28]

My left ear is drastically worse than my right ear, which makes the stage seem to be farther right that it should. Do you guys tune for hearing loss? And if so do you still eq to match and just make up the difference with volume?

Hearing loss is different from person to person, including frequencies affected.
I have no noticeable hearing loss, but, if I did, you'd better believe I'd tune to compensate for frequency and level.
When I was a teenager I met a deaf guy that had a seriously badass sound system, so he could feel the music.

 

[bbfoto]

My left ear is drastically worse than my right ear, which makes the stage seem to be farther right that it should. Do you guys tune for hearing loss? And if so do you still eq to match and just make up the difference with volume?

Get a professional audiologist to test your hearing and plot the amplitude response and deficiencies of each ear. This is usually covered under most health insurance plans to obtain hearing aides, etc.

FYI, There was recent paper published of studies & experiments done at MIT that developed a successful way to help regrow the cilia (tiny hairs) inside your inner ear to improve your hearing. Also, Lou Ferrigno (the OG "INCREDIBLE HULK") recently had successful surgery that restored his hearing. There is a YouTube video of this.

You can also go to the "Audio Tests" page at the link below and conduct your own hearing test.

Free Online Audio Tests, Test Tones and Tone Generators

Tests your audio equipment, speakers, room acoustics and hearing. Audio signals and test tones playable online. High resolution sound test files available for free download.

www.audiocheck.net

They also provide all types of excellent test tone tracks. IIRC you need to contribute or donate ~$20 or more to access some of the tests and test tones, but they are well worth it! This is a professional site.

Audio Tests

Test your audio equipment online. Check for frequency response, dynamic range, stereo imaging and more!

www.audiocheck.net

This will tell you how far down your hearing is at each 1/3rd octave frequency in each ear so you can compensate more accurately.

The problem is, if you compensate for one ear that is much worse than the other, the amplitude response will be way off for your better ear. When listening to loudspeaker systems, we cannot isolate each ear from each speaker, and there is your HRTF as well.

So unfortunately, without always using closed-back headphones, IEMs, or modern "tunable" hearing aides in each ear, it's almost impossible to properly compensate for the individual FR differences of each ear.

Your hearing loss usually happens at a slow pace as you age (unless you've had some type of rapid & significant loud noise/ear trauma), and your brain will try to compensate for the differences (as much as it can).

So, young lads, TAKE CARE OF YOUR EARS while you still can!

 

[oabeieo]

@bbfoto is exactly right

i had a older guy bring in what was just like a cal file from his audiologist… I thought it was a complete joke….

I built the offset…. He said it was amazing….

the catch , to this day , I have no idea if it was imaging properly…. All I did was change my mic cal file and convolve it with the mic cal I had and set L and R separate based off what his left and right ear responses were

so as far as the phase goes and how good or diffuse his center was…. Haha … no clue… he said it was good , but he was a old man and probably didn’t know what he was sayin, I do remember simply running out of headroom at 6.3k on one side and had to just scrap that portion of the correction, maybe if he had high output horns it would have worked…. But for the most part I think it went ok

would be super cool to do it on someonethat knows to do it on themself and post the results
I would absolutely love feedback on that

 

[bbfoto]

@bbfoto is exactly right

i had a older guy bring in what was just like a cal file from his audiologist… I thought it was a complete joke….

I built the offset…. He said it was amazing….

the catch , to this day , I have no idea if it was imaging properly…. All I did was change my mic cal file and convolve it with the mic cal I had and set L and R separate based off what his left and right ear responses were

so as far as the phase goes and how good or diffuse his center was…. Haha … no clue… he said it was good , but he was a old man and probably didn’t know what he was sayin, I do remember simply running out of headroom at 6.3k on one side and had to just scrap that portion of the correction, maybe if he had high output horns it would have worked…. But for the most part I think it went ok

would be super cool to do it on someonethat knows to do it on themself and post the results
I would absolutely love feedback on that

Yes, the Audiologist saves your Left & Right ear cal files so they can be loaded into the hearing aide's DSP/EQ. My father had this done with his "high tech" hearing aids and it made a significant difference. Some also have frequency-specific and directional phase cancellation to block annoying ambient background noise and/or noise specific to your work environment. But this is done to improve speech intelligibility, not so much for music listening.


A link to the Lou Ferrigno story...

The Story Of Hulk Star Lou Ferrigno's Hearing Loss And How He Got It Back - Grunge

Lou Ferrigno has lived the vast majority of his life coping with the challenges of hearing loss, until a cochlear implant turned that life around.

www.grunge.com

And to the MIT regenerative ear cilia article...

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

The MIT spinout Frequency Therapeutics uses a new kind of druggable regenerative therapy that targets progenitor cells to create hair cells of the inner ear and reverse hearing loss.

news.mit.edu

 

[daloudin]

@bbfoto is exactly right

i had a older guy bring in what was just like a cal file from his audiologist… I thought it was a complete joke….

I built the offset…. He said it was amazing….

the catch , to this day , I have no idea if it was imaging properly…. All I did was change my mic cal file and convolve it with the mic cal I had and set L and R separate based off what his left and right ear responses were

so as far as the phase goes and how good or diffuse his center was…. Haha … no clue… he said it was good , but he was a old man and probably didn’t know what he was sayin, I do remember simply running out of headroom at 6.3k on one side and had to just scrap that portion of the correction, maybe if he had high output horns it would have worked…. But for the most part I think it went ok

would be super cool to do it on someonethat knows to do it on themself and post the results
I would absolutely love feedback on that

Yes - I can atest to the fact that making frequency specific adjustments for LvR hearing loss causes "smearing" of the image. And based on the percentage of the overall Soundstage within the spectrum that's boosted can make it sound like the tweeter on one side of the car totally shuts down at times.

My tinnitus and 8kHz + hearing loss is worse in my left ear and when my system was one seat tuned I spent hours going through tones and specific sounds (like a high hat or cowbell) to get the high frequencies leveled out from side to side (sail panel tweets aimed at center dome light) only to find out that it made instruments and vocals with abundant high frequency content wander in the image and caused an overall loss of coherency to the staging. Repeating familiar sections of favorite tracks and test tracks would not even create consistent results.

After talking to my audiologist about the situation he theorized that I was confusing a brain that had taken decades to learn how to compensate for my progressive hearing loss by artificially boosting things that were then reflecting around inside the car (and HRTF) to my good ear and causing my brain to try and relearn everything. Furthermore, he postulated, that we all listen to music in different ways. Some listen to the lyrics and couldn't tell you if there were any guitars in the mix whereas some would listen to the instruments and couldn't tell you the lyrics and that this translated into things about how we listened between highs and lows. Some required high frequency content in order to maintain intelligibility while others were more likely to 'feel' music (regardless of volume) and needed less to achieve the same level of engagement. All of that to say that his recommendation was to keep the energy and frequency content as equal as possible from L to R in the car so that the image would be faithful to what the studio intended.

Thus my daily tune is now a 4 seat average that has virtually no EQ (still experimenting with crossovers) and is much more enjoyable with a cohesive and repeatable stage and things are anchored in the image.

It was an interesting experiment but ultimately left me with tremendous ear fatigue and nearly made me want to chuck the entire system. Starting over and going back to the basics kept me in the hunt though...

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

 

[tfunk182]

I had a stapedectomy 6 weeks ago to treat otosclerosis but so far haven’t improved any yet. Hopefully I will within the next couple months but I’m not betting on it. I was actually better off before the surgery because now louder sounds are distorted but that is supposed to get better as it heals.

 

[oabeieo]

That’s crazy….. it’s so intresting because I have a decent (being modest) size clientele, and a fair share are older doods that have hearing issues

not only could I help them but it’s a untapped hi-Rez market. If I could figure out how to make the amplitude adjustments and somehow validate, maybe with test tracks and have the customer sit and tell me if imaging is proper…. It would be cool to know from Analysis if it’s going to have good imaging

i think I could almost get some hearing Dr’s on board and create a referral program

ppl with hearing loss I bet would love to hear there music normal again. Wouldn’t that be something if we could figure out how exactly to do it and make it repeatable….

and what you guys are saying makes a lot of sense , especially long term degradation and then all of a sudden hearing normal probably would take getting used to…. Or if like you said there brain is rewired in a way that makes it difficult…. Interesting to say the least.

I’m going to spend some time on these link you all shared….. this is a suprisingly good topic…

my co worker wears an aid like you also said , and he has a ear eq from his phone , can focus in on long distance speech…… man, to adapt some of this into audio system performance seems a lot of possibilities

 

[daloudin]

That’s crazy….. it’s so intresting because I have a decent (being modest) size clientele, and a fair share are older doods that have hearing issues

not only could I help them but it’s a untapped hi-Rez market. If I could figure out how to make the amplitude adjustments and somehow validate, maybe with test tracks and have the customer sit and tell me if imaging is proper…. It would be cool to know from Analysis if it’s going to have good imaging

i think I could almost get some hearing Dr’s on board and create a referral program

ppl with hearing loss I bet would love to hear there music normal again. Wouldn’t that be something if we could figure out how exactly to do it and make it repeatable….

and what you guys are saying makes a lot of sense , especially long term degradation and then all of a sudden hearing normal probably would take getting used to…. Or if like you said there brain is rewired in a way that makes it difficult…. Interesting to say the least.

I’m going to spend some time on these link you all shared….. this is a suprisingly good topic…

my co worker wears an aid like you also said , and he has a ear eq from his phone , can focus in on long distance speech…… man, to adapt some of this into audio system performance seems a lot of possibilities

Agreed - and FWIW the effect at Low Level or background listening was wonderful but when raised to reference volume the reflections and refractions of a car interior were really the problem (and HRTF) whereas with hearing aids the normalization is isolated for the ear canal inserted in and not audible to the other ear. Still... would love to see someone be able to utilize the technology in car audio.