Apple Hearing

Anybody who knew me when I was a teenager knew that I played drums at church, went to band practice every week, and on any given Friday or Saturday night went out to either see a band play or would be on stage myself. My mom—who was a musician herself—always stressed that earplugs were important and your hearing was something you can't get back once it's gone.

Dumb teenager me doing dumb things, I often kept a few pairs of earplugs in my stick bag but almost never put them on when I was playing. On top of that, the problem with being a band full of poor teenagers is that things like extra speakers and in-ear monitors weren't something we'd invest our part-time paychecks on. So if you’re the drummer and you want to hear the vocals and whatever the guitar is playing you’d put the main speaker and amps behind the kit and listen to them from there. You're also sitting at one of the loudest instruments in the band that has a huge dynamic range between the bass and all the cymbals.

Anyway, somewhere in my 20s I started noticing that I had a hard time hearing in my right ear. I went to the doctor and got my ears cleaned and checked out. While I was having a few issues with hearing a few different sounds it wasn’t bad enough to diagnose me as hard-of-hearing or anywhere worse than that. But I knew that something was off.

Now that I'm 40 I know for sure that my early drumming days did some serious damage. I often find myself having a hard time hearing people in crowded areas where a lot of talking is going on and I find myself asking people to repeat what they said from time to time.

It’s all my fault and while the ship has sailed I have found that being a remote employee has really helped me deal with it at work (because every conversation can be turned up with a volume knob). Elsewhere I find myself using headphones a lot to consume media and for basic hearing protection. I keep a pair of over-the-ear monitors at my drum kit for when I play at home, I have a pair of noise cancelling, over-the-ear headphones for when I mow the lawn or do anything in the wood shop, a pair of headphones for solo watching TV (which is also about not disturbing everyone in the house), and as of the last couple months I've started doing the thing I learned on ATP where you can wear AirPods Pros at concerts to kill off sounds above a certain decibel range.

At its 2024 iPhone event, Apple announced a software update coming to all AirPods Pros (2nd generation) that turn them into clinical-grade hearing aids. I can’t wait for this to roll out officially because A. I already have a pair of AirPods Pro that will work with this feature so it's just a software upgrade for me, and B. at this point I always have my AirPods Pros on me anyway.

My understanding of the feature is that you use an iPhone on iOS 18 to do a hearing test, then it helps you create a profile that syncs to all of your Apple devices. This means my iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV would all use this hearing profile to make audio sound better for me. Then as part of the AirPods themselves I can essentially put them in a hearing aid mode where it not only pumps noise from around me into the earbuds but it'll use that profile to help enhance the right sounds that work better for my ears.

While I don’t love being in this situation to begin with, at least I hope this new AirPods feature will help me out a little bit.