Yeah, as long as you need to remember that equalizers are only meant to boost ranges of frequencies to provide extra emphasis to the areas you want to hear more of, but they’re not meant to ALSO do double duty and compensate for your hearing loss as well. That’s a big difference between them, and that’s why if you’re trying to find headphones that have an equalizer so that you can get rid of the HAs to just listen to music on your headphones only and be able to hear the same kind of quality music a normal person can, that would just be a pipe dream.
If you have only moderate hearing loss, then the AirPods Pro 2 (with audiogram accommodation activated) may allow you to get rid of your HAs and still be able to provide you with a good musical experience. But your high frequency loss is a bit more than moderate, although not necessarily full-blown severe yet, so you maybe you can get away with just using the AirPods Pro 2, maybe not. You’d have to try it to find out for yourself. I personally find the AirPods Pro 2 acceptable enough for use in music listening for my severe high frequency loss, but I’m willing to compromise a lot in terms of the inadequate high frequency compensation for my loss for the convenience of just using the AirPods Pro 2, while you may not be willing to compromise as much. It’s a personal decision.
HAs in telecoil mode don’t even allow or employ any of the sound processing like noise reduction or beam forming or transient noise management or compression to avoid high input level sound clipping, or feedback suppression (because there’s no feedback possibility in the telecoil mode anyway). Those processing features are only needed to mold the environmental sounds that reach the HAs’ mics through the air. But the telecoil picks up the sound information directly from the magnetic field generated by headphones’ speakers’ magnets (which use the same magnets on them to drive the cones to create the sound waves through the air). So the mics are not used to pick up the sound waves through the air from your headphones’ speakers at all → no need to process anything from the mics’ inputs. Instead, the telecoils are used to pick up the magnetic field from the speakers’ magnet by getting it “induced” onto the telecoil, which get transformed from electrical signal that represents the sound.
It’s almost as if you have a direct wire connection from the headphones’ wires into your hearing aids, except that the wire connection is broken and transformed into magnetic field which gets induced back onto the telecoil into the wires inside the HAs to the amplifiers.
In the telecoil mode, the HAs mainly operate based on your prescribed gain based on your hearing loss per your audiogram, and compression is still included in there as necessary. So the sound reproduction should be as faithful as possible because it’s almost as if it takes the streaming content directly from your headphones’ wires into the HA’s wire so to speak, as mentioned above.
The Music program that you find in most HAs indeed are designed to minimize the sound processing like noise reduction and beam forming and feedback processing and transient noise processing, etc. But that Music program is still for the music picked up by the HAs’ mic that travel through the air, which can get “dirtied” up with environmental noise and reverbation and feedback, etc So if using it for music over the air, the musical content can get polluted by the environment, but you just gotta live with it anyway and hope that when you listen to music, it’s not polluted, because all of the sound processing designed to deal with the pollution is already turned off in the Music program. But if you’re listening to music while driving, the road noise will greatly pollute your music, and if you use the Music program in this situation, while you don’t get the “distortion” (as you put it) from the sound processing features, you get the pollution from the road noise diffused into your music anyway.
If using the Music program for direct wireless streaming, then the content wouldn’t get polluted in the first place, but it’s still usually necessary to select the Music program while streaming just to ensure that the sound processing features get disabled. But in the Telecoil program, which is not the same as the Music program, those sound processing features are not even allowed to be enabled in the first place.
