Hearing impaired

Dear Akai,

I wanted to take a moment to express how much I love my MPC Live 2! This machine is incredible, and its portability makes it so easy to create music anywhere. Thank you for developing such a versatile tool.

I have a suggestion that I believe could be helpful for those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, like myself. While I may not be completely deaf, I do find myself cranking up the volume to its maximum—whether I’m working on beats or simply listening to music on Spotify. When I finalize my beats, I often have to adjust the volume down for people who aren’t hearing impaired, but I don’t always catch every detail as clearly as a sound engineer would. Most of the time, my beats end up extremely loud, which has even led to moments like blasting my friend’s speakers when I play them!

With that in mind, I’d like to propose a feature for a future update: a mode that allows users to work with louder volumes during the creative process, with an option to easily turn that mode off when finalizing the mix. I think this would be a fantastic way to help those with hearing challenges and improve the user experience overall.

Once again, thank you for creating such a great machine. I hope you’ll consider my request for future updates.

Sincerely,
Nick

Hi Nick,

I sympathize with your situation. Really though, I'm not sure how implementing a software feature makes sense when you can simply crank the knob like you have already been doing.

Yesterday I came back from my third doctor's appointment about my hearing problems. This resulted in me getting another appointment but this time to a special tinnitus center. Looking forward to that.

That said, I keep wondering if not @richie is right here. That perhaps implementing a firmware/software "solution" in the MPC isn't what would work/be feasible.

Depending on the type of hearing problem one has, perhaps it is better to look for "external" solutions. This made me think of one of Andrew Huangs videos I saw some years ago where he talks about how he copes with his hearing loss. This could perhaps be worth checking out?

Limiter on master bus?

Why not create a template?

Legotron wrote:Limiter on master bus?

I agree, either setting master to -6 or even -12 if you're feeling sexy, and then just use either a headphone amp or if you have a mixer, crank that up.

Then at the very least, if you send your stems to somewhere else to get mixed that there'll still be some dyanmics left for them to work with.

Wouldn't it be easier to just let an external amplifier handle that extra volume?

bitermc wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to just let an external amplifier handle that extra volume?

+1