Remixing Music for Every Ear: What Listeners with Hearing Loss Told Us
The Mix Was Never Made for You
Music is one of the great shared experiences - a concert with friends, a film soundtrack, a song on the radio. But every one of those mixes was balanced by a sound engineer for one audience: listeners with typical hearing. For the hundreds of millions of people with hearing loss, that same mix can bury the voice under the instruments, turning a shared moment into a frustrating one and, too often, into quiet exclusion.
So we asked a simple question that surprisingly had no precise answer: how differently do people with hearing loss actually want their music balanced?
What We Measured
In a study presented at Forum Acusticum 2025, the 11th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, our research team at Bettear, had 256 participants - 199 with typical hearing and 57 with bilateral hearing loss - adjust the balance between the lead singer and the accompaniment in three familiar songs by Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen. The measure is called the Lead-to-Accompaniment Ratio (LAR): how much louder the voice sits above the band. A second experiment repeated the task with 84 hard-of-hearing listeners across four degrees of hearing loss.
What We Found
- Listeners with hearing loss want the voice higher. On average they preferred an LAR of 10.41 dB, compared with 7.61 dB for typical-hearing listeners - a meaningful 2.8 dB gap from the mixes they are given every day.
- The more severe the loss, the stronger the preference. Preferred LAR climbed from 6.32 dB for mild hearing loss to 13.10 dB for profound hearing loss - more than double.
- One setting doesn’t even fit one group. Hard-of-hearing listeners also varied more from song to song, showing how sensitive their experience is to each track’s acoustics.
Why It Matters
These numbers confirm what many listeners have long felt: the standard mix is a compromise they never agreed to. They also point directly at the solution - not louder audio, but adjustable audio. When the balance between voice and accompaniment can be personalized, whether in a live venue, a streaming service or a hearing device, music becomes accessible without being changed for anyone else.
This is exactly the principle behind Bettear’s DAP™ technology: separate the audio into its components, then rebalance them for the listener. Research like this gives that personalization its evidence base - real preferences, measured across real hearing profiles.
The full peer-reviewed paper - Fink, Thor & Bar-Yosef (2025), “Psychoacoustics of Remixing Music” - is available via the European Acoustics Association.
