Myles
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2010
- Posts
- 6
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- 0
Greetings all!
I'm new to the forums so I hope to tread lightly in search of information and advise. Please point me in the right direction to look if you know of anything that might be applicable to this topic.
So I am a musician and with my band things are starting to take off, lots of live performances to come this year and this is all good stuff except that I am hard-of-hearing.
By this I mean, I wear hearing aids because my hearing loss is so severe I cannot hear anything under shouting volume level and even then it is pretty muffled. Hearing aids are my saving grace as with some pretty high powered Phonaks I am able to reset my basic hearing threshold so that face-to-face talking is possible albiet with a lot of lip-reading.
I've always been a musician though as long as I can remember, I love vibration and I love what small window of sound I am lucky enough to perceive.
I spoke to an audiologist recently and they recommended that maybe In Ear Monitors would be the best path for me to take for my rehearsals and live performances.
Hearing aids used to be little analog ampfliers around the time that I got my first pair 20 years ago but they've developed into little super computers that digitally compress and alter the frequencies to match my hearing loss. This is pretty good for speech however music greatly suffers.
An example might be that any high frequency sound that is deemed out of my audible range by a hearing test, get's harmonically shifted down into a lower octave that I would hear better but of course this makes music sound different and more muddy because there are more sounds competing for the same frequencies.
The hearing aids also distort quite easily at loud volumes so again I am dealing with a loss of clarity in many musical environments.
Turning to IEMs I have heard that the leading makers have started doing custom profiling of musicians hearing and creating a custom frequency response for them, i.e. boosting the mids if they have a mid frequency loss. I am very curious about this as it possibly represents a development that could help me out.
Another audiologist also recommended that I experiment with an outboard equalizer plus headphones, so I have some options there as well if the IEMs cannot go far enough.
My prime concern would be if there is enough gain and headroom coming out of the IEMs without distorting so that I would hear enough with my level of low and high frequency loss.
Would this mean I am looking at the higher end options?
Anyhow, I am fascinated by the whole emerging industry for custom IEM solutions so would appreciate any pointers or resources I could continue my research in this area regarding hearing loss!
Thanks for reading.
I'm new to the forums so I hope to tread lightly in search of information and advise. Please point me in the right direction to look if you know of anything that might be applicable to this topic.
So I am a musician and with my band things are starting to take off, lots of live performances to come this year and this is all good stuff except that I am hard-of-hearing.
By this I mean, I wear hearing aids because my hearing loss is so severe I cannot hear anything under shouting volume level and even then it is pretty muffled. Hearing aids are my saving grace as with some pretty high powered Phonaks I am able to reset my basic hearing threshold so that face-to-face talking is possible albiet with a lot of lip-reading.
I've always been a musician though as long as I can remember, I love vibration and I love what small window of sound I am lucky enough to perceive.
I spoke to an audiologist recently and they recommended that maybe In Ear Monitors would be the best path for me to take for my rehearsals and live performances.
Hearing aids used to be little analog ampfliers around the time that I got my first pair 20 years ago but they've developed into little super computers that digitally compress and alter the frequencies to match my hearing loss. This is pretty good for speech however music greatly suffers.
An example might be that any high frequency sound that is deemed out of my audible range by a hearing test, get's harmonically shifted down into a lower octave that I would hear better but of course this makes music sound different and more muddy because there are more sounds competing for the same frequencies.
The hearing aids also distort quite easily at loud volumes so again I am dealing with a loss of clarity in many musical environments.
Turning to IEMs I have heard that the leading makers have started doing custom profiling of musicians hearing and creating a custom frequency response for them, i.e. boosting the mids if they have a mid frequency loss. I am very curious about this as it possibly represents a development that could help me out.
Another audiologist also recommended that I experiment with an outboard equalizer plus headphones, so I have some options there as well if the IEMs cannot go far enough.
My prime concern would be if there is enough gain and headroom coming out of the IEMs without distorting so that I would hear enough with my level of low and high frequency loss.
Would this mean I am looking at the higher end options?
Anyhow, I am fascinated by the whole emerging industry for custom IEM solutions so would appreciate any pointers or resources I could continue my research in this area regarding hearing loss!
Thanks for reading.
