Hearing Health, Fatigue & Apple AirPods Pro

Hearing health, like sounds in general, is often ignored by almost everyone. Being a passive activity which has been "accepted to deteriorate with age", it's no surprise that most people don't realise that they are now listening to louder music on headphones, travelling in louder environments and working in louder offices than before. With this being the current situation, Apple's AirPods Pro getting the hearing aid feature is not just about a product launch. It's also about increasing awareness.

While creative audio professionals with long working hours know how ear-fatigue feels – it directly correlates to mental fatigue btw – many others who use Zoom / Google Meet and other remote meeting platforms have started to notice the problem of listening to poor quality of audio for long hours. However, THIS aspect still needs further awareness.

Not being able to see people clearly does not affect conversations as much as not being able to clearly listen to them, does.

Solutions like HANCE have come into picture to upgrade low quality audio with AI models as small as 256kb!, and I'm hopeful that industries across domains will start to realise the importance of audio quality and the direct effect it has on our well being.

On that note, it's important to understand what "quality" refers to. In most marketing & consumer terms, it's about the Dolby's Dolby Atmos or the Hi-res / Spatial audio in Apple Music. But in the context of use cases that haven't been commercialised (at least in advertising), quality is about noise-free & clear voices.

If you're someone who has to deal with a lot of online meetings, take a step back to use better platforms. BlueJeans and Zoom both have decent noise cancellation and spatialisation. Discord on the other hand sucks big time in terms of audio.

Invest in your listening environments. Noises do more damage than you'd like to acknowledge. What are your thoughts about this? Let me know in the comments and share this article with everyone who you think should become aware of hearing health.