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Re: Using recording equipment - with hearing aids

Subject: Re: Using recording equipment - with hearing aids
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 13:18:17 -0500
From: "Rich Peet" <>
> 
> The recording equipment that most of us use exceed the capability of 
> your hearing aids.  They may have come a long ways in recent years 
> but they have size constrants we do not and care about different 
> things than we do.

In particular, hearing aids are designed to maximize the ability to hear 
and understand the human speaking voice. Anything outside of that is 
normally filtered out. Even within that range the sound will not 
necessarily be reproduced evenly.

> As Dan suggested headphones may be the way to go.
> Not all hearing loss is created equal.  There is loss of volume and 
> complete loss of certain freqs. The later takes pitch shifting to 
> compensate for and may not be best addressed here. If what you have 
> is a loss of volume over the complete range you need a good map of it 
> so that you can program to match. Either by a headphone amp with 
> equalizer to balance the right freqs at the right amount or just by 
> having a filter in post to make your listening pleasure greater.

I would agree here. It's the sort of thing here where that info should 
be fairly easy to obtain as the hearing aids are custom designed to 
match the particular person's hearing.

> But the standard hearing tests fall way short of what you need as 
> they don't care about loss above 7000 or below 1,000 cycles and you 
> want to know your map from 100 to 12,000 if you want to cover birds.  
> This group is not the place to ask how to get the best map of your 
> hearing but once you have it you can apply the correct compensation 
> by a equalizer. 

I suppose it depends on the hearing test. The ones I did when in the 
military covered from 50Hz to 8KHz and that was just a simple survey one 
to see if you were qualified to be sent off to be shot. More 
importantly, to hear orders, and the other warfare sounds you needed to 
hear. The self test system I have here covers all the way to 20KHz with 
many steps along the way. Though without calibration using a good sound 
meter that one will not give you accurate absolute sound levels, but 
only relative.

Walt




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