Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave Would it be possible to get an audiologist to give me a frequency plot of my lousy hearing? Then I could play everything through a multimedia pc applying reverse equalisation to correct for my hearing.
Not enough to get back most of what you lost. Your high frequency hearing above 10KHz is gone forever, your audiologist probably won't even test for it and depending on how much your hearing has deteriorated, you might not have much left above 5KHz. Brass and strings have already lost their zing (because the third and fourth harmonics are in that range), your brain is relying on your auditory memory to fill in the blanks and give you the warm feelings you used to get from the music.
My hearing loss history spans more than 30 years, I lost almost all of the hearing in my right ear before I was 25 due to a couple of ear infections (but not before I sunk all my "surplus" income into stereo equipment). 20 years later the hearing in my left ear was declining to the point where I was having trouble following multiple conversations in crowded rooms and in 2008 I got my first hearing aid to boost moderate hearing loss (along with a biaural crossover). Then in 2015 I lost almost all of my hearing in my left ear within 72 hours and ended up with a cochlear implant in my right (formerly dead) ear and an ultrapower hearing aid in my left ear. Combined with the Bluetooth and FM capabilities of a Roger Pen, I can follow conversations better now than I could in 2008, but music sounds like an orchestra of mice playing piccolos inside steel drums, accompanied by a chorus of screeching birds. The brain is a miraculous organ, when I listen to my LPs from the seventies and eighties, it shuts off the auditory nerves and plays back all of my favorite tracks from memory. I can still appreciate music that hasn't been burned into my memory circuits, but it is not remotely close to what people with normal hearing get.
I guess the point I want to get across is that the active sound processing done by your brain is vastly superiour to what can be accomplished with electronic equalization. Everything that increases the information received by your brain is good, but if your brain stops trying to make life sound better, any technological assistance is wasted.