Toto Front Man Steve Lukather’s Journey to Better Hearing

Steve Lukather, guitarist, singer, songwriter, and record producer, has been playing rock and roll since he was nine years old. “And when I was young, I played really loud,” he explained recently. Over the years, like many musicians, Lukather began to suffer from hearing loss. “But I learned to live with it,” he said. “I wore ear protection for 20 years, but it kept still getting worse, and normal life was hard for me to grasp. At night, I’d have the TV on full volume.”

Something had to change. A respected, award-winning studio musician, Lukather is best known as a founding member of the rock band Toto and has toured extensively with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. He’s played on albums from artists such as Boz Scaggs and Michael Jackson. “This is a way of life for me,” he said. “My ears are so important.” When Lukather mixed his most recent solo album, due out in February, he was wearing WIDEX EVOKE digital hearing aids. The experience was so exceptional, he upgraded this summer to the revolutionary new WIDEX MOMENT hearing aids with natural-sounding PureSound technology. “It’s really been life-changing,” he said.

Lukather’s long journey to adopting hearing aids is not uncommon, especially among musicians. According to the National Institutes of Health’s Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from hearing aids. Yet, most people with hearing loss suffer through hearing problems an average of seven years before giving hearing technology a try.

“I was working so much, I never had time to really deal with it,” Lukather said. “My brain adjusted to the deficit the best it could.” And although he was used to wearing in-ear monitors when he performed, Lukather said he resisted hearing aids for years because he associated them with the large, bulky devices he’d seen other people wear.

After friend and Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford showed Lukather the small, in-ear hearing aids he wore (“I couldn’t even tell!”), Lukather was ready to take the next step and chose Danish hearing aid pioneer Widex for his first set.

“Suddenly, I’m hearing sounds I haven’t heard in 25 years,” Lukather said. “The new record sounds great. I worked on it with an engineer whose ears I really trust, and we were hearing the same things.”

“Everyone has different hearing frequency deficits, so my hearing doctor adjusted the EQ [equalization] for my particular pair,” Lukather said. “It took a while to get used to because I was hearing frequencies I hadn’t heard in so long. And I know some can be plastic-y sounding, but these WIDEX hearing aids are much better. And I can switch between settings depending on where I am and what I need to hear.”

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