It’s possible. The issue with the Simulator is that it just hosts your own desktop or laptop audio devices. Since it would be a huge, unbounded job for Apple to try to address every possible audio hardware combination in a computer (including external hardware) and really simulate iPhone audio sessions with it, they don’t try — the Simulator doesn’t actually emulate audio session code and that means (for instance) that your audio equipment might even be recording at a different sample rate than an iPhone would, among other possible differences like default buffer size or latency. For those same reasons, I also don’t put a lot of time/energy into trying to make OpenEars and its plugins behave identically on the Simulator as on the device because there will always be a new scenario to fix and it’s work that won’t improve the enduser experience of your OpenEars-enabled app. So OpenEars has a much simpler audio driver on the Simulator and it won’t always work as well as the device driver, which is much more strenuously tested.
If you’re still seeing this behavior on the device, definitely let me know!