Aumeo Audio Tailored Audio Device and Headphone Personalizer, Bluetooth / 3.5mm Audio Dongle for iPhone, Android and More - Silver

I have only owned it for a few hours, but I couldn’t wait to write a review because I love this thing so freaking much.I was born with microtia, meaning basically that my left ear did not fully form. I was deaf in my left ear for most of my life until 2007 when I had a surgery by a brilliant doctor who made an artificial ear from titanium and skin and cartridge from elsewhere on my body. I can hear now. Of course, even the best surgeons aren’t going to be able to match the real thing, so my left ear’s hearing is pretty poor. Everything sounds like I’m listening through a pillow and the volume is low enough that I usually don’t notice sounds from that ear.I’m a professional musician and amateur producer, so I’ve always felt at a disadvantage in certain instances. It’s difficult for me to create a sense of space when recording, and when I play on stage with in-ear monitors, my left ear has to be cranked loud to hear any instruments I have there.After charging the aumeo, setting up the app, and doing the hearing test, I put on Starlight by Bethel, and tears just ran down my face. It came *alive.* It didn’t make my left ear sound like my right, but it did create that space that was missing. The high end frequencies had sparkle and clarity that I had never known from both ears. Heck I’d never heard high end frequencies *at all* in my left ear.If you just want music to sound better and you don’t have any kind of hearing loss, this may not be for you (although I haven’t had anyone else try it yet). If you have hearing impairments like I do, you owe it to yourself to get this thing. It won’t heal you, it won’t make everything perfect, but it *can* help immensely!

This little unit changed my life. I knew I had some hearing loss, and this confirmed it AND helped correct it when listening to music. For the first time in a long time, I could understand the lyrics, and really hear the reverb and other more subtle nuances of what I was listening to. Podcasts and audio books have really benefitted tremendously.I also record my own music, and my mixing and mastering have greatly improved and translate much better to different playback devices, like my car stereo.The build quality is fantastic, and the aluminum case is solid. The package includes a short cables for audio and USB and a nice carrying pouch. Nice touches!There are a couple of things I’d do to improve the product. First, I’d make the profiles adjustable. My tinnitus masks some higher frequencies (4K and 8k) so those measurements are never accurate. As a result, some profiles have a crunchy higher frequency profile that I can only fix by going through the whole calibration exercise again.Second, now that I have an audiologist and have gotten a through hearing assessment, I’d love to be able to load those results as a baseline and then create profiles for my different headphones. That said, if it weren’t for me seeing how bad my hearing was at 4K and above, I never would have taken care of my hearing issues. I am grateful this product got me going in the right direction!Third, I wish that the regular jack still worked when the Bluetooth was on. Now that I have profiles configured, I’d like be able to send them to the device without disconnecting what I am listening to.Next, it would be great if the Aumeo stores multiple profiles on it and let you cycle through them, especially without the app.Which gets to the last improvement I’d like: the app user experience is not great. It’s as if they were trying to make it more complicated to make it seem more than what it is.

I wouldn't say using this changed my life, no.However... This little thing has definitely changed the way I listen to music. In simplest term, after I've tuned it specifically to each of my ear/headphones and selecting the correct profiles, music sounds much richer and nicer. The bass and treble sounds just right, not too heavy not too light, everything sounds much more up front.It worked on every one of my ear/headphones, you just gotta spend a minute each ear/headphone to tune it, literally one minute each (or less), its that simple. And gotta to remember select the correct profile based on the ear/headphone you're using to get the best result. Though, using one generic profile works also, but if you spend time to tune it, you'll get more out of it.The battery time is decent, you'll get few hours of continues listening out of a full charge. Charging is kind of weird, might be a bug in the software or something, but most of the time when charging no lights lit up, except for few occasions.It has a built-in amplifier, it can boost the output volume to a certain degree, this is definitely a good thing if you are using a standard headphone that depends on the audio device for volume control.There is no 'lock' button/switch, so you might accidentally press buttons or turn the volume nob, but after a week of use for me, I haven't encountered such accidents. Safe to say the chances of this happening really depends on the person. Volume control is very insensitive, as in, you need to turn it a lot to gain volume, so accidental turning of the nob won't suddenly boost the volume to the max.At the time of this writing, there's still bits and pieces of bugs in their iOS app, but I don't think this is a problem as Aumeo team will correct them through time.There are lots of more functions I wish this little box had, such as the abilities to use a proper bluetooth wireless headphones. Right now, in this version, you can connect Aumeo Audio to your audio output device (your phone, iPod, HIFI, etc) using bluetooth (or 3.5mm audio cable, if your device does not support bluetooth, like really old HIFI or Walkman), but you need to connect your ear/headphones to Aumeo Audio using a 3.5mm audio cable. This renders my B&O H9's bluetooth function useless.I won't listen to music without this little thing anymore... Except when I'm driving for number of reasons, safety being one of these reasons.

This thing is FANTASTIC! I've always been into quality audio and I have an excellent collection of headphones. Classical, especially piano, and EDM are the main things I enjoy.ButI ended up with tinnitus and severe hearing loss from megadoses of chemo (cisplatin).I was actually giving away headphones as I couldn't enjoy them anymore. My son discovered the Aumeo and suggested I give it a shot. Great advice!Essentially it's a hearing aid amp for your headphones/headset, tablet, phone, laptop or whatever. It runs a hearing test via an Android or Apple app. Then it adjusts the output to compensate, just as those insanely pricy hearing aids do, and you're good to go. It really works.