Sonar and Hearing Aids

Way too much Rock 'n Roll and some heriditary issues have left me middle aged with hearing aids to boost certain frequencies in both ears and volume in the right. 
 
What I'd like to do is replicate the pattern employed in the aids into Sonar so I can take my hearing aids off when using headphones.  Anyone have any experience or ideas with this?
 
Thanks,
Bill

double post Sorry

I actually do have a very recent audiogram.  I would need an EQ plugin that has different setting for each stereo field.  The other issue would be to have my own headphone mix while other musicians had a flat response.  I could probably figure that one out.

billkeys2


Way too much Rock 'n Roll and some heriditary issues have left me middle aged with hearing aids to boost certain frequencies in both ears and volume in the right. 
 
What I'd like to do is replicate the pattern employed in the aids into Sonar so I can take my hearing aids off when using headphones.  Anyone have any experience or ideas with this?
 
Thanks,
Bill

Hi Bill,
 
I don't know if this has been suggested ...  but if you get a good hardware EQ device with at least 15 bands or more and insert it into your audio device's inserts (assuming you use a good audio device), you can then approach that similar to how one would 'treat a room'.
 
In other words, you could have a permanent EQ compensation factor so you wouldn't have to approach each track in a project with EQ unnecessarily (which can add aliasing and artifacts, etc).
 
Behringer makes some decent and inexpensive rack mounted EQ products that do a decent job.   Most have an In/Out button to bypass if necessary, etc.
 
There are other products similar to that, but the idea is to have the device be inline for monitoring but not affecting the actual signal in the DAW.
 
So whether you're using speakers or headphones, you'll have the same treatment.
 
 

If your intention is to make the music sound good to you, then applying the EQ in Sonar will work. But that puts your music in a very small world of listeners with your own hearing problem, if the settings are applied to the mix or  the output. What sounds good to you will be boosted inappropriately in your deficit frequencies to anyone else who listens. Your simplest solution to mixing music that everyone will appreciate is to input the normal mix into your hearing aids, which should already be making the corrections you need personally to judge the mix everyone else is hearing. That would be a lot easier than making the mix sound good to your bare ears, then trying to undo the changes you made in Sonar so it will sound good to others.

On further reflection, I expect you are up against the limits of your hearing aids to make the corrections you need. They may well not have enough "bands" in their "EQ" algorithms to provide optimum correction. And as JazzSinger notes, they may introduce further processing. In most cases, hearing aids are designed to optimize speech frequencies. An audiogram done with your hearing aids on might give you some idea of how good a job they are doing across the frequency range. But an audiogram tends to focus on perceptual threshold i. e. the least loud sound you can differentiate from silence (or the background tinnitus etc.). Even in normal hearing the response to louder sounds is not entirely predictable from the threshold, much less so in hearing disorders like SNL or presbecusis.

So theoretically you might be able to calibrate EQ or other processes applied to the output (but not to the recorded mix) in Sonar (or some other dedicated signal processing application) to provide better results than the hearing aids. But it would be a far more complex endeavor than just boosting the deficit frequencies in your uncorrected audiogram. Phenomena like recruitment and blunting of the perception of loudness as sound pressure increases would come into play.

And I would have to agree with JazzSinger, that it might be unwise to just boost your deficit frequencies until they sound "good," which might risk further damage to your hearing.

For a similar reason, it might be wise to avoid depending too heavily on the opinion of someone who is just young :) to judge your final mix. Someone with some experience and reasonably normal hearing might give you a better idea of what you need to change. My limited experience with young as a group is that they tend to over-brighten and overdrive anything they can get their hands on.

bitflipper


Some equalizers (e.g. FabFilter Pro-Q) let you EQ left and right channels independently.

IIEQPro Stereo is another that does so.
 

In that case (your last post) I like bamidi's suggestion of a hardware EQ.  bypass when you have your hearing aids in, engage when they're not.  that way you can set it to the EQ you need and leave it and never have to insert EQ and remove it from sonar.

Hey billkeys,

I use very similar hearing aids to the one shown in the picture.
They're ( Dot 2 by Resound ) aids.
I have 50% loss in one ear and 30% in the other.
I don't change any EQ in my mixes or playback. I don't do anything and let the aids do their job.

I also use AKG K701 Headphones with great success. I've tried many many headphones and these are the most friendly, of any cans I've used with no feedback if placed on the head just right.

Hope this helps. :)

Guy

It looks to me as if the headphones would cover the part outside your ear. Yes? When you're using headphones the last thing you want is ambient noise combining with the hearing aid signal. At any rate they wouldn't be a prime position to do their job in a headphone. I think any EQing you did would have to be post DAW. You can't get more post than an EQ in your ear. Tailoring an outboard EQ to do the same job as the hearing aid is going to take some science and probably at least a 31 band EQ for each ear. I'll bet you could get another style of in ear hearing aid that was more central to the ear canal for recording that did the same job.

That's true about the headphones covering where the hearing aid actually picks up the sound.  However, they are very sensitive and there is a little benefit as some of the leaking sound from the headphones are received by the hearing aid. Not very much and not comfortable, either.  Probably more to the argument by Jazz for open headphones.

Crg


It looks to me as if the headphones would cover the part outside your ear. Yes? When you're using headphones the last thing you want is ambient noise combining with the hearing aid signal. At any rate they wouldn't be a prime position to do their job in a headphone. I think any EQing you did would have to be post DAW. You can't get more post than an EQ in your ear. Tailoring an outboard EQ to do the same job as the hearing aid is going to take some science and probably at least a 31 band EQ for each ear. I'll bet you could get another style of in ear hearing aid that was more central to the ear canal for recording that did the same job.