Apple AirPods Pro 2 Detailed Hearing Aid Review
quite frankly I’m surprised that apple is able to get away with this back in September of 2020 Apple released their iOS 14 update which essentially turned their airpods Pro into hearing aids of course at that time I did a detailed review on the airpods pro to see how good they were at amplifying sound for individuals with a mild to moderate hearing loss and to be honest they did pretty well in fact I had numerous individuals bring their airpods Pro into my clinic for us to optimize them after seeing my review video and several of these
individuals did experience a relatively good amount of success with these devices well since that time Apple has released their new airpods Pro 2 that has these same features that allow you to turn your air pods into hearing aids now technically speaking the airpods pro and airpods pro 2 are not hearing aids and they are not over-the-counter hearing aids now I’m not exactly sure how apple is able to skirt around the over-the-counter hearing aid guidelines that were established at the end of 2022 but I guess as long as they never Market these as hearing aids or
over-the-counter hearing aids they can get away without having any regulation on these devices regardless since they quite obviously have some hearing aid capabilities I went ahead and decided to review
identical the Apple airpods Pro 2 now come with an extra small earbud tip as far as the smaller earbuds go that will help out certain individuals with smaller ear canals but for myself I use the size medium and these fit my ears like a glove I absolutely love them in fact from a physical fit perspective I found the airpods Pro 2 to be some of the most comfortable earbuds that I’ve ever worn that being said if you previously had issues with the way your airpods pro fit your ears you’re going to continue to have that
problem with the airpods Pro 2 unless the smaller earbud helps you out personally from a comfort standpoint I could wear these all day long which brings me to my next point which is Apple did extend the battery life on the airpods Pro 2 which is very helpful the original airpods Pro would give you four and a half hours of battery life if you use them as hearing aids and the airpods Pro 2 will now give you six hours of battery life honestly that extra one and a half hours is helpful but you would still have
to get yourself a second pair of these devices if you wanted to wear the airpods pro too as hearing aids all day long of course at only 249 dollars for a pair of Apple airpods Pro 2. you could buy yourself two pairs of these devices and still spend less money than you would for a decent pair of over-the-counter hearing aids that’ll run you right around a thousand dollars alright guys hopefully you’re enjoying this video so far trust me we are going to get more technical with the airpods pro 2. but if you could do me
a huge favor click that like button really helps out my channel and it encourages me to make more review videos just like this one and while you’re at it if you have not yet hit that subscribe button with notification Bell go ahead and do that as well I greatly appreciate it that being said let’s get back to the review all right let’s go ahead and take a look at how to turn your airpods Pro 2 into hearing aids so you can better hear sounds around you and so you can hear streaming better right off the
bat you need to pair your airpods Pro 2 to your Apple iPhone and yes you do need an iPhone if you want to enable these headphone accommodations to turn your airpods Pro 2 into hearing aids if you do not have an iPhone but you have a friend who has an iPhone you can technically use their iPhone to turn your devices into hearing aids and then give their phone back to them because the air pods will actually store the settings that you put in them once you get them paired the next thing you need to do
is upload your professional audiogram thresholds into your iPhone or download the Mimi hearing app and take a hearing test that will upload automatically to do this make sure that your airpods Pro 2 are either paired to your phone or your iPad and you have them in your ears then you will want to go to settings scroll down to accessibility scroll down to Audio Visual headphone accommodations custom audio setup click continue and either select a previously entered audiogram or enter a new audiogram if you have a professional hearing test you can use your iPhone camera to
upload your audiogram and it will automatically enter thresholds for you but this is incredibly inaccurate so I would recommend entering your thresholds Yourself by hand the next best thing would be to download the Mimi hearing test app and take the hearing test through your iPhone once you’ve got your audiogram uploaded you can either use your custom settings based on your audiogram results or you can use the standard settings next this brings up the section where you can customize your transparency mode where you can adjust your overall amplification levels your transparency balance between your left and
right air pods your tone controls between darker and brighter your ambient noise reduction and toggle conversation boost on or off to test the Apple airpods Pro 2 I once again Enlisted the help of my assistant Brie who has a mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss which happens to fall within the capabilities of the airpods pro 2. to perform realer measurement we place probe micro phone tubes inside of Bree’s ear canals and measure the amount of amplification that she receives from the airpods pro 2. we can also measure things like directionality and noise reduction with this
method first we measured Bree’s ear canal resonance which is indicated by the solid pink curve this allows us to see the natural amplification effect that her ear canal creates without using any amplification devices however in order for Bree to hear her best we would want the solid pink curve to match the hash mark pink curve which is her Nal nl2 hearing loss prescription obviously with a mild to moderate hearing loss she will need some amplification in order to accomplish this second we place the airpods Pro 2 into Breeze ears and measure the initial amplification levels
indicated by the solid red curve to see how close they came to matching her prescription which is the red hash mark curve as you can see the airpods Pro 2 did a horrible job of matching her prescription above 1000 Hertz on their initial settings based on her entered audio videogram essentially leaving her significantly under Amplified which would provide her with little to no benefit using these devices if you compare the solid red curve with the solid pink curve you can see that the airpods Pro 2 provided little to no amplification across the frequency range on
this default setting third we attempted to customize the transparency settings to Bree’s prescription this time using a turquoise curve after several attempts of modifying the amplification levels transparency balance and tone settings this is as close as we got while this is much better than before you can see that we are still not meeting her hearing loss prescription above 3000 Hertz which would ultimately cause her to struggle with Clarity and speech fourth to fully test the capabilities of the airpods Pro 2 we set the tone control to darker which increased low frequency amplification while at the
same time decreasing high frequency amplification the same type of offset occurs when you shift it over to brighter now be careful when you shift it over to darker because while that might sound a little bit more natural to you it actually can create a phenomenon called upward spread of masking which can drown out the clarity from the high frequencies I do have an entire video explaining the concept of upward spread of masking so if you’re interested in it go ahead and check it out fifth I wanted to measure compression settings to see if soft sounds
were being Amplified enough to be Audible and if loud sounds were being reduced enough to be comfortable starting with the loud level compression in turquoise we can see that the airpods Pro 2 do a pretty good job at reducing amplification given to loud sounds so they do not become too loud but as we check the soft level compression in green we can see that we are missing prescriptive targets all over the place which means that Brie would continue to struggle with soft talkers and struggle to hear soft speech components sixth we tested the conversation boost
feature which is designed to use directionality to prioritize speech coming from the front while reducing sounds coming from the back if this feature works we would expect to see the solid red curve which is sound coming from the front to be higher on the graph than the solid turquoise curve which is sound coming from the rear clearly this conversation boost feature works and works really well I might add seventh I wanted to measure the ambient noise reduction capabilities of the airpods pro 2. to do this we play a steady state pink noise and see how
many decibels of noise reduction occurs first we turn this feature to its lowest setting and measured only three decibels of noise reduction next we set it to the medium setting and measured a respectable eight decibels of noise reduction finally we set the ambient noise reduction to maximum and measured between 9 and 10 decibels of noise reduction finally I wanted to compare the optimal airpods Pro 2 settings in red with Breeze prescription hearing aid settings and purple as you can see while the airpods Pro 2 settings are respectable Breeze prescription hearing aids do a much better
job of matching the hash mark prescriptive targets meaning that her prescription and hearing aids still do a better job of optimizing her ability to hear while they were definitely not perfect at being able to match a mild to moderate hearing loss prescription for average level speech and soft level speech for a pair of devices that cost only 249 dollars they did much better than I expected I was also very pleased to see that the conversation boost feature worked really well as well as the noise reduction settings even though I was not able to measure much
more noise reduction from the Midway point up to the maximum Point as far as my other thoughts about using the Apple airpods Pro 2 as hearing aids I like that you can also apply the audiogram tuning to both phone calls and other media streaming in addition to the transparency mode this means that you should also be able to understand people better on the phone as well as hear music better and other stream media better the stability of the Bluetooth connection between the airpods Pro 2 and your smartphone is second to none and they definitely outperform
any other hearing aid that’s out on the market when it comes to Bluetooth stability you can also use the live listen features to turn your iPhone phone into a remote microphone to learn more about this feature you need to watch Dr Rachel Cook’s video about turning your airpods pro into spy devices when it’s all said and done are the airpods Pro 2 as good as prescription hearing aids the answer to that is clearly no but would they be a viable option to provide you with benefit if you have a mild to moderate hearing loss even
though they are not an over-the-counter hearing aid the answer to that is clearly yes so if you’re on the fence about doing something to treat your hearing loss the fastest and cheapest way for you to get started maybe to get yourself a pair of Apple airpods Pro 2.
