Surprised to realise yesterday that I hear better in one ear than the other. Could be wax or something, yet to get it checked out, but it did make me wonder how others cope with this (it must be fairly common). Obviously ths risk is to weight your sound stage to one side so it sounds balanced to you, but for everyone else it sounds too far left/right.
You can’t change the balance on headphones themselves, and the Digitakt (on which I work; I don’t use a DAW) doesn’t have a balance setting either. So I was thinking a mixer, something like the 1010 Blue Box, might be the answer, since I presume a sophisticated mixer like that would have a balance control (not checked yet.)
Anyway, just curious to hear anyone’s experiences.
I’ve had this for decades, checked with an audiologist, who said it happens, it wasn’t significant enough to warrant correction, and I should check back if it got worse, which it has not. I don’t notice much of a difference when using headphones or listening to speakers. Sometimes when having a conversation in a noisy environment I have to turn my head to favour the better ear. That’s about it.
Only experience here is when I wanted to get a measure-up for otoplastics, to reduce wind noise while riding my motorcycle. Upon inspection, it turned out years of my mom cleaning my ears with cotton rags had formed a ball of earwax inside. Man, the difference in sound when you get that removed. I was walking home from the doctor (who did the removal) and got irritated by a constant crumbly crushing sound. Turned out to be my winter jacket moving while I was walking. Never experienced that before at that sound level.
I’ll bet there’s no shortage of people out there who’ve spent 000s/0000s on audio gear whilst their ears are gunkier than insert inappropriate metaphor
The frequency response between ears is definitely different for me, things are brighter on the left. It happened with age, I just try to be aware of it when evaluating my own mixes.
I don’t think it’s wax and it doesn’t get worse, so not much to be done.
Edit: It is worth getting the ears checked for wax if one side seems to be hearing worse. When I was younger, getting a cleaning sometimes improved things noticeably.
a couple years back i got some wax impacted in my left ear after using some ear plugs. it was a very trippy experience, having only one working ear for a while. getting my ears irrigated felt so incredibly good too, i wanna do it again just for the spa factor