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EQ Compensation due to hearing lost?

mbze430

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I have a question for anyone that is over 30 years of age and may or may not have gotten tested by an audiologist. When you get tested do they tell you what frequency range one's is deficient at? I am asking because I am considering going to an audiologist to get tested, because when I did the Samsung Adapt test, all my high frequencies I am not able to hear. I also wanted to know if the audiologist provide me information the range so I can compensate for it with EQ.

TIA.
 

Jim Matthews

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If you're having trouble with conversation, when many speakers are present the deficit isn't entirely in the ear, itself.

If the trouble is more pronounced (you can't hear a single voice, asking a question from the next room) boosting frequencies in your insensitive range *might* help.

FWIW - Even with a deficit above 10 kHz, there's little musical information lost. There's an ongoing debate about how much of that can be successfully replayed through any recording.

Boosting any band will likely overemphasized what you can hear, without augmentation.
 

sailor2005

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You should get a graphic of the audiogram which looks like a frequency response graphic. There could be also a report in table form of the loss in db's for each frequency tested. BUT, what you can do with EQ depends on the magnitude and root cause of the hearing loss.
 

RayDunzl

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I don't try to EQ for my deficiencies, as it would be bad for anyone else listening (and it doesn't help me anyway).

Flat (measured) response sounds completely normal to me (as does everything else that makes a sound).

I hear it, or I don't.

End of story.
 

sailor2005

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I don't try to EQ for my deficiencies, as it would be bad for anyone else listening (and it doesn't help me anyway).

Flat (measured) response sounds completely normal to me (as does everything else that makes a sound).

I hear it, or I don't.

End of story.
Well.. I'm happy for you and that it is the end of story for YOU. BUT not everyone has the same needs, priorities and preferences as YOU. Perhaps the OP has significant hearing loss or just wants to have some guidance as to what, if anything, can be done with EQ. In my case, no amount of EQ would help me as my hearing loss in one ear is due to a brain tumor. For me that is the end of story but be sure that if EQ helped in my case, I would EQ the hell out of everything and others be damned. Again, be happy that your choices work for you :)
 

RayDunzl

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Well.. I'm happy for you and that it is the end of story for YOU. BUT not everyone has the same needs, priorities and preferences as YOU. Perhaps the OP has significant hearing loss or just wants to have some guidance as to what, if anything, can be done with EQ. In my case, no amount of EQ would help me as my hearing loss in one ear is due to a brain tumor. For me that is the end of story but be sure that if EQ helped in my case, I would EQ the hell out of everything and others be damned. Again, be happy that your choices work for you

Feel better now?
 

Rockdog

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I don't try to EQ for my deficiencies, as it would be bad for anyone else listening (and it doesn't help me anyway).

Flat (measured) response sounds completely normal to me (as does everything else that makes a sound).

I hear it, or I don't.

End of story.
So, load a different EQ when others are listening. Takes 20 seconds. End of story.
 

sergeauckland

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I don't try to EQ for my deficiencies, as it would be bad for anyone else listening (and it doesn't help me anyway).

Flat (measured) response sounds completely normal to me (as does everything else that makes a sound).

I hear it, or I don't.

End of story.

At my age, my HF hearing is way down on what it was in my youth, but it still sounds 'normal' to me. The loss has been gradual, and I've completely adapted to what I can hear now. Boosting the HF just makes it sound bright, unless the HF boost is above what I can hear, in which case, I can't hear it....

I suppose it may be different if the loss of HF was sudden, everything would then sound dull and EQ might help temporarily, but unless one EQs the whole world, one normally adapts, so the EQ on music would become redundant quite quickly.

We're very adaptable.

S.
 

RayDunzl

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So, load a different EQ when others are listening. Takes 20 seconds. End of story.

As insinuated above, I don't sense improvement, adjusting levels trying to hear what I can't hear, via EQ.

As far as I know, it's always been this way for me, first noted around age 8, where my frequency extension roughly matched my Mother's, whereas Dad could hear out near the end of the test LP frequency sweep.
 
OP
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mbze430

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I noticed that even now, watching movies I am having a hard time with the dialogue. Sometimes I have a hard time making out what people are saying more so than before. Either way, I am trying to get into an audiologist appointment book. Hopefully it might share some light.


Another note, since I purchased the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, I am almost using them as hearing aid when set to the environment mode because I can hear so much "more" around me.
 

amirm

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I worry about accentuating frequencies you have already lost as to make that worse over time. Best to ask your doctor.

Also, when I took my last hearing test, they only went up to 8 kHz. Their focus is on understanding speech which you are interested in but not sure how much it helps with hifi listening.

Finally, dialog mix for video content often is poorly done so we all suffer from that to some extent.
 

Destination: Moon

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I worry about accentuating frequencies you have already lost as to make that worse over time. Best to ask your doctor.

Also, when I took my last hearing test, they only went up to 8 kHz. Their focus is on understanding speech which you are interested in but not sure how much it helps with hifi listening.

Finally, dialog mix for video content often is poorly done so we all suffer from that to some extent.

Some of the problems with dialog are due to surround sound processing that tries to create surround sound where there is no surround sound embedded in the sound stream. If you turn off some of this processing or switch it to a different "effect" you can often recover what it garbles up.
 

Rockdog

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Finally, dialog mix for video content often is poorly done so we all suffer from that to some extent.

In some things, technological progress is not so much... It's shocking to me that dialog mix in video is often terrible. My hearing is still pretty decent for my age, but I end up cranking movies well beyond where I'd like and still have to attempt to read lips. I suppose that's more the audio engineering than the technology but in some ways, a compressed VCR tape was easier to listen to than some of the content nowadays.

Reminds me of cell phones. Everybody forgot how clear and intelligible landlines were.

I did, however, have someone tell me recently that he hated his new 4k OLED because it was too sharp and too high in resolution. Hmm...
 

Rockdog

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As insinuated above, I don't sense improvement, adjusting levels trying to hear what I can't hear, via EQ.

As far as I know, it's always been this way for me, first noted around age 8, where my frequency extension roughly matched my Mother's, whereas Dad could hear out near the end of the test LP frequency sweep.
Consider yourself fortunate, just buy an Emerson boom box at Walmart and call it your end system.. How about your sense of taste when you were 8? Did you like Lima beans?

Seriously, just kidding Ray, appreciate your thoughts and I'd bet you're right, trying to EQ for hearing loss might have unintended consequences to consider.. Just piling on so Sailor can grab a break!

Cheers!
 

paulraphael

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At my age, my HF hearing is way down on what it was in my youth, but it still sounds 'normal' to me. The loss has been gradual, and I've completely adapted to what I can hear now. Boosting the HF just makes it sound bright, unless the HF boost is above what I can hear, in which case, I can't hear it...

This is my experience exactly. My HF loss is easily measurable, but music sounds the same to me subjectively. I'm as annoyed by overly bright mixes as I was as a teenager.

I do wonder if it's different with extreme hearing loss. When I spent more time in NYC rock 'n roll dives, the sound was often horrifyingly bright (and needless to say, horrifyingly loud). There was usually some guy in his 50s at the back of the room, looking like a veteran of many wars, poking at a sound board that was as beat up as he was. It seemed logical that the music was mixed to sound normal to his destroyed ears.
 

LTig

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I worry about accentuating frequencies you have already lost as to make that worse over time. Best to ask your doctor.
Yes, seeing a doctor is the best one can do. An acoustician told me that most people go too late to a doctor so that loss of understanding cannot be compensated completely with hearing aids.

I think the theory is that if you wait too long the nerves responsible for detecting speech related frequencies get no input and then the brain reorganizes them to fulfill some other task. When you then get a hearing aid perceived sound gets louder but understanding does not improve. Therefore I think you cannot do anything wrong if you use EQ to improve speech intelligibility, it's rather good to do so.
 

LTig

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At my age, my HF hearing is way down on what it was in my youth, but it still sounds 'normal' to me. The loss has been gradual, and I've completely adapted to what I can hear now. Boosting the HF just makes it sound bright, unless the HF boost is above what I can hear, in which case, I can't hear it....

I suppose it may be different if the loss of HF was sudden, everything would then sound dull and EQ might help temporarily, but unless one EQs the whole world, one normally adapts, so the EQ on music would become redundant quite quickly.

We're very adaptable.
I second that. I experienced the same. Until a few years ago I didn't know that I suffered from hearing loss and listening to music both live (jazz, rock, opera) and recorded sounded just fine to me. Only by taking a test offered free by an acoustician my hearing loss was detected. I went to a doctor to make a test, and while the result was quite shocking to me I don't need hearing aids yet. Understanding speech is difficult in noisy surroundings and sometimes in movies when listening in english (not my mother tongue, but I prefer it) but no problem at all even in lively discussions.

For me a very important is that music still sounds fine to me. My father got hearing aids around my age and told me that using them in the opera was no joy and he preferred to listen without them. So I think wrt music one should not worry too much about the negative impact of slow (normal) hearing loss on our beloved hobby.
 

gingerbeer

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The hearing test is just a series of different frequency beeps in each ear that you press a button to capture when you can hear it, generating a threshold of hearing curve.

it’s a really simple test and the only challenge is generating a known reference volume. I haven’t tried any but there are plenty of free ones on the Apple App Store, as an iPhone with its standard earbuds is a common platform that the developer can make decent baseline measurements from. Nothing to lose as there are a few free ones available.
 
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