Hears Perfection vs Aria Studio: Which Hearing Correction Plugin is Worth Your Money?

In this video, I review the new Hears Perfection plugin from Plugin Alliance and compare it with Altitude Audio's Aria Studio—both designed to correct hearing loss for more accurate studio monitoring. As someone who can no longer hear frequencies above 12.5 kHz, I put both plugins through their paces to see how they handle real-world hearing correction. The Hears plugin impressed me with its simplicity and effectiveness, offering a streamlined hearing test that takes just 1-2 minutes directly within the plugin. While it measures a narrower frequency range than Aria Studio (stopping at the frequencies typically measured by audiologists), I actually found this to be an advantage since correcting ultra-high frequencies you can't hear anyway is pointless and potentially stresses your headphones unnecessarily.

Both plugins delivered surprisingly accurate hearing profiles that closely matched my professional audiologist's measurements, but they take different approaches. Aria Studio uses calibrated headphones for measurement and offers more fine-tuning options, making it technically more accurate but also more complex to set up. Hears Perfection lets you create custom profiles for each of your studio headphones, baking in their frequency response into the correction—a practical approach that works remarkably well. For my workflow, I'm leaning toward the Hears plugin for its professional interface, simplicity, and lower price point, though I'll keep both in my arsenal. I typically set the correction to 80% rather than 100%, as full correction can feel unnatural when your brain has already adapted to some hearing loss.