How do hearing test results translate to a graphic equalizer?
September 9, 2024 1:22 PM Subscribe
How can I translate my hearing test results to a music player's graphic equalizer so that I can boost certain frequencies to match how a recorded music track is meant to sound?
My hearing test indicates relatively minor hearing loss in treble frequencies (too many loud band practices and shows way back when, most likely). It's not serious enough for hearing aids. But it strikes me that it would be interesting to translate the results of the hearing test into a DAW or graphic equalizer so that I could boost frequencies (while leaving the main volume reasonable) and hear recorded music closer to how the recording engineers intended it to sound. How would I go about this? Is there a way to convert the numbers, or is just fiddling with the mix the best way to go?
My hearing test indicates relatively minor hearing loss in treble frequencies (too many loud band practices and shows way back when, most likely). It's not serious enough for hearing aids. But it strikes me that it would be interesting to translate the results of the hearing test into a DAW or graphic equalizer so that I could boost frequencies (while leaving the main volume reasonable) and hear recorded music closer to how the recording engineers intended it to sound. How would I go about this? Is there a way to convert the numbers, or is just fiddling with the mix the best way to go?
Also in general if I was going to toy around with the idea of tweaking EQ to compensate for hearing losses I would go with parametric equalization first over graphic EQ.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:51 PM on September 9
posted by soundguy99 at 1:51 PM on September 9
Can you get an audiogram of your pure-tone hearing test?
Should be just a matter of drawing out the reverse of that on your equalizer plug-in... (he said, spitballing with all of the confidence of a mediocre white guy who's used Logic Pro a little bit...).
posted by straw at 3:51 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]
Should be just a matter of drawing out the reverse of that on your equalizer plug-in... (he said, spitballing with all of the confidence of a mediocre white guy who's used Logic Pro a little bit...).
posted by straw at 3:51 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]
if you're in the Apple universe you might be interested in this upcoming Airpods Pro 2 feature which apparently will be able to do this automatically:
Apple is also launching a “clinical grade” hearing aid mode, as part of a software update coming later this year.posted by BungaDunga at 4:07 PM on September 9
Firstly, users can take a clinically-validated hearing test. The hearing test uses your AirPods and iPhone, and can be conducted by a user in under five times [sic: minutes?]. The result of your hearing test can be viewed securely in the Health app.
If hearing loss is detected, the hearing aid mode is then available to use. The AirPods will make it easier to hear sounds from the world around you. A custom hearing profile is automatically applied when listening to audio, like music or podcasts.
If you're on iPhone/iPad with either Apple or Beats headphones you already have the ability to accommodate a custom hearing profile.
An app like Mimi can test you and save a profile, which you can then select under Settings app > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Headphone Accommodations > Custom Audio Setup
posted by churl at 5:52 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]
An app like Mimi can test you and save a profile, which you can then select under Settings app > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Headphone Accommodations > Custom Audio Setup
posted by churl at 5:52 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]
Hmm, just by complete chance I've spent the past several days messing around with just exactly this. The nice thing is, it's a system that compensates for your hearing but also for your exact system and headphones/speakers, too - and the end result is, my $20 or $40 headphones end up sounding as good as $200 or $400 models.
- Simplest & easiest: Just turn up the treble a little until it sounds good to you. That will honestly get you 90% of the way there with 0.1% of the effort.
- PEACE equalizer for windows is something of a process to get set up and working, but once you do it gives you excellent control of your audio output in windows. Just for example it will auto-adjust depending on what headphones or speakers you are using at the moment.
But particularly important to your question: It has the "Hearing Test" functionality and then the ability to generate an EQ profile based on your personal hearing test results. It's a little button center right on the main interface. Instructions and more instructions.
What you do is go through the hearing test process, it will get you your hearing curve, and then - just as important! - translate the directly into a set of EQ settings for you.
Once you have the hearing test completed (ideally for each ear separately), then "save" the results and "use". In use, Frequency range 20-16000, Peak Filters, Strength Normal, Quality Normal. (You can also try Graphic EQ instead of Peak Filters - you'll notice it is similar in most ways - and maybe easier to translate into adjustments needed for your home stereo or other units.)
Once you have done that, you will end up with a EQ setting in PEACE. Be sure to save that and also "Export" just to be safe.
Now you can transfer that to any other device you might use. Unfortunately I have not found a good way to save the settings as a file and transfer, but you just look at the settings for the EQ (Frequency, gain in dB, and Quality (Q)) and transfer them to your other device.
In Android I use PowerAmp for EQ of all sounds. There are other possibilities - one is "Wavelet".
- Another helpful utility/web site is Squig. If you click on the "Equalizer" button there, you can enter your EQ settings - for example from PEACE as above - and then export them as either "filters" (equivalent of EQ settings in PEACE) or "Graphic EQ (Wavelet)" which is the Graphic EQ version.
FYI "filters" is better and more precise but "graphic EQ" is simpler and usually good enough.
Those exports can be directly imported into either PowerAmp or Wavelet - the Android apps that control EQ. You can also enter or import the values into a media player like Symfonium. In general you can input the EQ settings into any app or music player that handles such things, in Android or iPhone or whatever (even just a graphic EQ board on a home stereo or similar). Just either manually input the values you got from PEACE or approximate the shape of the Graphical EQ as best you can using the graph it or Squig produced.
It is handy, but not really essential, to be able to export & import exact settings files as you can do among Squig, PowerAmp, Wavelet, & Symfonium.
- Another trick is to use a sine wave tone generator such as you will see near the bottom of the Squig equalizer screen. (You can also google terms like "sine wave sweep" - lots available on the web.) The main use for that tone generator is to sweep across the upper range (say 3000hz or 5000hz and up) and note any peaks & valleys in loudness there. You can then input a specific peak filter at each high and/or low point to try to smooth those down some.
This is more in the realm of extreme tweaks. With the EQ you got from the hearing test, your are like 98% of the way there - because that concentrates on the range of frequencies that are used most in human hearing. If those are wrong, nothing you will do in tweaking the high frequencies a bit will matter at all.
Note that you can't - and shouldn't - try to use this to get a perfectly flat response (in sound volume) all the way across. That's because human hearing has a natural large hump in the response curve between about 1.5khz and 8khz. This tone generator does not compensate for that - and you don't want to flatten this curve out as it is a natural and helpful aspect of human hearing.
- Another very good trick - which bypasses the issue of the "hump in the response curve" mentioned above, is to use a so-called "perceptual sweep" tone. Downloadable version here.
This is a sine wave sweep through the entire range of human hearing which DOES compensate for the hump. So you can play this sweep repeatedly (and at faster/slower speeds) and adjust your EQ until it sounds as flat all the way across as you can get it.
Concentrate particularly on getting it as flat as you can between say 60hz and 8000hz.
The nice thing about this is you can play back the perceptual sweep on any device/speaker/headphone combination and without a lot of hoo-hah, just tweak the dials or knobs or sliders until it sounds "good enough" - which is pretty easy to judge because you are just shooting for loudness that remains reasonably constant as the sweep goes across the core of the frequency spectrum.
(Again, don't kill yourself off trying to get the lower frequencies below say 60 hz or the higher ones above 8000hz too perfect - there are definite diminishing returns there.)
In a minute or two you can get the EQ good enough for most purposes.
posted by flug at 9:41 PM on September 9 [20 favorites]
- Simplest & easiest: Just turn up the treble a little until it sounds good to you. That will honestly get you 90% of the way there with 0.1% of the effort.
- PEACE equalizer for windows is something of a process to get set up and working, but once you do it gives you excellent control of your audio output in windows. Just for example it will auto-adjust depending on what headphones or speakers you are using at the moment.
But particularly important to your question: It has the "Hearing Test" functionality and then the ability to generate an EQ profile based on your personal hearing test results. It's a little button center right on the main interface. Instructions and more instructions.
What you do is go through the hearing test process, it will get you your hearing curve, and then - just as important! - translate the directly into a set of EQ settings for you.
Once you have the hearing test completed (ideally for each ear separately), then "save" the results and "use". In use, Frequency range 20-16000, Peak Filters, Strength Normal, Quality Normal. (You can also try Graphic EQ instead of Peak Filters - you'll notice it is similar in most ways - and maybe easier to translate into adjustments needed for your home stereo or other units.)
Once you have done that, you will end up with a EQ setting in PEACE. Be sure to save that and also "Export" just to be safe.
Now you can transfer that to any other device you might use. Unfortunately I have not found a good way to save the settings as a file and transfer, but you just look at the settings for the EQ (Frequency, gain in dB, and Quality (Q)) and transfer them to your other device.
In Android I use PowerAmp for EQ of all sounds. There are other possibilities - one is "Wavelet".
- Another helpful utility/web site is Squig. If you click on the "Equalizer" button there, you can enter your EQ settings - for example from PEACE as above - and then export them as either "filters" (equivalent of EQ settings in PEACE) or "Graphic EQ (Wavelet)" which is the Graphic EQ version.
FYI "filters" is better and more precise but "graphic EQ" is simpler and usually good enough.
Those exports can be directly imported into either PowerAmp or Wavelet - the Android apps that control EQ. You can also enter or import the values into a media player like Symfonium. In general you can input the EQ settings into any app or music player that handles such things, in Android or iPhone or whatever (even just a graphic EQ board on a home stereo or similar). Just either manually input the values you got from PEACE or approximate the shape of the Graphical EQ as best you can using the graph it or Squig produced.
It is handy, but not really essential, to be able to export & import exact settings files as you can do among Squig, PowerAmp, Wavelet, & Symfonium.
- Another trick is to use a sine wave tone generator such as you will see near the bottom of the Squig equalizer screen. (You can also google terms like "sine wave sweep" - lots available on the web.) The main use for that tone generator is to sweep across the upper range (say 3000hz or 5000hz and up) and note any peaks & valleys in loudness there. You can then input a specific peak filter at each high and/or low point to try to smooth those down some.
This is more in the realm of extreme tweaks. With the EQ you got from the hearing test, your are like 98% of the way there - because that concentrates on the range of frequencies that are used most in human hearing. If those are wrong, nothing you will do in tweaking the high frequencies a bit will matter at all.
Note that you can't - and shouldn't - try to use this to get a perfectly flat response (in sound volume) all the way across. That's because human hearing has a natural large hump in the response curve between about 1.5khz and 8khz. This tone generator does not compensate for that - and you don't want to flatten this curve out as it is a natural and helpful aspect of human hearing.
- Another very good trick - which bypasses the issue of the "hump in the response curve" mentioned above, is to use a so-called "perceptual sweep" tone. Downloadable version here.
This is a sine wave sweep through the entire range of human hearing which DOES compensate for the hump. So you can play this sweep repeatedly (and at faster/slower speeds) and adjust your EQ until it sounds as flat all the way across as you can get it.
Concentrate particularly on getting it as flat as you can between say 60hz and 8000hz.
The nice thing about this is you can play back the perceptual sweep on any device/speaker/headphone combination and without a lot of hoo-hah, just tweak the dials or knobs or sliders until it sounds "good enough" - which is pretty easy to judge because you are just shooting for loudness that remains reasonably constant as the sweep goes across the core of the frequency spectrum.
(Again, don't kill yourself off trying to get the lower frequencies below say 60 hz or the higher ones above 8000hz too perfect - there are definite diminishing returns there.)
In a minute or two you can get the EQ good enough for most purposes.
posted by flug at 9:41 PM on September 9 [20 favorites]
Mod note: [Yay, synchronicity! This question and Flug's great answer have been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:11 AM on September 15
posted by taz (staff) at 1:11 AM on September 15
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Generally, on graphic or parametric EQ's, low (bass) is the left side, highs (treble) are the right.
I think your main issue would be that without some kind of detail in the results of your hearing test there's no way to reliably convert to a graphic or parametric EQ setting. If your doctor just said, "Well, you've got some hearing loss in the treble frequencies" that's really pretty vague. "Treble frequencies" could mean anything from maybe 2 kilohertz up to 20 k.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:40 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]