Audio Cardio wants to help you enhance and protect your hearing with its new app
Do you care about your hearing health? If you don’t, perhaps you should. Most of us (including myself) often listen to their music way too loud while using headphones and that can really damage your ears. A new company called Audio Cardio is out with a new app which aims to help enhance and protect your hearing using its patented Threshold Sound Conditioning (TSC) technology that stimulates the inner ear cells using sound signals specifically tuned for each individual.
I had the opportunity to test out the app a bit before the launch and I found it to be relatively easy to setup and use. Setting up the app requires you to use the calibration feature where you can adjust sliders until you faintly hear a sound coming into the headphones. This calibration step is necessary to do for both the left and right ear, so you’ll need to do it twice. Once the calibration is configured, Audio Cardio recommends you enable its TSC feature for at least one hour per day while listening to music.
In order to listen to music and use the TSC feature, Audio Cardio has built several music services into its app, including Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud. Listening through the Audio Cardio app is the only way for the company to be able to keep the TSC feature on and working–which means you have to use it. Overall, the built-in music player works, however, in my tests it needed some polish (granted I was using a beta version of the app). You can also play music stored locally on your device through the Audio Cardio app as well.
With TSC enabled, you will likely hear faint sounds underneath your music. This is normal and expected as those custom sound signals that you calibrated earlier are what are responsible for enhancing your hearing. Over time, those signals will get louder and louder, indicating the restoration of one’s ability and strengthening it to better protect itself. Hearing is improved when the sound signals become easily recognizable which indicates it’s time to adjust your calibration back to a barely audible level.
The last thing I’ll mention with regard to the music player is the Active EQ feature that you can also enable and will tailor the sound experience based on your hearing capabilities. It works well based on my tests, music often sounded better to me with it enabled, though certain songs sounded worse so your mileage may vary.
If you want full benefits from Audio Cardio, the company recommends the following usage: one hour per day for two weeks. And of course, continuous use will result in further enhancing and protecting your hearing. It’s pretty much like going to the gym but for your ears.
In the company’s early trials, they say 75% of participants who followed that listening regimen had an auditory ability increase of at least 10 decibels for the frequencies being treated. That’s some pretty good results. The app also has a feature where you can track your hearing progress as well, which is useful and good so you can see if it’s helping you at all.
Audio Cardio is available today in the Apple App Store with a free 30 day trial (so there’s really no reason not to at least try it and test their two week claims for yourself). After the trial, Audio Cardio will cost you $9.99/month. For Android users, Audio Cardio plans to release the app in the Google Play Store in the next few months.