Hearing aids have gotten better and better over the years, with user satisfaction keeping pace.6 In the last few years Bluetooth streaming from iPhone and Android has become commonplace. But, have manufacturers made any progress on improving the dreaded sound quality when streaming music?
The short answer is "not really"—there is no great hearing aid when it comes streaming music quality. The best hearing aids are just OK. But, if music streaming is important to you, you'll want to make sure you read this article to learn what hearing aid technologies can impact music quality, and how you can be a smart consumer when it comes to selecting and fine tuning your next all-day companion.
I also work as the Lab Director of HearAdvisor, an independent scientific hearing aid vetting service. In the lab, we ran tests to find the absolute best hearing aids for streaming music quality. My recommendations are based on both HearAdvisor's scientific lab findings and my hands-on experience with these devices in my role as a product reviewer with HearingTracker. Continue reading to learn what hearing devices I liked best and why.
How Speech and Music Differ
Before we dive into technologies, let’s briefly look at the differences between speech and music. Figure 1 shows a ten-second clip of both speech in quiet and a typical rock song. These waveforms represent the sound's shape over time. The speech waveform (left) varies in volume having occasional pauses and louder peaked regions, such as at 3.6 seconds. Conversely, music tends to be much louder on average with less variation. This is to some extent the nature of music and instruments; however, we can also blame loudness competitions in the music industry (i.e., the “Loudness Wars”) driving our music to be less dynamic and more prone to distortions.
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