hearing aids for audiophiles

Road Runner

Here's some guy who wears hearing aids talking about how good they make his system sound:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_13_2/hearing-aids-6-2006-part-2.html

He sounds like he's reviewing regular audio equipment:

My Reference Hearing Aid – ReSound CC4 CIC

Edgar Villchur originally developed the technology for the ReSound CC4 in collaboration with AT&T Bell Labs, so one would expect these to sound exceptional with this Blue Ribbon Pedigree, and they are. Unfortunately GN-ReSound discontinued them several years ago. What a crying shame, as the new all-digital technology that replaced them has seriously compromised sound quality.

Micro and macro dynamics are excellent with the CC4s, as is dynamic range. Music is emotional and involving, alive and fluid with nuance, emotion and expression, this is not subtle. Transient attack is natural, clean and not strained, brilliant, and assertive, decay realistically rendered. Transients are delivered with more perceived speed than all the other hearing aids tested.

The CC4s are richer and fuller, more balanced across the frequency spectrum. The music flows with expression and emotion, capturing the nuances of the presentation – micro dynamics are very good to excellent – there is very good to excellent separation between instruments, and more air. The music is exciting and vibrant.

Timbre is excellent, the highs are brilliant but not harsh. The lows (deep bass is slightly rolled off) are solid, underpinning the foundation of the orchestra. Bass and highs are very good to excellent. Distortion is very low and clarity excellent.

Violins are vibrant and alive sounding, transients well defined. Resolution is very good to excellent, particularly on complex musical passages. Complex musical passages are well defined, with only a slight smearing on the loudest fortissimos (ffff) when the full orchestra is in full cry. There is more musical information, if not all, with the CC4s. They reproduce the musical event extremely well. These are satisfying to the soul.

The CC4 has a bigger, fuller sound without being bloomy than all the HAs except for the Etymotic K-Amp. The presentation is articulate, with very good to excellent separation and air between notes and instrument groups. Background and accompaniment are well defined, with excellent musical detail and complexity.

The CC4 presentation is dynamic. Transient attack is assertive without being aggressive . . . transient response fast, decay of notes natural. On loud (ffff) passages when the entire orchestra is in full cry, there sometimes is slight congestion, but not very often. However, when it does happen, the deterioration is graceful, doesn't break up and is less noticeable than with all-digital hearing aids.

On the Brubeck "Time Out" (and Rollins' "Way Out West") the sound is wonderful – excellent example of getting the balance right and treating the background (accompaniment) and the foreground (solo) correctly. (This is also evident at the beginning of the Tchsikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with Curzon.) No digital or any other hearing aids I have tested gets this right (except for the Etymotic K-Amp)!

Brubeck's piano sounds just right, excellent transient attack and decay of notes, with balanced presentation of each note in the chords in the right and left hands. Rich piano sound!

Separation and air are very good, with excellent micro and macro dynamics, resulting in more expression and emotion. Drums have snap – balance of instruments realistic. Background and accompaniment are balanced.

Cardas Sweep Record – Frequency sweep from 30 to 30K hertz – a fair, barely acceptable sweep – no suck outs, one notch, some minor wavering, no warbling. The notch was at mid-high. There was excellent high frequency extension. Deep bass was poor. Most of the frequency band sweep was even with right and left HAs nearly identical.
I have thousands of hours of listening to music with the CC4s, they consistently sound very good to excellent. With the CC4s, the music is lively, richer, fuller, there is just more sound; micro dynamics brings the music alive with emotion and expression – there is nice background detail with air and separation between instruments – excellent balance between instruments and frequency range is extended in the highs and bass! Percussion is +++++, cymbals sound right, and one can hear brushes against brass. It's toe-tapping good. The CC4s kick butt!

All-Digital Hearing Aids

The hearing aid industry has been touting the attributes of all-digital technology for hearing aids and marketing these devices as having excellent sound quality, clarity, etc. My findings, based upon detailed auditions are contrary, and what they do to music is just tragic. Dr. Mead Killion, who has conducted exhaustive research into the reproduction of accurate sound vs. colored sound and people's preferences for colored or high fidelity reproduction and people's capability to understand speech using various technologies, has also found all-digital seriously lacking.
My listening experiences have identified a typical sonic signature of all-digital sound, which is characteristic, in varying degrees, of all the digital hearing aids I have auditioned. The sonic signature is poor separation and air between notes and orchestral groups, hard transient attack with poor decay, thin, cold, hard, steely, edgy sound, exaggerated or poor rhythm and pace, poor timbre, smearing of musical phrases, off key pitch of notes, and high distortion that is stressful and fatiguing to listen to.
There is much missing musical information. As audiophiles, we are constantly searching for that nth degree of realism and all-digital doesn't even come close. At its best, it is unable to portray any palpable presence or soundstage. Resolution is worse than poor. My sense is the problems occur in the A/D and D/A conversion, interpolation, low sampling rates and word length, inadequate processing algorithms, etc.

Sami

To him they are regular audio equipment. The CC4 looks like it is customized EQ that goes into your ear, amplifying the fr's that the ear needs. Pretty cool.

Early B.

Someone should market audiophile quality hearing aids. Sounds like a great idea.

Many people can hear in one ear better than the other, and having the ability to compensate for it would be a nice touch for a product like this.

curved

That would be a great idea Brad, although it wouldn't help me out as I have colliflower ear pretty bad from my years of wrestling. I would need surgery to get all my hearing back in the one

ward91

no doubt its expensive.
proberly more than a dual 32band g/eq. and a hearing test. if you live in the uk cant you more or less get a free hearing test on the nhs?

George Grand

Edgar Villchur was one of the two founding fathers of Acoustic Research in 1954. The other was Henry Kloss.

Mr. Villchur sold his interest in AR to Teledyne and went into hearing aid research. Been there ever since.

ward91

ah so its probably quite a lot better than i initially thought. but still its likely to be expensive but if you are an audio enthusiast with damaged hearing , well.

treitz3

Could you imagine how skewed observations of gear would be if you were to introduce this product to either ear, or both? :eek:

Road Runner

There was this one thing where they were testing speakers and supposedly the better the hearing is for a group of people, the more consistent they were in their choice of speaker. One theory was that the frequency response of a speaker can compensate for the frequencies that are reduced in the person with hearing loss. One way to test it might be to find a bunch of people with different types of hearing loss and then give them an equalizer and see if they adjust it to match their hearing.

awe-d-o-file

which stands for Board certified Hearing Instrument Specialist. His article is mostly good and shows he never had a good hearing aid fitter. The digital aids that he voted all bad can be turned into analog like aids by turning off the digital processing.

That would be: compression, directional microphones speech detection and so on. Strip all that stuff off, which is good for helping understand speech for listening to music. It was a waste of time to go model by model and review them as he did. Neither he nor we have any idea how the aids were set! It would be like an audio review of integrated amps where one has great bass because the bass is turned up and the other amp is set flat but wasn't mentioned in the review.

Open fit and open fit with the receiver in the canal in particular is the best sounding, least intrusive aid if you have the type of hearing loss they work with (sensorineural - not conductive) where you still have decent LF response to at least 1K but bad HF loss between 2-10K. Aids don't do anything above 10K really.

Good aids have a 16 band EQ to help match to the persons hearing loss. Whether the reviewer knows it or not every hearing aid is made from a chip now so they are all digital.

I would go to my clients house and use my laptop and adjust the aids while the client listened to their system. I adjusted them in real time while the aid was in their ear. 999/1000 fitters don't do this believe it or not!

I left that business because of the horrible misleading advertising they use and the fact that most of the people were there because a spouse or family told them to not because they wanted to be there. Very few of all of the clients actually listened to music at all. The few that did were much more fun to help.

I still consult people who are going to buy. I fit someone myself that knew Vilchur and Killion. He was an NPR classical DJ for over 30 years and has written many liner notes for classical albums. I had more success than any other of the people he tried including audiologists and so on. Part of me misses it.