Long story short, I have congenital hearing loss. All the men in my family do. It causes me to not hear in the midrange very well. About 60dbs worse than a normal person in the 500Hz to 4000Hz range. I have naturally scooped mids! :P Well last week I got hearing aids and all my EQs for my stereos sound awful now since they were set based on my natural hearing. I have today off so I went to the jam room and plugged in for the first time since getting the hearing aids. I don't wear them when I play for obvious reasons, but I decided to do a tone test as it were. I chose Bold As Love as it is clean to heavily overdriven. When playing it without the hearing aids, the tone sounded great. Listening back (with hearing aids) it sounds WAY too midrangey to me. SO my questions are:
- Does it sounds too mid-rangey to you?
- Do you think it's the recording or is my tone just like that?
It's possible that it sounds bad to me because my ears and brain are still getting accustomed to hearing differently. If you've got four minutes to spare take a listen and crit my tone. You don't need to crit my playing. ;)
https://soundcloud.com/jim-kendrick/bold-as-love
I don't have headphones and I think it would be really hard to distinguish between your tone and whatever else happened to the tone during the recording process. How does music sound now they ya got your ears upgraded? You can still compare your tone to recordings of the tone your trying to cop.
Well as I said my old EQ settings had to go, but even still it's not sounding good. A bit more detail might help. My hearing, despite being terrible in the midrange, is actually phenomenal in the high highs and low lows. I'm about 50db better than the "normal" at 250Hz and below and 8000Hz and above. So I've always been more sensitive to the extremes. The hearing aids do not have a ton of dynamic range. So while I can hear much better in the frequencies of human voice, it's essentially microphones and speakers and my natural ability to hear the high highs and low lows is gone. So, while I can compare to other tone samples, it's not so simple for me until I really get accustomed to this new way of hearing, which could take a month or so. Even then I don't think I will ever be an accurate judge of how things sound to anyone other than me. Does that make sense?