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Crossfeed for hearing loss

post #1 of 4
Thread Starter 

I know crossfeed has been explained ad naseum on these forums but I haven't seen anyone ask this specific question:

 

I have asymmetrical hearing loss - I hear very well with my left ear but my hearing spectrum in my right ear drops dramatically after 6KHz to almost nothing at 8KHz.  I have been to various audio- and otolaryngo-logists and have been cleared of any pathological reasons for the situation.  After I realized I definitely can't hear some of my favorite music in that ear, I always feel like I'm missing something.  After some research, I discovered crossfeed and want to maximize my use of it.  I've used Foobar to resample music and would like to figure out an optimal crossfeed filter to apply to all the music that I'll enjoy through headphones.  What crossfeed settings would be most likely to allow my good ear to hear what my bad ear does not?  I'd rather not go totally mono if I can avoid it.

 

Thanks.

post #2 of 4

I’m afraid I can’t help you to solve this but what you need is a kind of combination of two existing technologies.
Room-correction – this alters the frequency response of a system. This can be used to boost anything above 6 kHz so can extend the hearing a bit at the bad ear.
Cross-over: normally used to split the audio between a woofer and a tweeter so anything > 6 or 8 kHz should be split and feed into the good ear.
This preserves the stereo image as much as possible

Then a mixer to combine the signal to to good ear with the > 8kHz of the other.
Maybe cascading a couple of VST plugins can do the job.
 


Edited by Roseval - 12/16/11 at 10:36am
post #3 of 4

I have a similar situation with you. I have some (about 7 dB at 8KHz) hearing loss to my right ear. 

I am always frustrated by the stereo image that I am hearing. I always tend to tilt the balance of the sound volume to the right with the balance knob. Unfortunately it seems that the value of tilting needed is not constant, but depends of the song!

 

I do not see how crossfeed  can help us. I think that frequency equalization with different settings for each ear is the answer to our problem. I have try the FABfilter proQ plugin (there is a free trial) because it has the capability of different equalization settings for each channel.

 

Unfortunately, I have discover that just applying the boost that (in theory) I need (7dB at 8KHz) tilts the stereo image to the right! It seems that my auditory system is compensating some of the hearing loss I have. So I experimented with various settings and I found that about 3dB is the best compromise. 

Even with this setting stereo image is not always centered. 

 

Hope that it helps...

post #4 of 4

Might be volume related as the sensitivity of our hearing alters with the loudness.

 

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Maybe you should try to generated an equal loudness contour of your hearing and use a parametric equalizer to generate a target curve.

It is possible that the bands of the EQ you are using are too broad.


Edited by Roseval - 12/18/11 at 1:29pm
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