As a mid-50 year old who discovered two years ago that he has moderate hearing loss (50-55 dB HL), I will be forever grateful to Apple for doing this.
If anybody from the accessibility teams is reading this, please know that it is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude and my appreciation for the amount of work this must've taken.
Music sounds unbelievably better through my AirPod pros, and I didn't even know what I had lost until I heard it again.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of my middle aged compatriots don't even know how much their hearing has degraded… Get your hearing test tested, folks, while you still have it!
> I wear musician's earplugs when playing in bands.
As a musician, you possibly have custom ones, but for anyone else who’s not an audiophile, you can get decent ones that mostly preserve the sound while lowering the volume for around $15-20. A godsend for concerts.
I'm past the edit window here, but have a couple more thoughts. First, I'm just a jazz player, so my gigs can get loud, but not screaming stooopid loud. Second, I am almost always amplified on stage, meaning that the most delicate subtleties of optimal tone quality are lost anyway.
Many of the rock players are moving to in-ear monitors, which block everything but replace it with your monitor mix, received via wireless.
On the other hand, some band mates, and my kids, play classical. Their needs are a lot more critical in terms of perceiving their tone quality. A benefit of the fitted plugs is that you can get the capsules with less attenuation, which means you're still safe in something like a classical ensemble, but without losing too much.
Are they ever. I watched Alien Romulus in Imax, I'm not doing that again, it was painfully loud. I am an avid concert goer and I wear earplugs every time - Romulus without earplugs was by far the loudest thing I've been exposed to this year.
And, if you can't afford those, just get some orange foam ones - they have excellent protection, often greater than the audiophile ones, and, let's be honest, that bar or arena you're going to wasn't built with sound quality in mind.
Personally, also at the very cheap end, I like wax ones partly because you can vary the noise blocking as needed - put them in loosely or squish them in.
I guess that depends on the metal show, because I wholeheartedly disagree. But except kanonenfieber currently, I like little that is close to mainstream.
Everybody has vastly different sensitivities to sound exposure.
Even identical twins with identical sound exposures can have drastically different hearing profiles especially as they age.
I actually have always been very careful with my hearing; there is some evidence that I may have a very very mild congenital birth defect that makes me prone to hearing loss, but that's largely speculation.
My wife is actually older than me and has a spectacularly sensitive hearing - as does her mother! - and she's the drummer! (The wife, not her mother :-) I just do keys and vocals...)
That's why it's so important that everyone protect their hearing because even though it's not too loud for the people around you, it might be too loud for you - and you won't know until it's too late.
Hearing being a "logarithmic" sense and decibels make this a bit weird to me. Like losing 6 dB of hearing in a car crash is considered negligible and insignificant, but that actually means the ears lost half their sensitivity in a flash (and it's never coming back, just like teeth). Likewise your 50 dB hearing loss is considered moderate, but actually represents a 300-fold reduction in acuity.
Although I try not to think about that too hard because... well it's kind of depressing.
But it's the exact reason that hearing aids are so difficult to design.
For example if you were to naïvely try to just "add back" 50 dB of gain to a 70 dB ambient sound, that hearing aid would be trying to pump 120 dB of sound energy into your ear canal... which would actually cause damage to the surrounding cochlear bands...
But if it doesn't try to add something there, then everything sounds distorted because you have way too much sound energy from the other frequency bands, perhaps ones where you have much higher sensitivity.
Hence the multi band compression and why it's so difficult, and why hearing aid manufacturers focus on speech intelligibility above and beyond everything.
When I go to rock concerts I am the one percent, when I go to bass music shows all of a sudden half of the people are wearing ear protection. I think some scenes and genres are better about this than others.
My wife is in her 50's. Her hearing seems noticeably poor than it used to be but she is in a bit of denial about it. This will be my first purchase of Air Pods — and for my wife. A kind of stealth hearing aid....
Hearing loss is one of the very few proven and CAUSAL mechanisms behind cognitive degeneration as we age.
They even know the mechanism: the slow imperceptible year by year withdrawal from rich communication patterns with our environment.
I found that it took me a little while not to feel "old" when I discovered that I needed hearing aids.
But my oh my what a difference.
It's difficult to describe to someone what it's like and how much less cognitive energy you have to put into even simple things like discussing lunch with your wife!
Because my voice is deep and I'm soft spoken, I've always been told people could feel my voice before they heard it, and a lot of noise cancellation models have a hard time distinguishing me from environmental sound and suppress my speech.
It's weirdly isolating not being able to communicate in certain meeting software or on some phones because a computer thinks I'm the machine.
I've been wearing them for 10 years and have never had any bad comments as a result. When I first got them, work colleagues were visibly pleased for me that I had done something about a problem that was getting worse (not being able to follow quiet conversations in meetings).
The one time someone did say something slightly negative that included "oh it's that guy with the hearing aids" I came back with "yes, and thanks to them I can hear what you just said, the clue is in the name", which got a general laugh that helped a lot. But that was a one off, apart from people slightly staring sometimes when they notice them, no one seems bothered.
Not directly related to your case, but I thought I had some age-related hearing loss when listening to Spotify Premium only for a decade. I appreciate their recommendations (found me a whole bunch of new interesting bands, even new favourite ones), but didn't know how awful Spotify's quality is even in comparison to Apple's standard codec.
I didn't make the switch yet since for lossless since I don't have enough space on my phone, but am considering it, even for just showing support for the current music quality efforts over at Apple.
Spotify high quality is usually 320kbps. If not, it's because only worse qualities are recorded/available. I have sincere doubts you're able to hear a difference to lossless qualities, especially if you're listening on the go or in non-hifi setups.
I've heard this argument so many times - but personally I can trivially easily here the difference between Tidal / Apple Music and Spotify's 'high quality' setting - even on wireless headphones. Music on spotify sounds flat and drained. No idea if this has something to do with their compression technique, some kind of EQing, or a flaw in some other part of the pipeline, but I've blind tested it many times and its night and day.
Generally the problem with this type of argument is that the two sources are not volume-matched. Try out an ABX test here, of lossless vs various lossy codecs: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
I used to be like you many years ago, thinking that high samplerates and bit depth were essential and the ultimate way of getting the best possible sound quality, but in reality 44.1khz 16bit is plenty for humans. Get over it. Whoever mixed the 192khz version essentially remastered it and put a bit of a spice over it. You can easily prove it by producing a downmixed 44khz version (use a high quality resampler) from the 192khz version and trying to blind ABX both, I doubt you will be able to spot any difference, and if you do, congratulations your sound system has some weird intermodulation issue from the high frequencies present in the high sample rate version, that is causing a listenable sound to appear (which should not be there).
I think you're missing the wood for the trees here. It makes no functional difference to the listener whether the reason spotify sounds worse is their use of lower quality masters, or some aspect of their streaming or compression. In practice their library sounds significantly, measurably worse to many people. I've also blind tested this with friends when I signed up for Tidal, and most people I tested were able to clearly hear the difference.
This. No double-blind ABX test has ever been able to discern the difference between an above-CD quality file and its downsampled CD-quality equivalent, or even a 320 kbps MP3 encoding of it.
Most people are not listening closely, nearly meditating over music. If you average over most people, this is what you will find. Look at the "outliers" in those same studies.
It seems more like you need to get over it. I have never cared about bit rates etc. I just care about how it sounds and I know that lossless sounds significantly better to me and to many others.
The amount of gaslighting when it comes to audio is always bizarre to me.
Read my post again, I'm strictly talking about the audio format and not about the codec nor compression. I would expect anyone caring enough to compare CD quality 44khz and 192khz/24bits to be using lossless or uncompressed audio, otherwise what's the point? Pretty much all lossy codecs will put a low-pass filter and trow out any sound above 16khz~20khz anyway, and some will even resample to 48khz, no matter what lol.
I can't speak to Apple Music or Tidal, but I did a test between the Spotify and CD versions of Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin and the difference would be clear to absolutely anyone - the Spotify version is very tinny.
People often trot out the "most people can't tell the difference" argument, but I wonder how many of those people have actually tried a variety of tests? My hunch is very few.
Are you sure you are not comparing a normal release to the remastered version? There are plenty of albums out there that have "improved" or remastered versions but are not labelled as such in the album title, and Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is one of those.
Xtal is a gem. I just tested both and the Apple Music version had more oomph the first time I tested for a bit. Then I went back to the beginning a second time and they sounded the same. Whether or not it's true I don't think I can trust myself to be a good tester.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fwiw I believe Xtal was originally made from samples recorded on cassette, so there's definitely a ceiling on how dynamic it could sound.
You can't judge the quality of a digital audio file purely on its bit rate.
There are many things that (can) go into digital mastering and re-encoding that can make huge differences in actual audio quality of the final product, even with the same file format and bit rate.
I can easily hear the difference between Lossless and AAC on my two IEMs (Blessing 2 Dusk + IE600) as well as my open-back Focal Clear. And even with Bluetooth via AptX HD.
With the quality of audio improving so much in recent years I would take a guess that almost anyone can appreciate the significant difference in sound quality for < $50.
Same. There's a difference in texture, primarily in the trebles, but there's also a general muddiness and lack of separation. Everything feels like it's been smoothed over, but not in a good way, or too "crunchy". Transients don't have the right amount of bite and the stereo image doesn't feel as three-dimensional. It's harder to hear the "room". Currently using Sony IER-M9 with a Linum DualBax Zebra, which is a great cable, btw.
I feel like if I was playing Audiophile Bingo, I'd just have won.
I mean I can't claim complete 'ignorance', I have more audio toys than many (a "Schiit Stack" on my desk (DAC, mixer and amp) and a couple of "low end" headphones, Sennheiser and Hifiman planars), but by the time you are discussing cables... next thing it's whether wood volume knobs will eliminate unwanted resonances from your sound stage.
Favorite comment I heard on such things: Music lovers buy equipment to listen to their music. Audiophiles buy music to listen to their equipment.
I can too, but only because AAC has such an unnatural stereo presence that I can pick it out in a lineup of codecs with my eyes closed. If it was a direct comparison between downsampled FLAC/WAV then I'm not sure I could tell the difference.
Theoretically, if Spotify's claims are true, Ogg Vorbis at 320kbps should be indistinguishable from lossless in most listening scenarios. In practice, I found this not to be the case and there is a significant difference, even when using lossy equipment like Apple Airpods Pro.
I do not understand where the difference comes from. It could be that Spotify uses a crappy encoder. Could be that they "cheat" on bitrate. Or it could be the interplay of different compression schemes. But something is definitely off. I compared to Apple Music with lossless and Roon ARC playing my own FLAC-encoded media.
Spotify does some loudness normalization that you could disable in the settings. (Don't know anymore as don't use Spotify for years). Maybe worth checking.
But that's just an auto volume level, it doesn't actually change the sound balance or dynamics or anything like that. It just makes the average volume of the track closer to the average volume of other tracks.
It feels like mainstream technology is slowly replacing most if not all accessibility devices, and I think that's a really good thing for those who need them!
This already happened to blind people. We used to have color testers, specialized audiobook / ebook players, GPS devices, text scanning / OCR machines, devices for banknote recognition, barcode readers, talking scales, thermometers, blood pressure meters and so on, all as separate devices, all extremely expensive. Nobody really had or carried all of these at once, though most people had at least some, it was just too expensive and impractical.
Nowadays, while those devices still exist, all you really need is any smartphone (even a low-end Android will do, though iOS is much better for this use case IMO), a free screen reader, which both OSes include by default, and a couple of free / cheap apps. Things like talking scales can be replaced with accessories connected over Bluetooth that don't technically talk, but that expose the measurements to your smartphone screen reader.
It feels like mainstream technology is slowly replacing most if not all accessibility devices, and I think that's a really good thing for those who need them!
Pretty much everyone eventually suffers from some sort of "disability". Hearing, eyesight, motor control, strength, etc. etc. So, I like to think of accessibility features as being made for everyone. Some people just need them earlier or with deeper functionality than others.
Interesting perspective. I never thought about this properly. But it seems things like Google Lens and other machine vision apps paired with a good screen reader can help blind people to "see".
I did some recent experiments with the openai api recently to see if I could make sense of photos by classifying and describing things. That worked surprisingly well for the absolute minimal effort I put in (<30 minutes) and I've been meaning to follow up on that to properly turn that in a product feature in our app.
Anyway, something simple hooked up to a camera shouldn't take that long to code. There might be good enough locally running models for machine vision as well. Reading signs, menus, describing what's in front of you, etc. I bet that there is some low hanging fruit there for visually impaired people that are a bit handy with programming in terms of really useful apps that they could develop with this.
Another aspect of using consumer tech like this is that it's normal. People wearing airpods don't stand out as hearing impaired or special. Most hearing aids on the other hand are clearly recognizable as such. I imagine some people don't like wearing them for that reason. They are kind of ugly, generally. Unlike e.g. glasses, there's no such thing as designer hearing aids. They are kind of a necessary evil for people. Apple is being clever here by tapping into a market of aging but wealthy people with a taste for good stuff.
Always been sensitive to sounds and have taken effort over my life to protect my hearing. It may look silly, but I still plug my ears when a large truck/train passes by.
Result is, even at my age, I can still hear those annoying high frequency teenage repellents (ubiquitous in Tokyo). Can also hear some of my electric devices charging.
I'm glad to see such steps being taken by Apple. I always bring my noise canceling buds (Sony, Apple) with me when I go see movies. It's literally painful to watch movies in modern theaters without them. Just too damned loud!
Apple's on the right track. Personalized health and more daily monitoring of said health is gonna be a sea change event.
Wait, those high frequency sounds in Tokyo are teenage repellents? I thought they are bird/insect repellants. I could hear the sounds and was literally getting mini headaches walking around.
They're extremely annoying, aren't they? I was the only one that could hear them out of 5 people in my group, all aged about 35, and they definitely caused me to avoid walking by that shop. Hell, I would have avoided ever buying anything there if I were a local.
Yes you can even adjust the frequency based on which demographics you want to keep from loitering. There is a predictable hearing loss curve for the highest frequencies. You could set it to 20kHz to keep little kids away, or even go as low as 16kHz if you want to keep everyone younger than about college age away. This also happens to be an easy way to test the degree of your own hearing loss compared to your age group.
> It's literally painful to watch movies in modern theaters without them.
> It may look silly, but I still plug my ears when a large truck/train passes by.
Do not be afraid, fellow high-sensitivity brother. As scientifically proven, the normies brains will literally melt when they become unable to follow conversations, excluding them from social life, while being too stubborn to wear hearing aids and suffer from tinitus. Meanwhile we will continue to hear.
> noise cancelling buds
Consider Moldex 780201 SPARK PLUGS, my go to earplugs for sleep and when I am sure I don't need to listen to anything. Deeply inserted they provide extreme noise cancelling and are even better than airpod prods in some frequencies (though worse in others).
Same here, right down to the experience in Tokyo. Both grandfathers had hearing loss and the impact it had on them socially was sad to see. Even with hearing aids. I hope to avoid that fate.
Maybe not as extreme but I also always took great care of my hearing, wearing protection whenever I went out dancing when I was younger and never turning up my music to be nice and loud like my friends did in high school. Now in my mid 30s I have stress-induced tinnitus. Oh well.
Went to see an artist (DJ) I liked and forgot my filters. Remembered that I had my AirPods Pro and used them in transparency mode and after only 10 minutes completely forgot I had them even in. I was surprised how good they worked as hearing protection!
Now when I’m at festivals and I have friends without earplugs, I usually recommend them to just use their AirPods Pro (if they have some) instead of buying cheap plugs
I've done that. At some point I felt like they weren't doing anything and pulled them out only to discover what a good job they had been doing. They lower the volume while keeping the sound pretty much the same. It's incredible.
This comment confuses me, but makes sense. Concerts are for consuming sound, people wear ear plugs??? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose? Like a blindfold in a theater?
Bands, DJs, clubs, concert venues, festivals (almost) all insist on playing music much louder than needed for reasons I'll never understand. The choice between "play music on a decent level for everyone to enjoy without causing hearing loss" and "play music too loud, requiring everyone to either wear ear protection or suffer hearing loss" has somehow been decided in favor of the latter. It's ridiculous.
For some kinds of music it is more or less ingrained in the culture -- think of the "It goes up to 11" in Spinal Tap. But in fact it's worse than that; almost all music is played way too loud.
During the Covid period I attended a number of smaller scale events, that for some reason used a lower sound volume. It Was So Much Better. Those events proved what I already heavily suspected: you do no need those high sound volumes to fully enjoy music.
There's like... two of us. For the life of me I am unable to understand[1] why all musical playback devices must have their volume turned up well past the point of distortion. I really don't want to hear some poor over-stressed subwoofer making chuff-chuff noises as it struggles to play back what must be a square wave because of clipping.
[1] Sigh, actually, I am able to understand but it's just sad instead of funny: the experienced professional musicians have all partially lost their hearing from years of too-loud music. They don't trust the juniors to set up the equipment, so they tune it to their deafness level. This then damages the hearing of the juniors, so by the time they get to be senior enough to be trusted with the volume knob, they're half-deaf themselves.
The main reason is that it's tough to have a uniform sound pressure distribution on a stage. That means the people at the front usually have very high sound levels, while those at the back have way lower. Technicians then make the tradeoff of having too high pressures at the front (where you must have earplugs) to afford to have medium levels at the back.
The music at many concerts and nightclubs is unfortunately loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
Ear plugs reduce the volume to a level where you can still hear the music, but the risk of long term damage is reduced. (You can get "musician's ear plugs" which attenuate all frequencies equally, so they don't make the music sound weird.)
I grabbed a pair of Eymotics several years ago and never looked back. For a while I didn't believe they worked and kept having to take them out, only to realize that they were in fact dampening the volume even though the music sounded the same.
Weirdly, earplugs can make it easier to hear certain detail, despite the reduction in volume. I wear earplugs at concerts and I can hear all the instruments, despite them somehow reducing the intensity of crowd noises. It’s also a lot easier to hear people talking to you, as long as they’re speaking in the direction of your ears.
I know several people who have permanent hearing damage as a result of loud clubs in their 20s. Gotta look after your hearing when listening to love music.
I went to a drum'n'bass party the other week, and if I didn't have earplugs I'm positive I would've had permanent hearing damage from it. I didn't have a decibel meter with me, but if I did I imagine it would simply say "Holy shit". Even with my good earplugs, it was still overwhelmingly loud depending on where I was standing, but with them off no matter where I was it was overwhelming.
Maybe I'm just more cognizant of it these days, but I don't remember festivals and parties in the past turning things up quite so loud as seems to be the case these days.
You can say a lot of things about Apple, but which other consumer-facing tech company adds features meant to accompany people throughout every phase of their lives? People are growing with their smartphones, and the need for some functionalities only starts to become obvious later in life.
Apple really took Sony's playbook and ran with it, with the whole ecosystem play and strategy tax. Jobs famously took inspiration from there, Sony lost to Apple on the music market though, and got toasted again on mobile phones, despite having been researching the market for so long.
This is how court cases work. One side shows a gotcha thing, reporters repeat it, everyone forwards it. Then the other side refutes it, but that doesn't go viral.
It’s just marketing. A plus point in differentiation matrix from gazillion competitors. And a justification for a higher price tag. The products are nice though.
If all marketing had actual consumer benefit we'd be much better off.
I can understand the cynicism, but I think Apple's investment into accessibility and health (I'm talking heart attack detection, not gamified activity tracking fwiw) as a differentiator is one of these rare win-win situations.
That's a very Friedman-esque take. Capitalism is nothing more than private ownership of means and capital (usually in a market largely free of government control). The recent inflation outbreak is a clear example where capitalism is not a win-win. Banks, hedge-funds, private equity are other good examples.
I don't mean that capitalism only produces wins, I mean that companies are incentivised to produce things that consumers will want (the "win-win" the GP mentioned).
That comment mentions "consumer benefit", which is something else that desire, sometimes entirely. It's the origin of the perversion of the free market.
In the classical view, consumer desire is called "demand", and demand creates the incentive. But that's also not the definition of capitalism, and it's also valid for non-capitalist systems.
I understand your point and in someway do agree that it is marketing and it is a way of differentiating themselves.
But inly to justify a higher price tag? Yes it is true they are premium products, but I don't think it's true that they're that much more expensive than similar items occupying the same marketing niche from other manufacturers.
And they are far more than an order of magnitude cheaper than even a low end set of hearing aids.
But all of that is despite the point.
Samsung, Sony, Bose,… The list goes on. I have bought high-end headphones from them all, some with some without noise cancellation. In ear, over the ear, wired and Bluetooth... the list goes on.
NOBODY has a headphone that accommodates my hearing loss except Apple.
And they started doing it years ago as a feature buried in the accessibility settings.
But they kept improving it to the point where it is now FDA approved.
"A plus point in a differentiation matrix…?"
This is the kind of action that buys customer loyalty for life. I hope you never get to experience the depth of hearing loss that many of us have and how utterly transformative this kind of technology not just can be, but IS.
Bose made a product ~10 years back called Hearphones which were far more capable than what Apple is doing here.
IIRC Jabra earbuds have had "hearing aid" features for years. They, unfortunately, don't help with single side deafness the way the Hearphones do.
Apple isn't doing anything groundbreaking here but they are doing it at a very competitive price. The airpod features also do not help with single side deafness. :(
The people I've talked to that have been using them say there's no setting for it and they don't hear anything like audio picked up on one side routed to the other earbud.
>At a shareholder meeting in 2014, a conservative finance group wanted Cook to make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable. Cook replied, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."
> Transparency mode in many of today’s earbuds sounds totally natural and lifelike, yet I still constantly remove my buds to show someone they’ve got my undivided attention. That way of thinking has to change when popular earbuds start pulling double duty as hearing aids. It’s a powerful way to reduce the stigma that’s all too common with hearing aids, but this shift will take time.
This will never be not true. You're fighting human nature. The vast majority of people don't need hearing aids and those who do you'll likely know they need a hearing aid if you're having regular or more personal conversations.
If you're getting your order taken at Starbucks, you can totally have ears in even today.
When was the last time you heard someone get called “four eyes” for wearing glasses? Mockery used to be common but society can improve and it seems like accepting people with disabilities as fully human has been improving even if we still have room to go.
I have a feeling that mostly went away not because society got any more considerate, but rather because glasses became much more commonplace, due to the explosion in prevalence of nearsightedness.
Isn’t that approaching the problem from the other direction? Hearing aids have some stigma because they’re not as widely needed as glasses before old age, but that’s not the primary reason why AirPods sell so the numbers are completely different. In my generation most of us have been talking about older Boomers relatives who’ve resisted visible acceptance of aging and pretty much everyone has been optimistic that they’ll use AirPods and wear an Apple Watch because those don’t telegraph “I’m elderly” the way hearing aids or one of those dedicated fall monitors do.
You said it yourself it's for a specific group of people.
Society will still think it's rude if someone they know who doesn't have a hearing problem under 40 doesn't take their ears out when trying to have a material conversation with them. It doesn't matter how many old people have airpods in. Because again - the younger group generally doesn't need it.
Taking your ears out is a sign of respect and showing attention like the article says.
I haven’t witnessed that dynamic: the people leaving their AirPods in tend to be young in my experience and it doesn’t seem to be seen as rude unless you’re ignoring the other person.
we're saying the same thing - if you have a disability it's totally fine.
You know who in your life has the hearing impairment, but the vast majority do not have this disability thusly "taking your ears out" is respectable.
The glasses analogy only works if general society has hearing impairments, but that's not the direction we're going as the human race, so we won't see this.
Societal views change. Moving from the Jabra Jawbone to AirPods it seems like it went from “that asshole business guy” to “literally everyone” in no time. When I was young, talking on a Bluetooth headset while walking down the street was worthy of derision. Things have changed a lot since then.
To go back way further, wasn’t Sony worried about the Walkman initially because the only people who wore headphones at the time out and about tended to use them for hearing aids at the time?
That’s what I remember hearing.
Obviously that changed when they got super popular. Your AirPods comparison is fantastic I had totally forgotten the phenomenon of “blue tools”.
One of the problems is that, currently, having earbuds in is a social signal of "please leave me alone and don't try to strike up a conversation with me", such as e.g. you might see someone on a train with earbuds in, and you know that means they don't want to be bothered.
> If you're getting your order taken at Starbucks, you can totally have ears in even today.
Prior to hearing aid features, I’d say this is actually quite rude even if you “can.” I don’t think the service workers taking your order appreciate this very much.
Because you’re interacting with another human being who is there helping you. I’m guessing you’ve never worked retail/service before. People treat retail/service workers like shit all the time. To wear an AirPod while ordering is another distancing layer that dehumanizes the other person.
I always take out headphones when interacting with service workers, but I'd say at this point a solid 80% of them have their own airpods in even when taking orders or in a directly customer facing role. I think the social stigma has just changed over time.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the news here is Apple is adding a hearing test app, and "officially" stating that you can use your Airpods Pro like hearing aids.
I mention this as you can use these today as hearing aids, you just need to use a third party app to create your audiogram. I have fairly bad hearing loss and use Airpods instead of hearing aids.
Well kinda in my second point but yes correct. I mentioned as I kept assuming you couldn't use these as such yet, but have been using happily for months now after I realized the functionality was all there.
I suspect the answer is "yes", and probably with an FSA now too. There is a similar situation with the Natural Cycles app, which is cleared by the FDA as a medical device, so you can buy it with an FSA or HSA, or have insurance pay for it - which is mandatory, since it is legally a birth control device, which they have to cover. (It is also a steal for the insurance company since it costs roughly $10 a month.)
I expect that insurance plans that cover hearing aids are going to cover this eventually, as a set of AirPods Pro 2 is $249, which is substantially cheaper than other hearing aids on the market. An open question is if any other manufacturer will be able to get a device that works this well at this price point - the amount of software and chip design engineering that went into H2 and the bridgeOS or RTKitOS that the AirPods run is just not something smaller manufacturers will be able to easily copy.
Now, I wish I could find a better eartips fit for my ears... XS doesn't pass in the app as having a good enough seal, and S is just a little bit uncomfortable for me for all day use.
> An open question is if any other manufacturer will be able to get a device that works this well at this price point - the amount of software and chip design engineering that went into H2 and the bridgeOS or RTKitOS that the AirPods run is just not something smaller manufacturers will be able to easily copy.
Well, "classic" hearing aids have two features that I don't see Apple replicating any time soon: longer battery life (AirPods roughly last around 4-6 hours depending on battery degradation and usage, whereas hearing aids run for days) and most especially, support for audio induction loops [1] - basically PA systems for the impaired, you'll find these in churches, conference/meeting rooms, concert halls/stadiums and in the UK also in taxicabs.
Classic hearing aids will have their place for quite the time to come.
Highly recommend giving Comply Foam tips a shot - I got them a few years ago, total game changer. I replace them approx every year, since they wear out based on your usage pattern.
I must be particularly hard on mine, or wear them far too much. A 3 pack of comply tips will only last me six months. The foam starts to tear and flake off after a while. I'm still quite happy to replace them because the sound isolation and comfort are much better than the silicon tips.
* Air Pods 2 were approved by the FDA in September
* iOS (and iPadOS) 18.1, for which the release candidate was released earlier today, comes with the ability to enable hearing aid mode and with a hearing test
* based on the hearing test, the AirPods can automatically compensate how things sound to you
* Apple has announced that iOS 18.1 will be released next week
Yep. I still haven't been able to determine if this "new" feature is any different from what already exists.
I hope so because when you enable your audiogram for transparency it sounds like you're in an ASMR video. There's no way to make it sound natural but louder, which is what I would expect from a hearing aid.
The audio gram stuff existed, but wasn’t well known and as mentioned required a third party app.
The hearing aid stuff was only recently certified by the FDA as an OTC hearing aid. Apple has had a mode for a many years where AirPods + iPhone could act like a hearing aid. But it didn’t meat the medical classifications.
Right but the question is how much - if at all - different hearing aid mode is from what was already there. It's possibly it was already compliant but simply hadn't been certified. Or maybe it's way different, I haven't been able to find any information on any differences.
Without the new software, there is no boost to external sound in transparency mode, so they are not useful as hearing aids. I’m looking forward to testing the new release.
Actually you can set up a good approximation using iPhoneOS>Settings>Accessibility>Audio & Visual>Headphone Accommodations. Under Custom Audio Setup, you can select a audiogram, such as produced by an app like Mimi, or scanned in from your audiologist.
Yep, the path for this official recognition was cleared by the executive order two years ago that allowed for hearing aids to be sold over the counter!
Either way it's just a label. You've already been able to do the same thing for years. Just use the free Mimi hearing test app, save the audiogram to Health, then apply it in headphone accommodations.
I'd like to see Apple run some opt-in scientific trials.
For example: Does active noise cancellation result in more or less hearing loss?
Or Alcohol consumption: Apple Health could ask each day how many drinks you had and many people want to track it anyway. Correlate that to health metrics at a wide scale. It'd be much more powerful than any currently existing study given the userbase likely to opt-in.
Let people see exactly the data that will be uploaded prior to consenting to alleviate any privacy concerns. They already have stronger data-protection and anonymity mechanisms than those used by most studies built directly into the phone.
Cool, I didn't realize this was a thing. Kind of disappointing to see only 2-3 studies available through the Apple Research app though, I wonder why it isn't more widely used.
Do most research teams have to build their own app?
> there’ll be detailed comparisons between the AirPods Pro 2 and existing OTC devices in the near future once iOS 18.1 is widely available.
As someone with a diagnosed, severe hearing loss, I wonder how these compare to prescription hearing aids. I currently wear a pair of Phonak hearing aids and am looking to replace them, but I wonder if spending 5-6k on another pair is worth it versus the OTC or Apple AirPod options that exist today.
If you have severe and above hearing loss, these won’t help much. This is what I have gotten to know from lot of forums. They do work well for my moderate-to-severe hearing loss. Been using for around 7 months now.
Yes the problem with severe hearing loss is that hearing aids simply cannot compensate for what is no longer there.
Hearing aids are actually a a lot more complicated than just boosting frequencies. At the very simplest, these days they are wide/multi band compressors that try to balance discomfort with natural hearing, generally focusing on speech intelligibility since that is by far the most important target.
If you have severe hearing loss I would strongly recommend putting yourself in the care of a professional. Costco is a great source of probably the lowest cost versus highest quality hearing aids these days... but the reason I say "professional" is because there are so many kinds of hearing loss and they all affect your perception markedly differently.
It's a lot more than just "missing some sensitivity at some frequencies".
I know what you mean. I am in India. Hearing aids are exorbitantly priced here and there is no Costco. I will definitely go for more professional ones once I can afford them, and not just buying them, but losing them too.
My experience is that they serve different purposes.
I have a very nice and expensive set of ReSound hearing aids and they're fabulous at what they do, which is focus on speech and kind of on music if I set them for that.
They're also unobtrusive and easily last 18-20 hours on a charge. I forget I'm wearing them, and nobody notices that I have them.
My AirPods I use primarily for running and listening to music because they just sound unbelievably better, and they're probably fine for a concert although I haven't done that with them. But I think for long-term use every day all day it wouldn't be that comfortable or unobtrusive.
Would love to hear the experience of somebody who's trying it, though!
I don't have hearing loss, but I wear 2 pairs of AirPods Pro 2 over the course of a 10 hour day. The reason I have 2 pairs is because 1 pair only gets 5-6 hours of battery life, and I need to swap them while they recharge in the case.
Comfort? To me, very comfortable. I just leave them in there with Active Noise Canceling on all the time.
I may be showing my age, but if you remember "Get Smart", AirPods Pro 2 are like a Cone of Silence -- except they actually work.
Looking at the web, they’re also over $4500. I think the people who will most appreciate the AirPods are the ones that can now afford to put something in their ear to help their hearing.
In my experience, the rubbery Apple ear tips in the AirPods have better sound isolation and audio quality, but foam aftermarket tips better keep the AirPods from falling out.
> And the main tradeoff with the AirPods Pro 2 is battery life: they can last for around six hours with the hearing aid engaged, which doesn’t match what you’ll get from many OTC and prescription hearing aids.
Since they are comparing to devices $1K and up, maybe getting two pairs makes sense.
noticed something similar with my non airport Noise cancelling earbuds. If I had to guess, I'd say those frequencies we can't hear are still damaging our ears
I have a feeling that it might be difficult for Apple to obtain FDA authorization for a system consisting in part of a device that Apple didn't manufacture (i.e. an Android phone). Getting the iPhone + Airpods system authorized was unusual enough already.
I've seen this mentioned before here in the comments, but custom fitted ear protection isn't that expensive if you consider the amount of time you can use them for and especially if you consider the damage to your hearing in terms of monetary elements.
I had to work in very loud and noisy environments and I also cycled to work through rush hour traffic in a busy city. The roughly 150$ for a custom molded in-ear protectors/filters (they lower between 10 and 25 db specifically aimed at limiting big event noises - music/announcers/etc). You can even get models with swappable filters, so you can easily get a few filters for different needs and swap them out.
Check with your local pharmacy or doctor and get them. If you can't afford them as $150 is a lot for many people, I've had a friend use the loop in ear protectors, but at an event where we worked a 16 hour day, he said that they got very uncomfortable, while my custom-fitted ones were still good!
I've watched a couple of members of my parents generation struggle to admit they need hearing aids, and prefer not to wear them a lot of the time, even when they miss things people say. I doubt the current generations are going to have that problem!
My girlfriend is hard of hearing and wears hearing aids. When we first started dating I tried them at one point to see what it sounded like. I knew right then apple was going to come for that market. I was like my airpods can do real time noise cancellation, these cant even amplify with out a very noticeable delay.
Also if you're a costco member you can get your hearing checked in their audiology department. its included in your membership. you should use it.
I'm not a father at this point in my life but one of my small fears is that the sound of a baby crying would cause me a headache very quickly (based on my experience on airplanes) and that I would struggle to be a more present father because of it.
Has anybody tried a slight volume reduction adjustment with AirPods, or maybe one of those special earplugs that just make things quieter and noticed any difference in their parenting?
Yes! I’ve used Etymotic Research’s concert/motorcycle earplugs for a few years now but there are a few others on the market for mild noise reduction. It’s roughly a 10 dB reduction and makes a lot of loud sounds more tolerable (including toddler temper tantrums) while also still being able to have conversations. I keep a pair in every bag and find them pretty helpful in loud restaurants and bars. I keep my AirPods as a backup, sometimes with some brown and pink noise (slightly lower pitch than white noise).
I do love my AirPods Pro and use them in all modes except for spatial audio. I have a bug that I cannot fix for almost a year: reversed channels when connected to MacBook Pro M1. Especially the spatial audio is totally wrong. I have tried everything, resetting AirPods, Mac, Bluetooth, reinstalling drivers. It is fine with my iphone. But just totally wrong with my particular MBP. Any ideas?
You can — today — use an app like Mimi to get a hearing test on your phone, which will write an audiogram to Apple Health, which you can then get your phone to use to tailor how your headphones sound. It’s amazing stuff.
Based on the graph it looks like the hearing test only tests out to 8 kHz. That's disappointing. That's also the limit at most audiologists offices. It would be nice to have a good test that goes farther.
Of course, the "important sounds" are mostly below 8 kHz, but I think they're missing out by not looking at higher-frequency sound sensitivity, since that's the first thing you lose.
I think its awesome that Apple has built these features, and I prefer to live in a world where they exist versus don't.
The hearing aid feature, to me, is a little overblown. It feels to me like the biggest positive impact it will have is, with some luck, forcing down the price of typical hearing aids and opening up the conversation on more competition. It might also be good in a pinch, and good for lower income customers(?), but I think at the end of the day there's a reason why hearing aids are generally pretty slim, skin colored, and innocuous. There's no reason why I have to take my Airpods out when I order Chipotle, I can hear everyone perfectly fine with them in, but I do because there will always be social stigma talking with someone who has earplugs in.
There was an "event" on Threads a while back where a wedding photographer asked "the world's" opinion about asking attendees to take their Apple Watches off. Some people say "oh hell yeah, those are gaudy, I don't want any of my wedding party even wearing one at any point in the event", meanwhile one person responded "The Apple Watch is literally a medical device for me, I need to wear it as often as possible, I can't take it off". Idk; feels like a related concept. Sometimes the social stigma doesn't matter, these devices drive some people insane with anxiety about their health, Apple's marketing plays up the anxiety because it sells hardware every year... at some point, someone will say "I can't take the Airpods out, they're my hearing aids, as diagnosed by iOS 18.1", and maybe this is just me being an old man yelling at clouds, but... that's cringe, go see a doctor.
The other angle I don't hear talked about enough: The Air Pods Pros don't have the battery life to really fill the same role as hearing aids.
It’s interesting that I perceive my hearing is still pretty stellar albeit during a surprise attack in my military service, a guy started firing his assault rifle right next to my unprotected ear…
A large part of the article focuses on using airpods at concerts and how loud the environment can be.
- Can airpods tell me how loud a room is?
- Which settings should I use for a concert to preserve fidelity? How do they compare to "concert" branded consumer earplugs, like Loop/Etymotic/SoundProtex ?
I've actually tried using the AirPods Pro 2 transparency mode at a Coldplay concert where I was gifted a last minute ticket.
> Can airpods tell me how loud a room is?
I don't think so, but my Apple Watch can.
> Which settings should I use for a concert to preserve fidelity? How do they compare to "concert" branded consumer earplugs, like Loop/Etymotic/SoundProtex ?
Transparency mode was fine, but focuses on blocking and reproducing sound through the built-in microphone and speakers.
They will never be as good as "concert" earplugs which reduce volume evenly.
I was disappointed that Apple had to downgrade the ANC in Airpods back then because of copyright problems, but they went full in and created a much stronger product out of it!
Imagine being student taking an exam... Normaly you would be disallowed to have bluetooth earpiece, but you would be allowed to have hearing aid. I'll let you think of the possible outcomes...
Next comes translation on the fly and boom - Apple suddenly listens to the world. But of course is nothing recorded, sure that.
Although the undisputed value in all this, won’t we still find it weird everything is always being (recorded and) processed. Or perhaps is weird when it’s not if you are born this way.
A new post-modernism of yet unknown proportions is going to be in a dare need.
Can’t stop thinking of Aldous Huxley with this and Adderall and all.
Fragile and too expensive to replace often. The software updates that apple pushes on to them screws them up. Happened to my first set of airpods and swore off of them since then. The batteries are awful too.
My go to since then has been the one plus z2 headsets, brilliant call quality, great form factor, decent ANC, and fantastic battery.
Just adding to this, for the general audience, hearing aids are thousands of dollars, and virtually all users describe the industry as a "racket." Features that improve their functionality, such as adapters for Bluetooth etc., are dedicated hardware modules with proprietary interfaces, and expensive too.
Also, everybody I know who has hearing aids eventually ends up getting them at Costco.
That’s what I’ve heard too. And they didn’t like the ones they had to get in the end, they didn’t work well but that was all insurance would cover.
But if they’re $4000 a pair, that’s _sixteen_ pairs of AirPods 2 Pro. Assuming you don’t get them on sale.
So if you lose/break ‘em every 6 months, which seems quite excessive, that’s still 8 years to break even with “real” hearing aids.
And that’s not to mention the fact that you can buy replacement individual AirPods or cases cheaper than a full set. Or just get AppleCare so replacements are even cheaper if you tend to lose/damage them a lot.
Even if you buy them and they convince you hearing aids would be useful but you want more traditional hearing aids, it still seems like it might be a good value. Compared to risking $4000 on something you might not even feel is that useful to you.
And/or Buy the AirPods Pros at Costco. Headphones fall under their standard return policy (or did as of about 2 years ago) so if they break, you have quick and easy recourse.
If anybody from the accessibility teams is reading this, please know that it is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude and my appreciation for the amount of work this must've taken.
Music sounds unbelievably better through my AirPod pros, and I didn't even know what I had lost until I heard it again.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of my middle aged compatriots don't even know how much their hearing has degraded… Get your hearing test tested, folks, while you still have it!