As age catches up with us our hearing is one of the first indications we’re losing capabilities. Cleverly, we’ve invented gismos to amplify ambient sound, even choosing which bandwidths need the most help, depending on the audiologist’s results.
These things, until recently, cost upwards of $5000
for a really “good” one; one with more functions than others, and with higher quality components. You pay a premium for miniaturization and invisibility as well.
There are very accurate hi-fi earbuds in the $500 range that are wired. From reports they do an amazing job of compensating for hearing loss by much the same technique as a sound engineer at his board; one moves sliders that control bandpass filters. Bluetooth and self-contained hearing aids work the same way. Unfortunately, their proprietary programs are unimaginative and very basic, and follow formulaic rules from the manufacturers. The testing results are entered into the program and the earbuds are adjusted automatically when placed in a dock. Finer adjustments tuned to particular clients are not possible. There are usually some pre-programmed settings for conversation, car, restaurant, concert, etc, but they are bogus. One problem is that the microphones in earbuds are so tiny and oddly positioned that the sound is not nearly as good from them as from a phone mic.
So we’ve got a mic, an amplifier, a more-than-capable hardware device (the phone), fancy software bandpass programs, transmission (bluetooth), reception (earbud bluetooth). What we don’t have is a direct mic signal that emulates a music program signal.
I would like to see a software patch that characterizes the mic input into the phone as a music signal so that hi-fi earbuds and other sound output devices could get a live feed from the phone. This would allow an audiologist or the end user to tune for specific situations with a greater degree of accuracy over a wider range, and would be independent of the internal earbud’s hardware and software.
As well as hearing aids, the live mic connection could be used as a remote mic for a loudspeaker or any remote speaker.
FOUND IT, BLAST! App store: Mic to Speaker - Virtual Mic