We are seeing a long term consolidation between hearing devices and headphones.
On the headphones side, we are getting smaller, truly-wireless headphones with some ambient sound features (such as noise cancellation, and iOS hearing features). New trends like AR would just accelerate the change due to the need to solve all day worn audio devices.
On the hearing aids side, almost every hearing aid today acts as an always connected set of headphones for your mobile phone (and has been like that for years on iOS).
Deregulating this could bring the tech industry innovation to hearing aids through natural progression of headphones technology.
This trend would make hearing aids not just target hearing impaired people, but also individual with normal hearing. For example, features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise, silencing a loud restaurant so you can have a quiet conversation or improving the audio of a soft speaker could be useful for everyone.
> silencing a loud restaurant so you can have a quiet conversation or improving the audio of a soft speaker could be useful for everyone.
Yes i use noice cancellation and voice isolation on my iphone here in india where noise is out of control. I can even take calls now outside in traffic and it sounds like i am in a quite room to the other person.
This one of the greatest technological improvements in the recent past for me personally.
>This trend would make hearing aids not just target hearing impaired people, but also individual with normal hearing. For example, features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise, silencing a loud restaurant so you can have a quiet conversation or improving the audio of a soft speaker could be useful for everyone.
Amusingly this already exists, there are a bunch of ear muffs (and some in ear equivalents I think) that relay sounds from outside in that cut off when a threshold is reached. They're pretty much exclusively sold for use with firearms, I'd love to see them developed more to work better in a setting other than the woods and shooting range.
Having just experienced a pair of these, it was incredible. I don't have extensive hearing loss beyond what being a teenager listening to music too loud will do for you, but the way these headphones relayed "normal" sounds while rejecting "loud" sounds was one of those - "why aren't these more popular?" moments. It felt truly superhero-esque.
What's even cooler is turning up the volume and have Spidey-Senses.
I've done this on a couple of hunts and it's amazing to hear everything -- you can't believe how loud grass brushing against you can be. It's like you can hear like the elk do. Well, not quite... Good sets (I like MSA Sordin) have excellent stereo imaging in front of you as well.
In shooting classes, I turn them backwards so the microphones point at the instructor.
Starkey is not exactly a quality company and I would be more than happy to see them put out of business. They tried to shaft their employees out of retirement money, they inflated their donation numbers, and a former executive was sent to prison for all kids of fraud.
I was just thinking about this with the announcement of the new AirPods. Apple could really take the concert earplug market while getting great natural marketing (people wearing AirPods at concerts). Just balance and lower the volume for concerts.
Getting tinnitus that was is just a function of how much sound there is in your ears. So headphones with loud rock music can cause issues, headphones on quiet less so and can block external noise, as can a blob of wax or whatever.
You don't really need fancy noise cancelling for tinnitus prevention, just some form of bung in your ear.
My AirPod Pros with transparency mode enabled and set to max volume and treble don’t provide as much gain as my MDHearingAid pair ($400), and the external sound quality isn’t as good.
Apple has a real opportunity here, and they are slow in seizing it. I suspect some kind of an arrangement with the hearing aid manufacturers regarding iPhone-ready hearing aids.
The name of the game here is to allow people to dial in their own preferred level of compression (amplifying soft sounds more than looks sounds) and equalization using their iPhones.
Yes, I’ve done that. I’m hoping that 15.1 next week will make some improvements.
Apple could have such a great product here, if they would just add gain comparable to the currently available hearing assist devices, and then add compression, equalization, and clipping of loud noises.
with a lot of woodworking tools the AirPods pros definitely offer more protection than nothing. Not sure what attenuation they offer, but for the truly damaging higher frequency noise they seem to do a pretty decent job.
I still wear real ear protection, but for the odd cut, or for any other day to day situation with loud noises the AirPods do a good job.
When I'm outside running on sidewalks along city streets, music via AirPods Pro with Noise Cancellation turned on sounds a bit better BUT I prefer to keep this feature turned off in favor of being able to hear ambient cars etc.
I’ve spent hours trying to find a review of transparent mode on AirPods or any other similar transparency modes with regards to reducing wind noise amplification while still allowing sounds of cars etc. through. I’m looking for a good solution to listening to music while riding a bike that’s safe but better sound quality than bone conduction. Sadly I can’t find any objective measurement of these combinations of noise cancellation and pass through. I can’t even find a review that mentions if this is how pass through is meant to work vs just passing along all sounds. If the latter then wind noise pass through sounds like a good way to completely ruin your hearing. I guess these days all we can find is marketing and reviews that amount to puff pieces with rare exceptions.
Would you be willing to give a personal experience? Have you tried transparent mode in windy conditions?
And yet Bose discontinued their very helpful Hearphone product and has introduced a much more expensive and less capable conventional aid, which they are marketing to older people. Very disappointing!
I know people complain about price, but custom in-ear monitors for musicians are on the same scale of price as hearing aids. Good in-ear monitors like good earphones are expensive.
I suspect, like the earphone market, this is going to become a marketing-driven race to the bottom that swamps any genuine technical improvement.
Technical improvement has been pretty stunted since the 90s anyways. The hearing aide market is insanely marked up and ends up costing an extremely significant chunk of change whenever you need a replacement. I also would mention that custom in-ear monitors for musicians apply to a really niche market as well - so we don't really have a broad market to compare either of these to.
Actually CIEM balanced armature drivers were originally made for hearing aids. They're conceptually very similar, but most of the market is consolidated to 2 main manufacturers Knowles and Sonion(+ some niche manufacturers).
If anything the Chinese are disrupting this market, in price, volume and choice. Just like they're doing with cheap lenses such as omnivision.
> features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise
Reminds me of the Artemis Fowl series or the first Iron Man, awesome to see former science fiction coming closer to reality. Adaptive ear protection in real life would be really interesting on construction sites or for musicians...
That sounds like a really interesting problem. You'd need microphones good enough, small enough, and cheap enough to hear the signal,
Signals processing/machine learning software robust enough to pick up a user-selected pattern and in a reasonable latency, and then a processor small enough and power efficient enough to process it all while again also being economical enough, and then have it last 8 hours.
"Completely blocking out" is out of reach, technologically; you'd need 80+ dB of attenuation, and the best anyone can do with things that fit around your head (earplugs, noise-canceling, etc.) is about 40, before you even start to touch the questions of selectivity and power usage. If you need 80 dB of attenuation your best bet is to contract an acoustics engineer to build a wall out of several layers of different materials.
Part of snoring is low frequency sounds, which even with fully plugged ears, transmits through bone conduction.
also long term use of ear plugs with sleeping can cause unwanted side-effects.
When we sleep our hearing system does not turn off (safety), and when you wear ear plugs while sleeping you run the risk of making your hearing work harder - and then if you have no plugs in your hearing system is now (hopefully temporarily) more sensitive than before.
I've got a product similar to these and they're great. You can have a normal conversation and it didn't take me long to realize their eavesdropping potential. My Surface headphones also have a feature that more or less acts as a hearing aid.
Some years ago there was a set of headphones sold for hunting (amplifying sounds of animals and reducing gunshot noise) that were very popular among the hearing-impaired community as a cheaper alternative to hearing aids.
Yeah but have you ever worn a hearing aid? My wife has a very expensive and up to date one and there is so much white noise. She can play music on it but can't hear well enough in that ear to get any use out of that. I just don't feel like they will ever overlap that much since they have to cater to people who are quite deaf.
Would "bring[ing] the tech industry innovation to hearing aids through natural progression of headphones technology" mean that hearing aids would now need to be coupled to a smart device?
If so, then hard-of-hearing people who work in secure areas where they can't bring their phones will be very unhappy...
On the headphones side, we are getting smaller, truly-wireless headphones with some ambient sound features (such as noise cancellation, and iOS hearing features). New trends like AR would just accelerate the change due to the need to solve all day worn audio devices.
On the hearing aids side, almost every hearing aid today acts as an always connected set of headphones for your mobile phone (and has been like that for years on iOS).
Deregulating this could bring the tech industry innovation to hearing aids through natural progression of headphones technology.
This trend would make hearing aids not just target hearing impaired people, but also individual with normal hearing. For example, features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise, silencing a loud restaurant so you can have a quiet conversation or improving the audio of a soft speaker could be useful for everyone.