Compensate for Age Related Hearing Loss

Trevor.Dennis  wrote I usually listen via a pair of Tapco S5 monitors, but I have just put my system back together after a house refurb, so I am just using Logitech computer monitors right now.  That was obviously not a fair test, so I have switched to the Sennheiser 280PRO headphones that I use to monitor audio when shooting video.  This is better, but the before and after in the Mike Russell videos is way less pronounced than I feel sure it would be for a younger person. So, the above is a long winded leaded up to asking if there is any point in me trying to clean up my voice audio with the limitation of my hearing?  Am I likely to make high frequencies too strong so that I can hear it, but it will sound dreadful to normal ears?  IME most of the voice audio on the Tech Wednesday sessions is pretty dire, and that includes some of the Adobe staff, so I am hoping I can do better than that.

Oh my goodness - there's a lot to say about this!

First up, you don't have to keep typing Age-Related Hearing Loss, as it has a proper name - Presbycusis. No it's not avoidable; I certainly suffer from it to a limited degree now. Is it a disaster when it comes to mixing or sound balancing? Well actually no... there even one advantage, believe it or not.

Firstly, you need to be aware of the way the human ear works at different sound levels. Traditionally this is commonly related to some curves generated by Fletcher and Munsen, but this has been updated somewhat. To get a basic idea of what's happening, look at this: https://ledgernote.com/columns/mixing-mastering/fletcher-munson-curve/

Now, you will see that it's always been difficult to set mixes up correctly, never mind Presbycusis! So what do you have to do in practice? At its simplest, you just have to make your mix EQ adjustments at a slightly higher sound level than you previously might have. But you also have to take account of the fact that as your hearing starts to fail, it also has the subjective effect of becoming more directional, although it isn't, really - that's just part of the 'cocktail' effect which is mainly down to HF loss. So your position relative to your monitors is also important - you pretty much need to be on-axis. If you get a recording of some good 'normal' speech, you can fairly easily determine what level your monitors need to be at for it to sound okay to you, and once you've done that you have a benchmark. What you may well find is that this is a higher level than somebody a bit younger might prefer, but hey, this is about you, not them!

Strangely enough, it's the cocktail effect that can be useful to you here. You may well find that it's easier to detect the positions of sound sources and levels more accurately in a mix, simply because naturally, you're having to pay more attention to hearing in a crowded environment anyway. I think that the extent of this varies according to the individual - it's a bit of a movable feast.

The other thing to note is about those sound tests linked to above. They are steady-tone tests, and don't entirely reflect what your ears can actually do. The reason for this is simple; your ears' response to transients is way better than its steady tone response. This is generally because transients tend to be at a higher level than the rest of the sound they're associated with, so once again the level curves come into play - sort-of follows, really.

It is worth getting a pair of monitors with a known-good HF response. The Tapcos may be okay, but their peak power is somewhat limited, so you'll need to use them as intended - as near-field monitors, and make sure that your ears are on axis with the tweeters.

What Dave did above was pretty sensible processing, and it's rather a shame that some of the others don't take a leaf out of his book! The one thing that I'd note though is that although you can get away with speech in a band up to just 4kHz, including some of the higher frequencies will increase the potential  transient level, and that will make it easier for anybody who's suffering with hearing loss. The reason, incidentally, that the phone companies have always got away with this sort of HF cutting is that phones are directly firing into your ear, so you don't get all the interference that would make the transients more useful. That's why sometimes a 'presence boost' between 6-10kHz can improve intelligibility more than you might credit...

Hi Trevor

Thanks for the nice comments.The audio was not perfect, it was just an ordinary headset mic, but my aim was just to avoid some of the issues that I often hear on those live sessions.

So just to clarify what I used to clean up the audio a little.

1. I used an application called VB Cable ( from VB Audio). It allows you to use a "virtual cable" to output from Audition then take that as an input to the Connect live session, thereby inserting the audition mixer into the Connect session mic feed.

2. In the audition mixer I used a Dynamics effect to add:
a. A noise gate - to cut out the background fan noise from my PC between speech

b. A compressor - just to smooth the levels

c. A limiter - to avoid those horrible digital clicks we sometimes hear on the live sessions

3. Again in the audition mixer I used a parametric equaliser to roll off the very low (<60Hz ) and very high (>10kHz) frequencies. I then added a dip around 4.6KHz where there was some nasty sibilance and added  little boost around 100Hz and 200Hz

All of the above could be done with limited frequency range in your ears as most speech content is in the lower range of hearing  anyway (telephony uses 300Hz-3400KHz) and far from boosting the high frequencies >10Khz , I cut them to get rid of any hiss.

I hope this helps.

Dave