I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments.
I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in glasses. Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Not a paid sponsor at all, just a very happy customer.
Between the glasses for IRL settings and bluetooth/live captions on meet/etc, I've felt much more empowered in my working life.
Thanks! I have hearing aids too and, while I don't have profound hearing loss (severe one side, moderate the other), it's got to the point where I am starting to look at other solutions to supplement them. For those not aware: hearing aids are not like eyeglasses, where you can effectively have your vision restored to 20/20 with the right prescription. They help, but they don't get you up to the level of a person with ordinary hearing. This goes particularly for situations with high background noise, multiple voices, etc.: restaurants, bars, parties and other places where social life tends to happen.
Your recommendation has made me think I should finally take the leap on live-caption glasses, which I've been watching for a while now. It sounds like they've finally got to the point where they're effective.
A question: how do you find them in conversations with multiple people? Do the glasses help you distinguish speakers by breaking out text from different voices, or is it all just a stream of words? What if there are multiple conversations going on - do the glasses manage to "focus" captioning on the one you're closest to, or do other conversations creep in?
The captions on google meet have been useful for me as well, although I do wish they were more configurable, e.g. being able to give the captioning model a list of technical phrases, internal company terms, or acronyms that are likely to come up. There also seems to be a gap still between real time transcription, which is good, and after-the-fact transcription, which is excellent. (You can also use an LLM for the latter and prompt it yourself with extra context, although that may not be the best model.)
It's been great to see so much progress in this area in the past few years. I am hoping the current (over-)investment in AI at least has the side effect of improving the tech still further.
Looks and seems great, always felt like a no-brainer use case for the smart glasses. But considering the kind of hardware they most likely are using, how is the captioning actually happening? I'm really scared of getting hardware that is 100% cloud dependent, as eventually the company gets bought or shut down, and then you end up having to repeat the process of figuring out what to buy next, and sometimes that just one or two years in the future.
They are not making it clear how the captioning is happening, but since they don't claim it'll continue working even if the company disappears/shuts down, one can be safe to assume it's a cloud product, meaning it won't actually be a good fit for most people out there with a limited amount of money to spend on things like these.
Edit: I realize now this product is not at all for people like me, "Boost caption accuracy up to 98%" and "More accurate translations" are locked behind a $15/month subscription, kind of disgusting how they hide making the product work as it should behind a subscription.
I just want some simple glasses that can caption what people are saying without ripping me off, I guess we're too late into capitalism for that to actually be made for consumer.
They can do local transcription without internet but you do need their app, so the glasses would be useless if the company died, yes.
That said, the paid subscription has some useful features, but I personally don't care about multi-languages translation. The rest of the conversational improvements seem to help but I don't think they're necessary... although I don't know what they mean with "Boost caption accuracy". Maybe using more expensive models?
Here's a crazy idea. I personally prefer the fidelity of an active ambient in-ear monitor (IEM), as used by musicians on stage over the best hearing aids. Once a year, I do a monthly trial with the latest hearing aid models and IMO the fidelity (especially low-end) and the comfort just is not there compared with the best active ambient IEMs. The difference between hearing aids and IEMs is blurring, but they are not yet fully interchangeable.
Standard IEMs isolate you from the world, which is the opposite of what a hearing aid does. However, a specific category called "Active Ambient" IEMs bridges this gap. These are IEMs with embedded high-fidelity microphones on the outer shell. They pick up the sound of the room (bandmates, crowd, conductor), amplify it, and blend it with your monitor mix. The accompanying bodypack or app often includes a multi-band EQ and Limiter. You can boost specific frequencies where you have hearing loss (e.g., boosting highs to hear cymbals or speech clearly) and set a volume ceiling to protect your remaining hearing. I have no ownership/sponsorship in the product, but I personally LOVE the ASI Audio 3DME (powered by Sensaphonics), which is the industry standard for this. [1] It allows you to use an app to shape the ambient sound to your hearing needs.
The Pros: It provides hearing protection + monitoring + hearing enhancement in one device.
The Cons (Why they aren't daily hearing aids):
1) Form Factor: You are tethered to a belt pack. You likely won't wear a wired bodypack to a grocery store or dinner party.
2) Social Barrier: Wearing full-shell custom IEMs creates a "do not disturb" look that discourages conversation in social settings. This can be more socially alienating than a comparatively inconspicuous hearing aid.
3) Battery Life: IEM systems typically last 6–8 hours, whereas hearing aid batteries can last days or weeks.
Power requirements, moving mass and audio sampling and processing.
Hearing aids run on tiny voltages (typically ~1.4 Volts). They are designed to amplify speech (a small frequency range) at moderate volumes. An IEM is designed to handle the massive energy of a live drum kit without distortion. To do this, the internal amplifier needs Headroom. It likely steps up the battery voltage significantly (internally converting to higher voltage rails) to ensure that when a snare drum hits 120dB, the amplifier has enough electrical height to reproduce that spike without clipping.
Hearing aids use microscopic balanced armature receivers that require almost zero power to move because they are only moving a tiny amount of air near your eardrum. IEMs use dual-driver miniature subwoofers and tweeters that are physically larger and heavier. It takes significantly more electrical current to push these drivers back and forth.
Hearing aids often use aggressive battery-saving tricks, such as lowering the sampling rate or "sleeping" processes when silence is detected. The processor of an IEM is running wide open 100% of the time. It is constantly digitizing the world at a high sampling rate to ensure zero latency. If it tried to save battery by "sleeping" between notes, you would hear a delay (latency), which would make it impossible to play in time.
That’s on the high side for an IEM. Let’s be conservative and say it’s actually 100dB SPL at 1mW (which is on the low side) and that the user has hearing loss and the IEM is actually outputting 90dB continuously (I’m not an expert but this seems high. Certainly I would not set an active IEM anywhere near that loud, even at a concert). That’s 0.1mW of electrical power to each IEM, for 0.2mW total.
A modern amplifier might as well be 100% efficient, although that body pack could easily be some wildly efficient Class A design.
Let’s suppose the DSP is processing 96kSPS (might as well minimize latency and the need for a complex antialiasing setup and let’s assume it’s using a duper-high-fidelity FIR filter that’s a whole 100ms long, i.e. 9600 taps, and that the FIR implementation is pure brute force, so there are 9600 times 96k FMAs per second. That’s about 2 billion FMAs per second for both ears. (Again, this is a ridiculous way to do this.) The fancy nonlinear compression stuff will be negligible in comparison.
From some quick Googling, you could easily spend a whole watt on the DSP. And there’s where all that battery charge goes :)
I bet that someone who really cared about optimizing this could put some software engineering into getting DSP power down below 50mW. Either use an FFT to
Does that setup work ok outside in windy environments? A lot of the 'active' audio systems I've found really focus on the wind noise while hearing aids will try to filter that out
You definitely have a point there. The 3DME uses small MEMS microphones embedded in the faceplate of the earphone and has no physical windscreen or noise suppression like digital hearing aids and consumer buds which use aggressive software algorithms to detect wind and instantly cut the low frequencies to stop the rumble.
As a workaround, some artists performing outside wear a thin, acoustically transparent beanie or headband over the ears effectively acting as a pop-filter/windscreen. This breaks the wind before it hits the mic while still letting mid-to-high frequency sound (speech/music) pass through. Not exactly a hearing aid alternative.
I have worn hearing aids since childhood in the '90s. Moderate sloping to profound loss. Been through all the tech since the equalized analog era.
For a while now, like the last 15 to 20 years, since hearing aids went DSP, I had not been much impressed by each new generation. At the risk of sounding like a bit of an advertisement, that changed this year.
I have the new Oticon Intent. RIC style aid. They have some of the best spatial awareness I've experienced. They're capable of quite a lot of directionality - accelerometer and three microphones in each. I had to have the intensity of the directionality turned down a bit. It was startling me when I turned my head and I wasn't hearing things behind me enough. But that's at the expense of less signal due to more environmental noise.
The machine-learning based noise reduction is an improvement over the previous generations, too.
They have a music mode. It drops all the speech remapping and noise reduction and just makes it feel loud. It's some sort of perceptual algorithm: in my case as I turn up the volume it gets more and more treble, because only at the loudest volumes would I hear those high frequencies. All while being power limited at 95 dB SPL so I know I'm not blowing my ears. I used to wear over-the-ear headphones for that but I now prefer the hearing aids. It's nice to not worry about if it's too loud.
My mom has hearing aids, I only get all the technical info through her, so it's a bit blurry, but she complained about very unpleasant scratchy noises, for instance when my dad was watching videos on his iPad (for himself) elsewhere in the room. Settings were changed but now she has a harder time understanding us. We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).
Perhaps this is just the limit of her hearing capacity. Or do you think she should not settle for this and push for something better?
> We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).
This is where my normal hearing is now. My assumption is the "some I understand clearly" is base very much on what frequency their speech is in.
I'm meeting with a hearing aid doctor this week, actually.
I'm in a similar age range (HAs since 1991 I guess). I also have fond recollections of the pre-digital HAs' sound.
I'm using a pair of 8 yr old phonak BTEs, which have various levels of directionality focusing. (Actually, I'm down one HA; 8yr old on left; 13 yr old left one one on right ear... getting new ones in January) I too prefer a lower level of directionality as my default.
I assume your HAs are doing bluetooth for the music setup you describe? Or are you describing a setup with speakers at home?
As a parent with a child with mild-to-moderate hearing loss it is heartening to know that the hearing aid technology is progressing, and progressing well!
He's been using a pair of Phonak Skys since infancy, and while they can be tuned by the audiologist I sometimes wonder what it'll be like if and when he gets his next pair.
My son is 14 and has a moderate to severe loss. During his younger years we had a big clunky behind the ear type of aid and it was fine for a while. But tech progressed and we started noticing that he was having trouble hearing "s" sounds. I researched and got him the Oticon Real and it's been amazing and his speech dramatically improved with the new tech. There have been a lot fewer problems with wind noise and he can talk and pay attention in loud environments like school or a restaurant. His grades shot up.
The newer tech is definitely worth it but spendy. There are times though when I'm a bit jealous, too! He can turn them off when he doesn't want to hear and can listen to anything on his phone over bluetooth, as well as take calls. And he never wakes up at night because of noise :)
This feels to me more like the kind of Augmented Reality (AR) that will make it to mass market adoption than what the market has offered to date. Granted, audio-only, but that's where all our wearable tech seems to start (likely because of the energy physics involved with how our tech currently generates artificial perceptual signals).
Audiologist and hearing aid user here. It's a great time to be looking for new hearing aids! Speech in noise capabilities have improved massively this generation, and I can personally attest to this. For me, the most important performance metric is speech perception in noisy / challenging listening situations. For you there might be other considerations, so keep that in mind.
With that said, my recommendation are the new Phonak Infinio Sphere devices with with their "Spheric speech in noise" feature. It's a complete game changer in terms of speech perception in loud noise. Activating this program in a noisy situation feels like turning off the background noise, leaving only (nearby) voices.
The caveat is that to achieve this they use a separate, power-hungry processor and compensate by increasing the battery size (making the whole hearing aid bigger than other, similar hearing aids). The upside to this is that if you're _not_ using the spherical program, you'll have really good battery life. I use mine for exactly 16 hours a day and if I'm careful I can make them last almost three full days. The charger is much better than the previous ones; they use magnets to keep the devices in place instead of relying on plastic friction.
The Oticon Intent and new Starkey AI aids are also great. You should always try more than one model before you make a decision.
I have Phonak Audeos paired over bluetooth with my iPhone. A few years prior, I used to have Oticon, also paired with my iPhone.
With the Oticon, if I made a cellphone call, the iPhone would use the default iPhone microphone while the audio would stream to my hearing aids. It was good that way because in a noisy environment I could hold the iphone right up to my mouth and the other party would be able to hear what I was saying.
With the newer Phonaks, I was very disappointed to find that the new hearing aids would only use the microphone input that is built into the hearing aids themselves, and not the iPhone mic input. I discovered this when I realised that talking directly into iPhone mic did not make it any easier for the other party to hear me.
I complained to my Audiologist who explained that yes, the new hearing aids were copying the behaviour of Apple AirPods, which also have the mic input on the earpod itself, and that there was no way at all to configure the Phonaks to use the iPhone mic input instead.
Why is this a problem you might ask? Because my hearing aids are Behind The Ear (BTE) and thus the mic input on the hearing aid is a good 4 inches away from my face and thus my voice cannot possibly sound as clear as when I could speak directly into an iPhone mic.
When I next replace my hearing aids, I shall look for aids that do not mimic this crappy AirPods behaviour...
I trialed hearing aids a little while ago and ended up not committing, because the sound quality was bad, wheezy and tinny, and gave me headaches. Particularly bad in noisy environments, which is where I'd most need the help. Also the app sucked, Bluetooth pairing broke all the time and the controls were just confusing.
They were Phonaks.
I guess I'm glad to hear that it's not intrinsically a hearing aid thing, and I may find a better experience with other brands.
The tinniness is something your brain adjusts to and prices in, and if your hearing aid is properly set up, it is very likely that to start with it will sound tinny if your hearing is deficient with high frequencies. It is boosting those frequencies to make up for your lack in hearing. You probably need a good 2-6 months to adjust.
Mine were exactly like this to start with and over time the effect goes away such that you don't notice. I'd recommend if you do actually have hearing problems, sticking with it for quality of life improvements.
This is the case for any Bluetooth microphone headset, it has nothing to do with the hearing aid “trying to mimic AirPods “it is because Apple refuses to give us fine-grained controls on our Bluetooth devices
Depends if the hearing aid presents itself as an audio sink (with no mic) or as a headset with mic. The phone will only use the mic if it's available (which is generally what you want if you're using an actual headset).
An elaboration on how complicated call handling can be with hearing aids (and how I wanted AirPods-like behavior): I assisted someone with purchasing hearing aids a year ago, and we first had a pair of Philips and returned them within a few months because they only worked with iPhone for supporting phone calls with the microphone on the hearing aids themselves, for Android it didnt work. Even the next generation Philips 9050 that supported Auracast didnt support this.
We ended up with Phonaks rebranded as Sennheisers. The audio quality during calls may not be as clear as a separate mic (what i believe you refer to as oticon), but from a user experience its nice to not have to fish out your phone to answer a call or wonder why you can hear the other person but they cant hear you.
Note that my complaint here is specific to Android support.
Seems a bit sad/ironic that it sounds like the solution in OP's case would be to switch to Android for that exact behavior that your side didn't want. (And that switching to iPhone would bring that "feature" in)
I personally use iPhone and I do prefer to leave phone in pocket for my phone call. But it does seems like a massive oversight to not make this configurable.
Yea, my Phonak + iPhone experience was not great. I stopped using any integration with them after a while and now just use AirPods for all my calls, music, etc. I have open domes and can pull off wearing both, but do take the HAs out now and then when I just want to focus and let the noise cancellation do its thing.
Which sadly does not work very reliably. At least on my end the selection changes back to default every few days. I reported this issue over the Apple Feedback app already…
Yes, that’s my experience too. I have to choose during each call by opening the control centre and choosing the audio settings option for the ongoing call.
This does seem to let me enable voice isolation though, which seems to work very well.
I have the same problem, but I always assumed it was Apple's fault. I don't know why the HAs/Airpods have the final say.
I don't think there's a way around it on the iphone, but I was able to cobble a fix for my macbook at least. It uses Shortery to run a Shortcut whenever my HA connects. The Shortcut runs a shell script that uses https://github.com/deweller/switchaudio-osx/ to determine the built-in mic and switch back to it immediately:
> I think the Macbook does some more advanced beamforming stuff to filter out sound coming from other directions.
It does, and that also gave the Asahi Linux team some serious headache when trying to get the microphones working on the ARM MacBooks - the team involved in that had to delve deep into DSP black magic to get usable sound working out of the three microphones [1].
I’ll chime in with a sidebar: Anyone got any experience using hearing aids for the "hearing in noise" issue (aka. King-Kopetzky syndrome or lack of cocktail party effect [0], part of a whole bunch of things also called adhd for ears). Essentially I have filtering issues, as soon as multiple people talk, I can’t really understand anyone anymore, unless they very directly speak into my ears so they are significantly louder than other noises.
It’s a brain thing, my hearing itself is above average for my age (40), so I’m not sure what exactly can be done, but there was an article many years ago about someone (Bose?) working on aids for that issue, no idea what came of it. I guess all modern hearing aids have some focus mode.
edit: In case there’s an airpod suggestion, I’ll also need to know if that feature works on Android, it’s not crippling enough to make me use an iPhone.
I posted this standalone, but replying to you since you specifically asked about HAs in noisy environments.
The newest HAs have AI that helps in noisy environments. The ones I have are the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio I90s. I've worn HAs for 40 years. It's truly unbelievable in noisy environments. I know it's easy to think it's all marketing garbage, but some great demos on YT of the technology. I keep them in AI mode all the time when I have them on, and charging them for an hour at lunch is enough to get me the necessary runtime.
Sadly I can’t afford high end HAs. And from what I’ve read, you don’t really get HA prescriptions for stuff like APD with no hearing loss.
But it’s cool that this stuff is now integrated, hopefully those advancements will eventually trickle down further, from what I’ve now read, the AirPod Pro feature is a bit of that trickle.
Hearing in noise is both what most people want from hearing aids and what they are least equipped to provide.
The traditional solution is an FM system where you give the person speaking a microphone linked to your hearing aids. There are dedicated ones like Phonak Roger. You could probably also use your phone as a microphone if it's bluetooth connected to your headphones or hearing aids.
The tech for isolating a speaker at conversational distances exists. You use half a dozen microphone transducers (minimum; Crappy microphone transducers are cheap and quality is expensive, so just use a bunch of them), and through a combination of phase and intensity they decode relative location, and amplify that phase expectation while suppressing everything that isn't phased like that. Sound is slow, and readily susceptible to real-time triangulation. The math/processing is much easier if the parallaxes are fixed (eg the microphones are arranged in a line array on the top band of a rigid pair of smart glasses), but with a little latency it's not prohibitive for a deformable array to solve for its own relative position as well.
That’s more a solution for far more extreme cases, including actual hearing loss. This would be far more involved than me lining up my ears with their mouth ;)
I'm completely lost in noise. The benefits for this kind of thing is part of why my audiologist pushed for hearing aids with directional microphones. And they do help. But it's not a fix. I'm still mostly lost in noise.
People rely on the (usually very large) dynamic range of hearing to be able to understand in those situations. In people with typical hearing the brain filters out the sounds too loud or too quiet to be what they are trying to listen to. But hearing aids act as compressors reducing the dynamic range.
Bose used to make these noise cancelling earphones called the Hearphones that could focus on the speech of person in front of you and they were amazing:
These were great and I am always on the lookout for something similar, but no luck so far.
I also liked that there was a neckband - easy to take the buds out when not needed and leave them hanging, and of course more power in a larger battery.
Thanks for bringing this up, I'm often lost in a setting with competing voices. I don't strictly need hearing aids but the few times I've had my earbuds in with ambient voice enhancements it's really improved my QoL. Gonna have to look into this more!
>When your AirPods Pro are connected to your device, you can use Conversation Boost to focus on the person talking in front of you. This makes it easier to hear in a face-to-face conversation.
Airpod Pros work well for me in adaptive mode for this, I've never compared to devices more dedicated for this thing, but it's enough for me. They seemingly reduce most of the surrounding noise while I can still hear the person talking closest to me.
I have the same problem (took 35 years to find out), and hearing aids with directional microphones might work. I don’t say they will, but it is worth to try it.
I have moderate-to-profound hearing loss and have worn hearing aids since I was 4. I currently have Oticon Opn1’s and have had Oticons since 2017 (and got new ones in 2022) and they are fabulous. I find the sound quality in noisy environments much better than any other aid I’ve had - much better perception of voices in restaurants, for example. I rarely have to fiddle with the volume control and in fact do not even use any other settings than the main program - I find that whatever the core program is doing tends to be basically what I want.
I also very much appreciate that they can natively connect to iPhones (this is also essentially the main reason I have an iPhone). This makes phone calls and music and podcasts very easy. (Whereas up until 2017, I used to dread phone calls.)
I actually tried Phonaks briefly in 2022 and hated them. Lots of controls to fiddle with (some with oddly unintuitive names), but that meant I was constantly trying to adjust it and was rarely able to just exist in the moment. I found them markedly worse in noisy environments - I basically couldn’t have a conversation in a restaurant.
I have the Widex SmartRIC 220, and would buy them again. They are comfortable, have musical audio quality (Widex works with musicians), very low latency (reducing comb filter effect), and in general look and feel very professional.
As for technology, they use bluetooth low energy to connect to the smart phone, which works really well, with the caveat that the range is quite low and if it is in the pocket and you are moving around, media sound will often disrupt or desync intermittently. On the plus side, they last well over a day even with media use (WIdex says they last 37 hours without bluetooth use and that checks out). The case provides charge for about a week, and has wireless and usb-c charging.
They are quite pricey, but there are several options (110, 220, 330, 440), and the 220 were more than enough for me. The app has several modes, including directional focus mode, and you can define your own. I sometimes use a different mode for listening to concert music, that disables most filters such as volume protection.
I am wearing them for 9 months now, and there was no situation (concerts, traveling, work, sports, etc) were they gave me any issues whatsoever.
I'm using Widex Allure. I only need to use one ear for now, and the low latency from the Widex was what won it, tried a couple Oticons that had a disorienting amount of lag. Also the Widex has really great high frequency transient filtering, much better than the Oticons in my experience. With a house full of screaming kids, this was also critical.
What is the best thing for people with no hearing loss but need help in noisy environments?
My partner and I both have difficulty listening to conversations in crowds.
Logic tells me that there must be some noise cancelling devices with directional mics that let you hear just what is in front of you, but querying staff in stores gets me the same bemused look as when I asked about Arm laptops before Apple did one.
I just replaced my Jabras (from Costco) whose microphones stopped working. I tried Phonaks and found that the use of Bluetooth to connect to my iPhone was painfully flakey (there were certain locations in my neighborhood that every time I walked in front of a particular house, I would lose audio). I ended up returning them and the only MfI hearing aids the audiologist I went to (I was limited by what was in-network by my insurance and while the old insurance covered equally in-network and out, my new insurance covered 0% out of network so I was going to be looking at double the price to go to Costco). I ended up with Resound which are essentially the same as the Jabras.
The one thing that I find absolutely essential is using ear molds instead of domes. My cousin hated ear molds and gave up on them, but I definitely prefer them.
Incidentally, I would recommend the HA/hearing loss subreddits (r/HearingAids and r/hardofhearing) over HN for this discussion. The HA group can get a little rigid, but I really like the community at HoH.
Losing audio in front of a certain house may be related to devices I’ve noticed my own neighbors beginning to use, which are those high pitched audio emitters that ward off voles etc. We don’t have that issue in our neighborhood and especially in front yards so I suspect it’s to keep dogs from pausing in their yard.
In any case it’s a periodic high pitched burst. I wonder if that was what caused your issue with the phonaks. Seems like it would be a rather common issue in suburbs that should be considered in hearing aid design.
Yea I gave up on the phone integration with mine. Whenever I’d get a call or some audio thing was going to happen, my HA mics would go silent and second or so later the audio would come in. So answering a call i would often miss the callers initial words. Or driving instructions would be “…in 1000 feet” with the “turn left” or “turn right” part missing.
I do participate in the Reddit subs but am interested in the technologists view of HAs I might get here. They are fascinating, necessary devices for myself.
Weird - in an incredibly similar situation and my RICs are overdue an upgrade (Oticon Opn 3).
I've been keeping an eye on developments for some time, and I've been looking for something ideally CIC, though I do like the RIC Opns.
However, nothing has had the feature set I wanted - bluetooth, auracast, Apple MFI and being CIC.
Oticon just announced/released their 'Zeal' product - a non-custom CIC, with seemingly all the bells and whistles, including bluetooth.
Planning to try them soon.
I have tried a few aids before (Starkey and some older Phonak) and I do really like the Oticon 'sound'. They work for me, but of course YMMV. I think many aid manufacturers (many of them the same company - WDH!) do 60 day trials. Worth a shot.
My only dislike is the new fad, particularly of Oticon, of stopping disposable batteries and only going rechargeable.
Disposable zinc-air cells have great life (I'd get a week on the Opns at least, with a few hours streaming per day). I travel for work a lot, so carrying a couple of tiny 312's in my wallet or keychain was perfect.
The Zeal look to have what Oticon think is a 'compact' charger - but it ain't small.
My kingdom for a charger the size of the AirPods Pro case...
I also travel a lot with work. So far, the estimate of 20 hours battery seems genuine - but you’re right, the charger is not small. What I didn’t know though, is that the charger holds three full charges worth of capacity. Meaning it doesn’t need to be plugged in for three nights in a row.
Due to my level of loss (80db), I need the custom mold option. This seems to be primarily to reduce feedback. I’m swapping between the custom mold and the standard tip to see which is best for my use case.
Has anyone had and experience using hearing aids to deal with tinnitus? I've got some small hearing loss in the high frequencies and I'm looking at getting fitted for hearing aids to help boost those frequencies. The hope is to train my brain to stop replacing the deficit of sound with the monotone tinnitus noise.
I've tried some OTC hearing aids (Sony & Sennheiser) but its been hit or miss. I'm going to try whatever the hearing aid tech at my ENT proscribes.
I have mild tinnitus, and I don’t really notice it at all when my hearing aids are in. (Phillips, got them at Costco) Sadly, it’s a lot more noticeable once I take them out. I am still waiting for that electrostimulation therapy I read about a few years ago to pan out.
The newest HAs have AI that helps in noisy environments. The ones I have are the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio I90s. I've worn HAs for 40 years. It's truly unbelievable in noisy environments. I know it's easy to think it's all marketing garbage, but some great demos on YT of the technology. I keep them in AI mode all the time when I have them on, and charging them for an hour at lunch is enough to get me the necessary runtime.
A long time ago, I interviewed at a company called Earlens. They had a really interesting solution that used mineral oil to stick some kind of tiny speaker directly to your eardrum. The processor then beams the sound to the speaker. I think the first generation used a laser, but they've since switched to inductive coupling: https://earlens.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/LBL00153vJ.ar...
One of the engineers I had lunch with actually used their own product and he seemed to like it. I get the impression it's a more premium tier kind of thing that may not be covered by insurance, though.
This is very unrelated but I worry about posts like these.
HN is a great place to get genuine thoughtful discussions compared to a big portion of the rest of the internet. Reddit used to be the place for finding genuine experiences for products with subreddits like buyitforlife (or more specific) but now these and other subreddits are filled with bots and marketeers promoting what they sell and hammering their competition in the same thread.
Some bots are already here but I fear when the marketeers come.
If you spot one flag it and mail hn@ycombinator.com , Dan & Tom usually act pretty quickly on confirmed shills. But don't comment in the threads to accuse someone of being a shill, that's explicitly against the guidelines, and that's because it isn't rare for people to simply get it wrong, besides it would pollute the threads.
I've got moderate to severe SSHL and use an Oticon intent 1 miniRite. For my use it's been very good - long last battery, relatively robust. It also has excellent bluetooth connectivity, so I often use it to stream audiobooks in tedious meetings.
In terms of hearing quality, for me, it's been solid, with the caveat that it took a while to get the fitting right. I think my audiologist was a bit old school, and was sticking to settings he'd known to be good in the past rather than fitting for what the aid is capable of. I've recently had its prescription type updated to the native Oticon one, and it's been a revelation in terms of clarity.
My hearing loss is relatively recent (About four years now) so I will caveat this that I've only used Oticons, so can't really compare to anything else.
Thank you for the new acronym. Sudden sensorineural (“inner ear”) hearing loss (SSHL), commonly known as sudden deafness, is an unexplained, rapid loss of hearing either all at once or over a few days. SSHL happens because there is something wrong with the sensory organs of the inner ear. Sudden deafness frequently affects only one ear. https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/sudden-deafness
To save some people time if they were wondering.
Good catch - I should have expanded on the acronym, especially as was referring to my hearing loss being Single Sided Hearing Loss, so already easy to confuse (Although as you point out, SSHL often presents as single sided deafness). In my case, I had sudden loss of balance with subsequent hearing loss. I spent well over six weeks suffering from bouts of severe rotational vertigo, which once passed, never returned, but took a hefty chunk of my left side hearing with it.
The hearing aid has certainly given me back most of what I loss, but it took some time to come to terms with losing my hearing on that side.
I'll tell you what's not hot: cochlear implants. I wore hearing aids since the late '80s. I wear CIs as of about 5 years ago, and while my hearing is much better and stable than it used to be, I've found that UX for CIs is pretty bad.
For one, unless you use Med-El's Rondo processeor, you're going to have a thin cable connecting your processor to the coil. Taking off your CIs and putting them back on (as one does every day) is going to put stress on the cable. Sometimes the cable frays and you find that out with sound cutting in and out. There's nothing you can do until the manufacturer sends you a replacement cable in exchange for your frayed one. If you want a backup, be ready to shell out $250 for each cable.
Another UX issue is that processors depend on gravity to stay on your ears. Since there's no earmold to anchor to, processors can easily be jostled off and left hanging precariously. Wearing hearing aids, I never had to worry that my hearing devices would fall off if I rode my bike on a bumpy road. Also with cochlear implants, high-intensity interval training requires some kind of hat or bandana to make sure that the processors don't fly out.
Battery life is another disappointment. Rechargeable batteries don't last a full day. If I put them in at 6:30a, they'll last until about 4:30p. With disposable zinc air batteries, I can squeeze out about a day and a half, but then I'm having to dispose batteries. And while I can track processor battery levels with the rechargeable batteries on my phone, disposable batteries are opaque to the app.
One new thing that would be useful in terms of UX would be an configurable indicator, e.g., a blinking LED, signaling that audio streaming is occurring. It's awkward to find oneself in a conversation that already started and having to excuse oneself to turn off the stream.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I have my cochlear implants, but they're way behind hearing aids in terms of UX.
For Cochlear brand your kit should include backup coils, and replacement is overnight. If you turn on lights (child mode) the processor lights indicate streaming with blue. I love my cochlear implants even though the integration UI and reliability is not perfect yet.
Two things that we use for my son's CI are a cable wrap, which gives the cable a bit of reinforcement, and what we call the "eagle claw" - a little plastic hook that goes on the bottom and hooks around the ear lobe to give it a bit more stability.
My daughter has the Cochlear N8 and the rechargeable battery lasts 20 hours
> Sometimes the cable frays and you find that out with sound cutting in and out
Is there any way you can know about this, e.g. from the app? I'm asking because my daughter is 1 and if this was happening she'd currently have no way of communicating that to us
I know one person at work with CIs and yea, I imagine it's a challenge.
UX for a lot of assistive technology is iffy at best. Repeating some of the comments others have made, I'd love it if Apple would make a full on hearing aid that "just worked". Or someone would do a good AI integration that could notify you of things you probably should focus on - like someone trying to get your attention, or emergency vehicle sirens, etc.
Marketing too. But it's nice to see some vendors starting to actually make their devices visible and fun. HAs are a bit like glasses ages ago, when it was kind of this shame thing to get teased about when you were 8 years old. Selling them as "discrete" and with colors designed to match your skin or your hair is just continuing that perception of them being something you should hide.
Have you tried the non-over-the-ear cochlear devices? The kind that have everything built into the part that sticks magnetically to your implant — I don’t know what the term is; I don’t use them myself.
I know somebody who really dislikes the over-the-ear type devices and swears by the all-in-one kind.
She seems to get a full day of battery out of hers, but I don’t know what kind they are and I imagine usage patterns make a big difference.
that's the Med-El's Rondo processor they referenced (there's also the Cochlear Kansu), so presumably they know of them and have tried them
For what it's worth in the UK the NHS no longer provides the off the ear models (at least for children) as they say they have too many problems with them
There's something I think must be possible and wonder if it would be useful: using noise cancelling earphones to mimic someone else's
hearing loss. The idea is if you live with someone with hearing loss, you could enter the frequencies they can't hear, and cancel only those. Then you could spend a day with these in to try to get a more direct understanding of which noises they can hear and which they can't.
Whilst I have no idea how well this would work, I would definitely appreciate something like this.
Rather than noise cancelling headphones, I’d be happy with an audio recording that has my loss applied to it. Anything to demonstrate what it’s like would help awareness and understanding.
Email your audiologist and ask for your audiogram. Should be straightforward to apply an equalizer to match it, esp if can find an equalizer with db(a? m?) labels
It makes no sense at all. You have measurable frequency range. But you have no idea how particular brain weights the specific frequencies in the range. Some people can live comfortable life hearing only 200 Hz to 6000 Hz from birth. The other people freak out hearing 8000 Hz coil whine sound. It’s not an universal thing.
As most later hearing loss starts from the high frequencies, like mine, it is enough to put a good amount of cotton whool in your ears. No kidding, this should simulate it pretty well.
Cancelling aperiodic noise requires time travel to work, doesn’t it? So you could feel what it feels like to be that person on an airplane bare-headed, or next to a fan, or perhaps even beside a river, but beyond that I don’t think the technology is there.
I’ve worn hearing aids since I was a few years old, and I’m currently trialling the Oticon Zeal ones.
I tried the Starkey ITC ones a couple of weeks ago, but found the performance in noisy environments to be sub-par.
The Oticon Zeals seem good so far, but it has only been a few days. One thing they seem very strong at is the Bluetooth connectivity.
Thanks to recent iOS changes, I can use the mic in the Oticons or the iPhone for calls - and I’m tempted to try a DJI mic on my lapel as the mic. Although, so far during testing it seems that the Oticon mic might actually be good for phone calls.
How are you finding the Zeal's charger? As I said in another comment - I'm baffled Oticon can't make a charging case the size of the AirPods Pro or similar. The Zeal charger doesn't seem exactly...pocketable!
In terms of size - I don’t know what they were thinking. I’m considering doing a 3D scan of the charger shape and trying to make my own. I’m sure every customer will compare it to the AirPod case. It’s small enough to throw in my laptop bag, but I won’t be keeping it in my jeans pocket anytime soon.
Actually, it looks as though they’re going to be releasing a smart charger which is slimmer and only contains one full charges worth of capacity. I can’t find much information on it just yet though.
That's interesting - thank you! Can I ask where you saw the (limited) information? Hearingtracker forum seems devoid of info on the Zeal and accessories (likely due to the limited fitting range) - but I'd be curious if Oticon are planning a smaller, lower-capacity charger!
One of my friends has the latest Apple Airpods. He has had various (expensive) hearing aids over the years but these are much better for him (and cheaper). For the first time he can actually hear everything going on
Using Advance72 (made by Sonova) has BlueTooth which makes using a phone a breeze. The Hearing Remote app allows me to override the audiologist configured settings for volume, listening modes and equalizer.
IMHO rechargeable models are not worth the extra cost. With a typical 5 year replacement cycle the batteries will no longer hold the early levels of charge. 312 batteries are cheap and easy to carry spares.
Bit a side question since OP mentioned company's name: anyone from Europe with Phonak devices with recently replaced earmold? I wonder if you got a soft silicone or something that appears to be some firm 3D printed material.
Mother uses hearing aids since end of 90s and most of the time it was in-the-ear but recently due to increased hearing loss she had to pick a new behind-the-ear device - still with button battery tho.
I wear BTEs and got new earmolds made by phonak this past summer, but I'm in the US. I'd classify them as firm silicone, and doesn't seem 3d printed. Seems like the same material as the previous molds (which I wore for almost 8 years).
I’ve been using Phonak app for a little over a decade now, I’ve tried to Oticon, but had disappointing experiences.
Currently using rechargeable Phonak Audeo with an air fly for connecting to any device other than my phone to avoid Bluetooth switching chaos.
I wish iOS had better control controls over microphone routing but with iOS 26 you can change the microphone during a call to be the phone microphone, even though the hearing aids have their own microphone.
I find both AirPods and Nothing Ears to be more than sufficient as hearing aids. I can easily eavesdrop into and even record from neighboring condo units in my building.
I had the chance to test Moment while my Widex Evoke 440 had been in repair. They are indeed a lot better as the Evoke, sounding wise, while having only mild hearing loss. But they are still only MFI (can only connect to an iphone) and since I am migrating away from Apples ecosystem this will be a blocker.
I'm not a hearing aid wearer, but I came across https://www.envoymedical.com/ during investment research activities. They seem to have the leading candidate for a fully implantable device. FDA Breakthrough Device designation. I'm interested in the reaction of any hearing aid wearers to what they are developing.
By and large, implantable devices are for more extreme hearing losses or unusual conditions, and I would expect very few people who get by with a HA to switch to an implantable before it's necessary.
Especially since the hardware is not upgradeable without another surgery, assuming it's upgradeable at all.
If you have HAs and wait, 1) the implant tech may get better, or 2) medical science may be able to regenerate inner ear hair cells. For #2 in particular, cochlear implants may prevent that from even being an option, since iiuc, they damage the cochlea.
I’m sorry I can’t answer your question but on a related note I wonder if anyone has used AirPods Pro 3 as hearing aids either as their first pair or replaced their traditional ones with AirPods?
I’m considering getting a pair for a family member who has been reluctant to wear traditional ones but I think would be willing to do AirPods.
I did and it is amazing for someone with just mild 40s hearing issues. Took a bit of effort and updates to run the hearing test for AirPods Pro 3. Turns out I connected over Bluetooth when I should’ve paired them the Apple/iOS way.
The live listening mode is very good. I can hear my kid trying to quietly walk past 10pm :) There are a lot of features however you cannot selectively choose to lower / raise certain frequencies. I wish it had an equalizer I could use.
The ANC is fantastic, sometimes
I even forget fans around me are on. Only issue is that when I use live listen mode and everything is super clear, people still treat me like I’m using full noise cancellation.
I got my father-in-law to try AirPods Pro 2 last year. He’s needed hearing aids for about a decade, but wouldn’t get them, I think for vanity reasons. I’m at the in-laws for thanksgiving and he’s wearing the AirPods now.
From the other side, it’s night and day. We can have conversations. He can hear my kids. The TV volume is set to reasonable levels.
Sample size of one, but it’s been a tremendous improvement. A lot of places are closing out the second gens right now for $140. I’d give it a go. It’s a pretty low price of entry for something that could literally be life changing.
I would absolutely love for Apple to make proper hearing aids or license their chipset to a HA maker. Before I became completely dependent on HAs I had a set of Beats headphones with the Apple wireless chipset in it and the ease of switching between devices with it was amazing. With my current HAs I essentially only can use it for sound with my phone.
I did the same with my mom. Big improvement for her. She’s also subsequently gotten ‘real’ hearing aids and finds them much more fiddly to use than her AirPods Pro. She’s 83, FWIW.
We also did this for my mom, but keep in mind this is a bit of a crutch that may keep them even more from getting a real hearing aid. My mom later had to go to the hospital, and because of battery life and other problems we regretted not pushing for a real hearing aid earlier. This caused real problems in the hospital.
Adam Savage made a video about them. If I remember correctly, they won’t be replacing his primary hearing aids, but would be a serviceable backup. Note that I could be misremembering, as I watched the video 9 months ago.
In your situation they could be a low stakes way to get someone to try a hearing aid and sell them on the idea, while still being a useful thing to have around even if they do upgrade to something more purpose built.
I have severe hearing loss in my right ear and no to mild hearing loss in the left. AirPods Pro 2 make it so that I feel like I can hear in stereo while streaming without resorting to setting the balance 90% right and jacking the volume. In that respect I love them. However, they are designed only for moderate loss so they will not amplify the right ear sufficiently to hear well in that ear unless the left ear is uncomfortably loud.
For me, I need a real hearing aid to hear a person that is at my right shoulder.
If both ears are about the same, I think the hearing aid volume (separate slider from general volume) could be adjusted to get past the “designed for moderate loss” limitation.
I have the latest AirPods, and I do use them quite a bit for calls and noise cancellation when using power tools and such.
But irrespective of any capability to act as hearing aids from the acoustic perspective, I don’t think they are the same.
For me hearing aids are glasses for my ears. Like glasses they need to be “put them on/in and forget about it”. If AirPods would not fall out of my ears when I walk or put on a hat or pull on/off a sweater, I might consider them.
I wake up in the morning, grab them from the nightstand and put them in. And they stay there all day until I go to bed. Only come out if I’m taking a shower or in a loud environment.
One thing to consider though, hearing aids are rated as medical devices. That means they have to fulfill a lot of requirements in terms of durability and reliability. They need to work if it is -/+50 deg C outside and still after you accidentally showered with them. Just as examples..
My 84 year old mom uses AirPods Pro 2 as an aid for moderate hearing loss and has been satisfied. As others have noted, the difference is night and day; I went from having to yell just to be occasionally understood to being able to have a normal conversation.
My understanding is they are pretty good hearing aids, but they don't have the battery life that purpose-built aids do (4-5 hours vs 18-24) so they're not optimal for full-time use. This is fine for her use case, since she only uses them when she wants to talk to someone, but could be an issue for someone who wants to wear them all day, every day.
I have worn HAs for 40 years and will give my take. HAs are better, especially the new ones with AI built in. However, if you already own AirPods Pro, it's straightforward to take the test and give yourself a boost if needed. And it's an excellent way to introduce people to the idea of HAs, without breaking the bank. I've even used old pairs of them for my parents. Of course, battery life isn't sufficient for all-day use, but if you need it for a recital or one-on-one talks, and the like, it's the best bang for your buck on the market.
I have had my hearing tested at an audiologist. My hearing curves are identical with air conduction and bone conduction. There are very few cases where bone conduction might be better, like when something is obstructing air conduction. But with most people, bone conduction headphones will not help. I have been a regular user of Shokz for around 4 years now. They have other advantages (and disadvantages).
My anecdata for that is that they're all universally a bit rubbish. They're good for maintaining situational awareness but bad at musical quality or for communication in high ambient noise (like a loud room or restaurant).
With so many hearing aid users around, this may be the perfect time for me to ask what it is like to wear one, and how it improves dayly life.
I have some hearing loss (suppose moderate) only in my left ear. As this is only on single one I think I am coping enough with the right for now. With regular "ha , sorry, what?" moments.
In your experience should I be investing in one immediately or trying my best with current coping situation for now?
I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments.
I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in glasses. Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Not a paid sponsor at all, just a very happy customer.
Between the glasses for IRL settings and bluetooth/live captions on meet/etc, I've felt much more empowered in my working life.
Thanks! I have hearing aids too and, while I don't have profound hearing loss (severe one side, moderate the other), it's got to the point where I am starting to look at other solutions to supplement them. For those not aware: hearing aids are not like eyeglasses, where you can effectively have your vision restored to 20/20 with the right prescription. They help, but they don't get you up to the level of a person with ordinary hearing. This goes particularly for situations with high background noise, multiple voices, etc.: restaurants, bars, parties and other places where social life tends to happen.
Your recommendation has made me think I should finally take the leap on live-caption glasses, which I've been watching for a while now. It sounds like they've finally got to the point where they're effective.
A question: how do you find them in conversations with multiple people? Do the glasses help you distinguish speakers by breaking out text from different voices, or is it all just a stream of words? What if there are multiple conversations going on - do the glasses manage to "focus" captioning on the one you're closest to, or do other conversations creep in?
The captions on google meet have been useful for me as well, although I do wish they were more configurable, e.g. being able to give the captioning model a list of technical phrases, internal company terms, or acronyms that are likely to come up. There also seems to be a gap still between real time transcription, which is good, and after-the-fact transcription, which is excellent. (You can also use an LLM for the latter and prompt it yourself with extra context, although that may not be the best model.)
It's been great to see so much progress in this area in the past few years. I am hoping the current (over-)investment in AI at least has the side effect of improving the tech still further.
> Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1].
Looks and seems great, always felt like a no-brainer use case for the smart glasses. But considering the kind of hardware they most likely are using, how is the captioning actually happening? I'm really scared of getting hardware that is 100% cloud dependent, as eventually the company gets bought or shut down, and then you end up having to repeat the process of figuring out what to buy next, and sometimes that just one or two years in the future.
They are not making it clear how the captioning is happening, but since they don't claim it'll continue working even if the company disappears/shuts down, one can be safe to assume it's a cloud product, meaning it won't actually be a good fit for most people out there with a limited amount of money to spend on things like these.
Edit: I realize now this product is not at all for people like me, "Boost caption accuracy up to 98%" and "More accurate translations" are locked behind a $15/month subscription, kind of disgusting how they hide making the product work as it should behind a subscription.
I just want some simple glasses that can caption what people are saying without ripping me off, I guess we're too late into capitalism for that to actually be made for consumer.
The iPhone live translation is on-device.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123720
They can do local transcription without internet but you do need their app, so the glasses would be useless if the company died, yes.
That said, the paid subscription has some useful features, but I personally don't care about multi-languages translation. The rest of the conversational improvements seem to help but I don't think they're necessary... although I don't know what they mean with "Boost caption accuracy". Maybe using more expensive models?
Here's a crazy idea. I personally prefer the fidelity of an active ambient in-ear monitor (IEM), as used by musicians on stage over the best hearing aids. Once a year, I do a monthly trial with the latest hearing aid models and IMO the fidelity (especially low-end) and the comfort just is not there compared with the best active ambient IEMs. The difference between hearing aids and IEMs is blurring, but they are not yet fully interchangeable.
Standard IEMs isolate you from the world, which is the opposite of what a hearing aid does. However, a specific category called "Active Ambient" IEMs bridges this gap. These are IEMs with embedded high-fidelity microphones on the outer shell. They pick up the sound of the room (bandmates, crowd, conductor), amplify it, and blend it with your monitor mix. The accompanying bodypack or app often includes a multi-band EQ and Limiter. You can boost specific frequencies where you have hearing loss (e.g., boosting highs to hear cymbals or speech clearly) and set a volume ceiling to protect your remaining hearing. I have no ownership/sponsorship in the product, but I personally LOVE the ASI Audio 3DME (powered by Sensaphonics), which is the industry standard for this. [1] It allows you to use an app to shape the ambient sound to your hearing needs.
The Pros: It provides hearing protection + monitoring + hearing enhancement in one device.
The Cons (Why they aren't daily hearing aids):
1) Form Factor: You are tethered to a belt pack. You likely won't wear a wired bodypack to a grocery store or dinner party.
2) Social Barrier: Wearing full-shell custom IEMs creates a "do not disturb" look that discourages conversation in social settings. This can be more socially alienating than a comparatively inconspicuous hearing aid.
3) Battery Life: IEM systems typically last 6–8 hours, whereas hearing aid batteries can last days or weeks.
[1] https://www.sensaphonics.com/products/3dme-custom-tour-gen2-...
They only get a couple hours better life even with a belt pack to fit more battery?
Power requirements, moving mass and audio sampling and processing.
Hearing aids run on tiny voltages (typically ~1.4 Volts). They are designed to amplify speech (a small frequency range) at moderate volumes. An IEM is designed to handle the massive energy of a live drum kit without distortion. To do this, the internal amplifier needs Headroom. It likely steps up the battery voltage significantly (internally converting to higher voltage rails) to ensure that when a snare drum hits 120dB, the amplifier has enough electrical height to reproduce that spike without clipping.
Hearing aids use microscopic balanced armature receivers that require almost zero power to move because they are only moving a tiny amount of air near your eardrum. IEMs use dual-driver miniature subwoofers and tweeters that are physically larger and heavier. It takes significantly more electrical current to push these drivers back and forth.
Hearing aids often use aggressive battery-saving tricks, such as lowering the sampling rate or "sleeping" processes when silence is detected. The processor of an IEM is running wide open 100% of the time. It is constantly digitizing the world at a high sampling rate to ensure zero latency. If it tried to save battery by "sleeping" between notes, you would hear a delay (latency), which would make it impossible to play in time.
Let’s try some actual numbers.
A fancy passive IEM quotes:
> Sensitivity: 114 dB-SPL (@ 0.1V)
That’s on the high side for an IEM. Let’s be conservative and say it’s actually 100dB SPL at 1mW (which is on the low side) and that the user has hearing loss and the IEM is actually outputting 90dB continuously (I’m not an expert but this seems high. Certainly I would not set an active IEM anywhere near that loud, even at a concert). That’s 0.1mW of electrical power to each IEM, for 0.2mW total.
A modern amplifier might as well be 100% efficient, although that body pack could easily be some wildly efficient Class A design.
Let’s suppose the DSP is processing 96kSPS (might as well minimize latency and the need for a complex antialiasing setup and let’s assume it’s using a duper-high-fidelity FIR filter that’s a whole 100ms long, i.e. 9600 taps, and that the FIR implementation is pure brute force, so there are 9600 times 96k FMAs per second. That’s about 2 billion FMAs per second for both ears. (Again, this is a ridiculous way to do this.) The fancy nonlinear compression stuff will be negligible in comparison.
From some quick Googling, you could easily spend a whole watt on the DSP. And there’s where all that battery charge goes :)
I bet that someone who really cared about optimizing this could put some software engineering into getting DSP power down below 50mW. Either use an FFT to
A belt pack can fit a battery literally ~1000x as large as a hearing aid battery.
Is there a little computer doing DAW work inside the earpiece?
> Is there a little computer doing DAW work inside the earpiece?
Yes, and likely always running all filters at high fidelity rather than power-saving whenever there isn't something to amplify.
Does that setup work ok outside in windy environments? A lot of the 'active' audio systems I've found really focus on the wind noise while hearing aids will try to filter that out
You definitely have a point there. The 3DME uses small MEMS microphones embedded in the faceplate of the earphone and has no physical windscreen or noise suppression like digital hearing aids and consumer buds which use aggressive software algorithms to detect wind and instantly cut the low frequencies to stop the rumble.
As a workaround, some artists performing outside wear a thin, acoustically transparent beanie or headband over the ears effectively acting as a pop-filter/windscreen. This breaks the wind before it hits the mic while still letting mid-to-high frequency sound (speech/music) pass through. Not exactly a hearing aid alternative.
This sounds essentially like a higher end/specialised version of what Apple Airpods do.
I have worn hearing aids since childhood in the '90s. Moderate sloping to profound loss. Been through all the tech since the equalized analog era.
For a while now, like the last 15 to 20 years, since hearing aids went DSP, I had not been much impressed by each new generation. At the risk of sounding like a bit of an advertisement, that changed this year.
I have the new Oticon Intent. RIC style aid. They have some of the best spatial awareness I've experienced. They're capable of quite a lot of directionality - accelerometer and three microphones in each. I had to have the intensity of the directionality turned down a bit. It was startling me when I turned my head and I wasn't hearing things behind me enough. But that's at the expense of less signal due to more environmental noise.
The machine-learning based noise reduction is an improvement over the previous generations, too.
They have a music mode. It drops all the speech remapping and noise reduction and just makes it feel loud. It's some sort of perceptual algorithm: in my case as I turn up the volume it gets more and more treble, because only at the loudest volumes would I hear those high frequencies. All while being power limited at 95 dB SPL so I know I'm not blowing my ears. I used to wear over-the-ear headphones for that but I now prefer the hearing aids. It's nice to not worry about if it's too loud.
My mom has hearing aids, I only get all the technical info through her, so it's a bit blurry, but she complained about very unpleasant scratchy noises, for instance when my dad was watching videos on his iPad (for himself) elsewhere in the room. Settings were changed but now she has a harder time understanding us. We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).
Perhaps this is just the limit of her hearing capacity. Or do you think she should not settle for this and push for something better?
> We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).
This is where my normal hearing is now. My assumption is the "some I understand clearly" is base very much on what frequency their speech is in.
I'm meeting with a hearing aid doctor this week, actually.
I'm in a similar age range (HAs since 1991 I guess). I also have fond recollections of the pre-digital HAs' sound.
I'm using a pair of 8 yr old phonak BTEs, which have various levels of directionality focusing. (Actually, I'm down one HA; 8yr old on left; 13 yr old left one one on right ear... getting new ones in January) I too prefer a lower level of directionality as my default.
I assume your HAs are doing bluetooth for the music setup you describe? Or are you describing a setup with speakers at home?
Thank you so much for commenting.
As a parent with a child with mild-to-moderate hearing loss it is heartening to know that the hearing aid technology is progressing, and progressing well!
He's been using a pair of Phonak Skys since infancy, and while they can be tuned by the audiologist I sometimes wonder what it'll be like if and when he gets his next pair.
My son is 14 and has a moderate to severe loss. During his younger years we had a big clunky behind the ear type of aid and it was fine for a while. But tech progressed and we started noticing that he was having trouble hearing "s" sounds. I researched and got him the Oticon Real and it's been amazing and his speech dramatically improved with the new tech. There have been a lot fewer problems with wind noise and he can talk and pay attention in loud environments like school or a restaurant. His grades shot up.
The newer tech is definitely worth it but spendy. There are times though when I'm a bit jealous, too! He can turn them off when he doesn't want to hear and can listen to anything on his phone over bluetooth, as well as take calls. And he never wakes up at night because of noise :)
This feels to me more like the kind of Augmented Reality (AR) that will make it to mass market adoption than what the market has offered to date. Granted, audio-only, but that's where all our wearable tech seems to start (likely because of the energy physics involved with how our tech currently generates artificial perceptual signals).
Audiologist and hearing aid user here. It's a great time to be looking for new hearing aids! Speech in noise capabilities have improved massively this generation, and I can personally attest to this. For me, the most important performance metric is speech perception in noisy / challenging listening situations. For you there might be other considerations, so keep that in mind.
With that said, my recommendation are the new Phonak Infinio Sphere devices with with their "Spheric speech in noise" feature. It's a complete game changer in terms of speech perception in loud noise. Activating this program in a noisy situation feels like turning off the background noise, leaving only (nearby) voices.
The caveat is that to achieve this they use a separate, power-hungry processor and compensate by increasing the battery size (making the whole hearing aid bigger than other, similar hearing aids). The upside to this is that if you're _not_ using the spherical program, you'll have really good battery life. I use mine for exactly 16 hours a day and if I'm careful I can make them last almost three full days. The charger is much better than the previous ones; they use magnets to keep the devices in place instead of relying on plastic friction.
The Oticon Intent and new Starkey AI aids are also great. You should always try more than one model before you make a decision.
Happy to answer any questions!
I'll tell you what is NOT hot!
I have Phonak Audeos paired over bluetooth with my iPhone. A few years prior, I used to have Oticon, also paired with my iPhone.
With the Oticon, if I made a cellphone call, the iPhone would use the default iPhone microphone while the audio would stream to my hearing aids. It was good that way because in a noisy environment I could hold the iphone right up to my mouth and the other party would be able to hear what I was saying.
With the newer Phonaks, I was very disappointed to find that the new hearing aids would only use the microphone input that is built into the hearing aids themselves, and not the iPhone mic input. I discovered this when I realised that talking directly into iPhone mic did not make it any easier for the other party to hear me.
I complained to my Audiologist who explained that yes, the new hearing aids were copying the behaviour of Apple AirPods, which also have the mic input on the earpod itself, and that there was no way at all to configure the Phonaks to use the iPhone mic input instead.
Why is this a problem you might ask? Because my hearing aids are Behind The Ear (BTE) and thus the mic input on the hearing aid is a good 4 inches away from my face and thus my voice cannot possibly sound as clear as when I could speak directly into an iPhone mic.
When I next replace my hearing aids, I shall look for aids that do not mimic this crappy AirPods behaviour...
You can change the mic during calls now on iOS.
During a call, swipe down for the control centre. You’ll see an option at the very top to adjust the audio options. Mic input is just there.
I trialed hearing aids a little while ago and ended up not committing, because the sound quality was bad, wheezy and tinny, and gave me headaches. Particularly bad in noisy environments, which is where I'd most need the help. Also the app sucked, Bluetooth pairing broke all the time and the controls were just confusing.
They were Phonaks.
I guess I'm glad to hear that it's not intrinsically a hearing aid thing, and I may find a better experience with other brands.
The tinniness is something your brain adjusts to and prices in, and if your hearing aid is properly set up, it is very likely that to start with it will sound tinny if your hearing is deficient with high frequencies. It is boosting those frequencies to make up for your lack in hearing. You probably need a good 2-6 months to adjust.
Mine were exactly like this to start with and over time the effect goes away such that you don't notice. I'd recommend if you do actually have hearing problems, sticking with it for quality of life improvements.
Me, too.
This is the case for any Bluetooth microphone headset, it has nothing to do with the hearing aid “trying to mimic AirPods “it is because Apple refuses to give us fine-grained controls on our Bluetooth devices
Depends if the hearing aid presents itself as an audio sink (with no mic) or as a headset with mic. The phone will only use the mic if it's available (which is generally what you want if you're using an actual headset).
An elaboration on how complicated call handling can be with hearing aids (and how I wanted AirPods-like behavior): I assisted someone with purchasing hearing aids a year ago, and we first had a pair of Philips and returned them within a few months because they only worked with iPhone for supporting phone calls with the microphone on the hearing aids themselves, for Android it didnt work. Even the next generation Philips 9050 that supported Auracast didnt support this.
We ended up with Phonaks rebranded as Sennheisers. The audio quality during calls may not be as clear as a separate mic (what i believe you refer to as oticon), but from a user experience its nice to not have to fish out your phone to answer a call or wonder why you can hear the other person but they cant hear you.
Note that my complaint here is specific to Android support.
Seems a bit sad/ironic that it sounds like the solution in OP's case would be to switch to Android for that exact behavior that your side didn't want. (And that switching to iPhone would bring that "feature" in)
I personally use iPhone and I do prefer to leave phone in pocket for my phone call. But it does seems like a massive oversight to not make this configurable.
Yea, my Phonak + iPhone experience was not great. I stopped using any integration with them after a while and now just use AirPods for all my calls, music, etc. I have open domes and can pull off wearing both, but do take the HAs out now and then when I just want to focus and let the noise cancellation do its thing.
iOS 26 finally enabled custom mic selection!
Settings > Sound & Haptics > Input > change from "Automatic: ..." to "iPhone Microphone"
Which sadly does not work very reliably. At least on my end the selection changes back to default every few days. I reported this issue over the Apple Feedback app already…
Yes, that’s my experience too. I have to choose during each call by opening the control centre and choosing the audio settings option for the ongoing call.
This does seem to let me enable voice isolation though, which seems to work very well.
I have the same problem, but I always assumed it was Apple's fault. I don't know why the HAs/Airpods have the final say.
I don't think there's a way around it on the iphone, but I was able to cobble a fix for my macbook at least. It uses Shortery to run a Shortcut whenever my HA connects. The Shortcut runs a shell script that uses https://github.com/deweller/switchaudio-osx/ to determine the built-in mic and switch back to it immediately:
BUILTIN_MIC_ID=$(switch-audio --list-input | jq 'map(select(.name == "MacBook Pro Microphone")) | .[0].id') switch-audio --set-input="$BUILTIN_MIC_ID"
Nice.
And AirPodsSanity (& SoundAnchor) offer polished options here. Maybe using that same script underneath!
Interesting, wouldn't the MBP microphone be even further away than the HA's microphone?
It's also my experience that people who use the Airpods audio in meetings = poor sound, whereas when they switch to the Macbook, it's much better.
I think the Macbook does some more advanced beamforming stuff to filter out sound coming from other directions.
> I think the Macbook does some more advanced beamforming stuff to filter out sound coming from other directions.
It does, and that also gave the Asahi Linux team some serious headache when trying to get the microphones working on the ARM MacBooks - the team involved in that had to delve deep into DSP black magic to get usable sound working out of the three microphones [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461701
I’ll chime in with a sidebar: Anyone got any experience using hearing aids for the "hearing in noise" issue (aka. King-Kopetzky syndrome or lack of cocktail party effect [0], part of a whole bunch of things also called adhd for ears). Essentially I have filtering issues, as soon as multiple people talk, I can’t really understand anyone anymore, unless they very directly speak into my ears so they are significantly louder than other noises.
It’s a brain thing, my hearing itself is above average for my age (40), so I’m not sure what exactly can be done, but there was an article many years ago about someone (Bose?) working on aids for that issue, no idea what came of it. I guess all modern hearing aids have some focus mode.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
edit: In case there’s an airpod suggestion, I’ll also need to know if that feature works on Android, it’s not crippling enough to make me use an iPhone.
I posted this standalone, but replying to you since you specifically asked about HAs in noisy environments.
The newest HAs have AI that helps in noisy environments. The ones I have are the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio I90s. I've worn HAs for 40 years. It's truly unbelievable in noisy environments. I know it's easy to think it's all marketing garbage, but some great demos on YT of the technology. I keep them in AI mode all the time when I have them on, and charging them for an hour at lunch is enough to get me the necessary runtime.
Sadly I can’t afford high end HAs. And from what I’ve read, you don’t really get HA prescriptions for stuff like APD with no hearing loss.
But it’s cool that this stuff is now integrated, hopefully those advancements will eventually trickle down further, from what I’ve now read, the AirPod Pro feature is a bit of that trickle.
Hearing in noise is both what most people want from hearing aids and what they are least equipped to provide.
The traditional solution is an FM system where you give the person speaking a microphone linked to your hearing aids. There are dedicated ones like Phonak Roger. You could probably also use your phone as a microphone if it's bluetooth connected to your headphones or hearing aids.
That sounds awkward.
The tech for isolating a speaker at conversational distances exists. You use half a dozen microphone transducers (minimum; Crappy microphone transducers are cheap and quality is expensive, so just use a bunch of them), and through a combination of phase and intensity they decode relative location, and amplify that phase expectation while suppressing everything that isn't phased like that. Sound is slow, and readily susceptible to real-time triangulation. The math/processing is much easier if the parallaxes are fixed (eg the microphones are arranged in a line array on the top band of a rigid pair of smart glasses), but with a little latency it's not prohibitive for a deformable array to solve for its own relative position as well.
Least equipped to provide? They've been working on machine learning algos for exactly this purpose for twenty years.
That’s more a solution for far more extreme cases, including actual hearing loss. This would be far more involved than me lining up my ears with their mouth ;)
I'm completely lost in noise. The benefits for this kind of thing is part of why my audiologist pushed for hearing aids with directional microphones. And they do help. But it's not a fix. I'm still mostly lost in noise.
People rely on the (usually very large) dynamic range of hearing to be able to understand in those situations. In people with typical hearing the brain filters out the sounds too loud or too quiet to be what they are trying to listen to. But hearing aids act as compressors reducing the dynamic range.
The second part is why I wonder if there’s anything targeted at the problem instead of badly solving it as a side effect.
Bose used to make these noise cancelling earphones called the Hearphones that could focus on the speech of person in front of you and they were amazing:
https://support.bose.com/s/product/hearphones-conversationen...
I absolute loved them, but unfortunately lost them, and they are irreplaceable.
These were great and I am always on the lookout for something similar, but no luck so far.
I also liked that there was a neckband - easy to take the buds out when not needed and leave them hanging, and of course more power in a larger battery.
Thanks for bringing this up, I'm often lost in a setting with competing voices. I don't strictly need hearing aids but the few times I've had my earbuds in with ambient voice enhancements it's really improved my QoL. Gonna have to look into this more!
Have a look at librepods [1], which was lately on HN.
___
1. https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods
That seems to enable airpods, but I have no idea if airpods are in any way applicable to the issue.
Airpods might be totally applicable here:
>When your AirPods Pro are connected to your device, you can use Conversation Boost to focus on the person talking in front of you. This makes it easier to hear in a face-to-face conversation.
https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/use-and-customize-tr...
librepods appears to support this feature
Ohh, that is interesting. I’ll research this, thank you.
Hah, this made me find the subreddit /r/AudiProcDisorder where people discuss those and others for exactly that reason.
edit: Damn, tool requires root because of a bug :/
On Linux it works out of the box as I understood. So maybe time for a linux phone? ^^
Airpod Pros work well for me in adaptive mode for this, I've never compared to devices more dedicated for this thing, but it's enough for me. They seemingly reduce most of the surrounding noise while I can still hear the person talking closest to me.
I have the same problem (took 35 years to find out), and hearing aids with directional microphones might work. I don’t say they will, but it is worth to try it.
I have moderate-to-profound hearing loss and have worn hearing aids since I was 4. I currently have Oticon Opn1’s and have had Oticons since 2017 (and got new ones in 2022) and they are fabulous. I find the sound quality in noisy environments much better than any other aid I’ve had - much better perception of voices in restaurants, for example. I rarely have to fiddle with the volume control and in fact do not even use any other settings than the main program - I find that whatever the core program is doing tends to be basically what I want.
I also very much appreciate that they can natively connect to iPhones (this is also essentially the main reason I have an iPhone). This makes phone calls and music and podcasts very easy. (Whereas up until 2017, I used to dread phone calls.)
I actually tried Phonaks briefly in 2022 and hated them. Lots of controls to fiddle with (some with oddly unintuitive names), but that meant I was constantly trying to adjust it and was rarely able to just exist in the moment. I found them markedly worse in noisy environments - I basically couldn’t have a conversation in a restaurant.
This matches my experience, too. Although I’ve opted for ITC or ITE as much as possible in recent years.
I have the Widex SmartRIC 220, and would buy them again. They are comfortable, have musical audio quality (Widex works with musicians), very low latency (reducing comb filter effect), and in general look and feel very professional.
As for technology, they use bluetooth low energy to connect to the smart phone, which works really well, with the caveat that the range is quite low and if it is in the pocket and you are moving around, media sound will often disrupt or desync intermittently. On the plus side, they last well over a day even with media use (WIdex says they last 37 hours without bluetooth use and that checks out). The case provides charge for about a week, and has wireless and usb-c charging.
They are quite pricey, but there are several options (110, 220, 330, 440), and the 220 were more than enough for me. The app has several modes, including directional focus mode, and you can define your own. I sometimes use a different mode for listening to concert music, that disables most filters such as volume protection.
I am wearing them for 9 months now, and there was no situation (concerts, traveling, work, sports, etc) were they gave me any issues whatsoever.
I'm using Widex Allure. I only need to use one ear for now, and the low latency from the Widex was what won it, tried a couple Oticons that had a disorienting amount of lag. Also the Widex has really great high frequency transient filtering, much better than the Oticons in my experience. With a house full of screaming kids, this was also critical.
I have a related question.
What is the best thing for people with no hearing loss but need help in noisy environments?
My partner and I both have difficulty listening to conversations in crowds.
Logic tells me that there must be some noise cancelling devices with directional mics that let you hear just what is in front of you, but querying staff in stores gets me the same bemused look as when I asked about Arm laptops before Apple did one.
Good question, that's something I struggle with as well. And it gets worse as I age.
I just replaced my Jabras (from Costco) whose microphones stopped working. I tried Phonaks and found that the use of Bluetooth to connect to my iPhone was painfully flakey (there were certain locations in my neighborhood that every time I walked in front of a particular house, I would lose audio). I ended up returning them and the only MfI hearing aids the audiologist I went to (I was limited by what was in-network by my insurance and while the old insurance covered equally in-network and out, my new insurance covered 0% out of network so I was going to be looking at double the price to go to Costco). I ended up with Resound which are essentially the same as the Jabras.
The one thing that I find absolutely essential is using ear molds instead of domes. My cousin hated ear molds and gave up on them, but I definitely prefer them.
Incidentally, I would recommend the HA/hearing loss subreddits (r/HearingAids and r/hardofhearing) over HN for this discussion. The HA group can get a little rigid, but I really like the community at HoH.
Losing audio in front of a certain house may be related to devices I’ve noticed my own neighbors beginning to use, which are those high pitched audio emitters that ward off voles etc. We don’t have that issue in our neighborhood and especially in front yards so I suspect it’s to keep dogs from pausing in their yard.
In any case it’s a periodic high pitched burst. I wonder if that was what caused your issue with the phonaks. Seems like it would be a rather common issue in suburbs that should be considered in hearing aid design.
Yea I gave up on the phone integration with mine. Whenever I’d get a call or some audio thing was going to happen, my HA mics would go silent and second or so later the audio would come in. So answering a call i would often miss the callers initial words. Or driving instructions would be “…in 1000 feet” with the “turn left” or “turn right” part missing.
I do participate in the Reddit subs but am interested in the technologists view of HAs I might get here. They are fascinating, necessary devices for myself.
Weird - in an incredibly similar situation and my RICs are overdue an upgrade (Oticon Opn 3). I've been keeping an eye on developments for some time, and I've been looking for something ideally CIC, though I do like the RIC Opns. However, nothing has had the feature set I wanted - bluetooth, auracast, Apple MFI and being CIC.
Oticon just announced/released their 'Zeal' product - a non-custom CIC, with seemingly all the bells and whistles, including bluetooth. Planning to try them soon.
I have tried a few aids before (Starkey and some older Phonak) and I do really like the Oticon 'sound'. They work for me, but of course YMMV. I think many aid manufacturers (many of them the same company - WDH!) do 60 day trials. Worth a shot.
My only dislike is the new fad, particularly of Oticon, of stopping disposable batteries and only going rechargeable. Disposable zinc-air cells have great life (I'd get a week on the Opns at least, with a few hours streaming per day). I travel for work a lot, so carrying a couple of tiny 312's in my wallet or keychain was perfect. The Zeal look to have what Oticon think is a 'compact' charger - but it ain't small. My kingdom for a charger the size of the AirPods Pro case...
I’m trialling the Oticon Zeal right now.
I also travel a lot with work. So far, the estimate of 20 hours battery seems genuine - but you’re right, the charger is not small. What I didn’t know though, is that the charger holds three full charges worth of capacity. Meaning it doesn’t need to be plugged in for three nights in a row.
Due to my level of loss (80db), I need the custom mold option. This seems to be primarily to reduce feedback. I’m swapping between the custom mold and the standard tip to see which is best for my use case.
So far though, I’m impressed.
Jabra via Costco:
https://www.costco.com/f/-/jabra-brand-showcase
Backup:
Airpods Pro 3 with hearing test through iPhone.
Has anyone had and experience using hearing aids to deal with tinnitus? I've got some small hearing loss in the high frequencies and I'm looking at getting fitted for hearing aids to help boost those frequencies. The hope is to train my brain to stop replacing the deficit of sound with the monotone tinnitus noise.
I've tried some OTC hearing aids (Sony & Sennheiser) but its been hit or miss. I'm going to try whatever the hearing aid tech at my ENT proscribes.
I have mild tinnitus, and I don’t really notice it at all when my hearing aids are in. (Phillips, got them at Costco) Sadly, it’s a lot more noticeable once I take them out. I am still waiting for that electrostimulation therapy I read about a few years ago to pan out.
Same. When in I don’t notice it much but do when not wearing them.
The newest HAs have AI that helps in noisy environments. The ones I have are the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio I90s. I've worn HAs for 40 years. It's truly unbelievable in noisy environments. I know it's easy to think it's all marketing garbage, but some great demos on YT of the technology. I keep them in AI mode all the time when I have them on, and charging them for an hour at lunch is enough to get me the necessary runtime.
A long time ago, I interviewed at a company called Earlens. They had a really interesting solution that used mineral oil to stick some kind of tiny speaker directly to your eardrum. The processor then beams the sound to the speaker. I think the first generation used a laser, but they've since switched to inductive coupling: https://earlens.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/LBL00153vJ.ar...
One of the engineers I had lunch with actually used their own product and he seemed to like it. I get the impression it's a more premium tier kind of thing that may not be covered by insurance, though.
This is very unrelated but I worry about posts like these.
HN is a great place to get genuine thoughtful discussions compared to a big portion of the rest of the internet. Reddit used to be the place for finding genuine experiences for products with subreddits like buyitforlife (or more specific) but now these and other subreddits are filled with bots and marketeers promoting what they sell and hammering their competition in the same thread.
Some bots are already here but I fear when the marketeers come.
If you spot one flag it and mail hn@ycombinator.com , Dan & Tom usually act pretty quickly on confirmed shills. But don't comment in the threads to accuse someone of being a shill, that's explicitly against the guidelines, and that's because it isn't rare for people to simply get it wrong, besides it would pollute the threads.
I've got moderate to severe SSHL and use an Oticon intent 1 miniRite. For my use it's been very good - long last battery, relatively robust. It also has excellent bluetooth connectivity, so I often use it to stream audiobooks in tedious meetings.
In terms of hearing quality, for me, it's been solid, with the caveat that it took a while to get the fitting right. I think my audiologist was a bit old school, and was sticking to settings he'd known to be good in the past rather than fitting for what the aid is capable of. I've recently had its prescription type updated to the native Oticon one, and it's been a revelation in terms of clarity.
My hearing loss is relatively recent (About four years now) so I will caveat this that I've only used Oticons, so can't really compare to anything else.
Thank you for the new acronym. Sudden sensorineural (“inner ear”) hearing loss (SSHL), commonly known as sudden deafness, is an unexplained, rapid loss of hearing either all at once or over a few days. SSHL happens because there is something wrong with the sensory organs of the inner ear. Sudden deafness frequently affects only one ear. https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/sudden-deafness To save some people time if they were wondering.
Good catch - I should have expanded on the acronym, especially as was referring to my hearing loss being Single Sided Hearing Loss, so already easy to confuse (Although as you point out, SSHL often presents as single sided deafness). In my case, I had sudden loss of balance with subsequent hearing loss. I spent well over six weeks suffering from bouts of severe rotational vertigo, which once passed, never returned, but took a hefty chunk of my left side hearing with it.
The hearing aid has certainly given me back most of what I loss, but it took some time to come to terms with losing my hearing on that side.
I wrote about losing my left ear completely to SSHL 6 years ago.
https://stonecharioteer.com/writing/2019/the-sound-of-music/
https://stonecharioteer.com/writing/2020/ear-one/
I'll tell you what's not hot: cochlear implants. I wore hearing aids since the late '80s. I wear CIs as of about 5 years ago, and while my hearing is much better and stable than it used to be, I've found that UX for CIs is pretty bad.
For one, unless you use Med-El's Rondo processeor, you're going to have a thin cable connecting your processor to the coil. Taking off your CIs and putting them back on (as one does every day) is going to put stress on the cable. Sometimes the cable frays and you find that out with sound cutting in and out. There's nothing you can do until the manufacturer sends you a replacement cable in exchange for your frayed one. If you want a backup, be ready to shell out $250 for each cable.
Another UX issue is that processors depend on gravity to stay on your ears. Since there's no earmold to anchor to, processors can easily be jostled off and left hanging precariously. Wearing hearing aids, I never had to worry that my hearing devices would fall off if I rode my bike on a bumpy road. Also with cochlear implants, high-intensity interval training requires some kind of hat or bandana to make sure that the processors don't fly out.
Battery life is another disappointment. Rechargeable batteries don't last a full day. If I put them in at 6:30a, they'll last until about 4:30p. With disposable zinc air batteries, I can squeeze out about a day and a half, but then I'm having to dispose batteries. And while I can track processor battery levels with the rechargeable batteries on my phone, disposable batteries are opaque to the app.
One new thing that would be useful in terms of UX would be an configurable indicator, e.g., a blinking LED, signaling that audio streaming is occurring. It's awkward to find oneself in a conversation that already started and having to excuse oneself to turn off the stream.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I have my cochlear implants, but they're way behind hearing aids in terms of UX.
For Cochlear brand your kit should include backup coils, and replacement is overnight. If you turn on lights (child mode) the processor lights indicate streaming with blue. I love my cochlear implants even though the integration UI and reliability is not perfect yet.
Two things that we use for my son's CI are a cable wrap, which gives the cable a bit of reinforcement, and what we call the "eagle claw" - a little plastic hook that goes on the bottom and hooks around the ear lobe to give it a bit more stability.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/870982894/cochlear-implant-cabl...
What model do you have?
My daughter has the Cochlear N8 and the rechargeable battery lasts 20 hours
> Sometimes the cable frays and you find that out with sound cutting in and out
Is there any way you can know about this, e.g. from the app? I'm asking because my daughter is 1 and if this was happening she'd currently have no way of communicating that to us
I know one person at work with CIs and yea, I imagine it's a challenge.
UX for a lot of assistive technology is iffy at best. Repeating some of the comments others have made, I'd love it if Apple would make a full on hearing aid that "just worked". Or someone would do a good AI integration that could notify you of things you probably should focus on - like someone trying to get your attention, or emergency vehicle sirens, etc.
Marketing too. But it's nice to see some vendors starting to actually make their devices visible and fun. HAs are a bit like glasses ages ago, when it was kind of this shame thing to get teased about when you were 8 years old. Selling them as "discrete" and with colors designed to match your skin or your hair is just continuing that perception of them being something you should hide.
Have you tried the non-over-the-ear cochlear devices? The kind that have everything built into the part that sticks magnetically to your implant — I don’t know what the term is; I don’t use them myself.
I know somebody who really dislikes the over-the-ear type devices and swears by the all-in-one kind.
She seems to get a full day of battery out of hers, but I don’t know what kind they are and I imagine usage patterns make a big difference.
that's the Med-El's Rondo processor they referenced (there's also the Cochlear Kansu), so presumably they know of them and have tried them
For what it's worth in the UK the NHS no longer provides the off the ear models (at least for children) as they say they have too many problems with them
There's something I think must be possible and wonder if it would be useful: using noise cancelling earphones to mimic someone else's hearing loss. The idea is if you live with someone with hearing loss, you could enter the frequencies they can't hear, and cancel only those. Then you could spend a day with these in to try to get a more direct understanding of which noises they can hear and which they can't.
Pending that, there are a number of videos on YouTube that show simulated hearing loss, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOpW-4XFqM
Whilst I have no idea how well this would work, I would definitely appreciate something like this.
Rather than noise cancelling headphones, I’d be happy with an audio recording that has my loss applied to it. Anything to demonstrate what it’s like would help awareness and understanding.
Email your audiologist and ask for your audiogram. Should be straightforward to apply an equalizer to match it, esp if can find an equalizer with db(a? m?) labels
It makes no sense at all. You have measurable frequency range. But you have no idea how particular brain weights the specific frequencies in the range. Some people can live comfortable life hearing only 200 Hz to 6000 Hz from birth. The other people freak out hearing 8000 Hz coil whine sound. It’s not an universal thing.
As most later hearing loss starts from the high frequencies, like mine, it is enough to put a good amount of cotton whool in your ears. No kidding, this should simulate it pretty well.
Cancelling aperiodic noise requires time travel to work, doesn’t it? So you could feel what it feels like to be that person on an airplane bare-headed, or next to a fan, or perhaps even beside a river, but beyond that I don’t think the technology is there.
just the fact you instinctively thought of the use case to understand and empathize with this disability better, is very cool of you
Following... My audiologist had the big talk with me last week and I guess I'm due to take care of my hearing...
I’ve worn hearing aids since I was a few years old, and I’m currently trialling the Oticon Zeal ones.
I tried the Starkey ITC ones a couple of weeks ago, but found the performance in noisy environments to be sub-par.
The Oticon Zeals seem good so far, but it has only been a few days. One thing they seem very strong at is the Bluetooth connectivity.
Thanks to recent iOS changes, I can use the mic in the Oticons or the iPhone for calls - and I’m tempted to try a DJI mic on my lapel as the mic. Although, so far during testing it seems that the Oticon mic might actually be good for phone calls.
How are you finding the Zeal's charger? As I said in another comment - I'm baffled Oticon can't make a charging case the size of the AirPods Pro or similar. The Zeal charger doesn't seem exactly...pocketable!
In terms of capacity, it’s excellent.
In terms of size - I don’t know what they were thinking. I’m considering doing a 3D scan of the charger shape and trying to make my own. I’m sure every customer will compare it to the AirPod case. It’s small enough to throw in my laptop bag, but I won’t be keeping it in my jeans pocket anytime soon.
Actually, it looks as though they’re going to be releasing a smart charger which is slimmer and only contains one full charges worth of capacity. I can’t find much information on it just yet though.
That's interesting - thank you! Can I ask where you saw the (limited) information? Hearingtracker forum seems devoid of info on the Zeal and accessories (likely due to the limited fitting range) - but I'd be curious if Oticon are planning a smaller, lower-capacity charger!
https://www.hearingnow.co.uk/product-page/oticon-zeal-smartc...
Seems like a holding page for now though!
One of my friends has the latest Apple Airpods. He has had various (expensive) hearing aids over the years but these are much better for him (and cheaper). For the first time he can actually hear everything going on
these won’t work for me, as i have 80-100db loss.
Using Advance72 (made by Sonova) has BlueTooth which makes using a phone a breeze. The Hearing Remote app allows me to override the audiologist configured settings for volume, listening modes and equalizer.
IMHO rechargeable models are not worth the extra cost. With a typical 5 year replacement cycle the batteries will no longer hold the early levels of charge. 312 batteries are cheap and easy to carry spares.
Bit a side question since OP mentioned company's name: anyone from Europe with Phonak devices with recently replaced earmold? I wonder if you got a soft silicone or something that appears to be some firm 3D printed material.
Mother uses hearing aids since end of 90s and most of the time it was in-the-ear but recently due to increased hearing loss she had to pick a new behind-the-ear device - still with button battery tho.
I wear BTEs and got new earmolds made by phonak this past summer, but I'm in the US. I'd classify them as firm silicone, and doesn't seem 3d printed. Seems like the same material as the previous molds (which I wore for almost 8 years).
I’ve been using Phonak app for a little over a decade now, I’ve tried to Oticon, but had disappointing experiences.
Currently using rechargeable Phonak Audeo with an air fly for connecting to any device other than my phone to avoid Bluetooth switching chaos.
I wish iOS had better control controls over microphone routing but with iOS 26 you can change the microphone during a call to be the phone microphone, even though the hearing aids have their own microphone.
I find both AirPods and Nothing Ears to be more than sufficient as hearing aids. I can easily eavesdrop into and even record from neighboring condo units in my building.
Widex Moment 440. They’re expensive but really good.
I have the same and really like them other than the BTE still require an induction loop necklace for Bluetooh.
I had the chance to test Moment while my Widex Evoke 440 had been in repair. They are indeed a lot better as the Evoke, sounding wise, while having only mild hearing loss. But they are still only MFI (can only connect to an iphone) and since I am migrating away from Apples ecosystem this will be a blocker.
I'm not a hearing aid wearer, but I came across https://www.envoymedical.com/ during investment research activities. They seem to have the leading candidate for a fully implantable device. FDA Breakthrough Device designation. I'm interested in the reaction of any hearing aid wearers to what they are developing.
As a 40-something without any noticeable hearing loss, I’d actually be very interested in having Bluetooth ‘earbud’ implants.
By and large, implantable devices are for more extreme hearing losses or unusual conditions, and I would expect very few people who get by with a HA to switch to an implantable before it's necessary.
Especially since the hardware is not upgradeable without another surgery, assuming it's upgradeable at all.
If you have HAs and wait, 1) the implant tech may get better, or 2) medical science may be able to regenerate inner ear hair cells. For #2 in particular, cochlear implants may prevent that from even being an option, since iiuc, they damage the cochlea.
Would like something like the Apple ones, without Apple or an app at all. Anyone make such a thing that works with Linux?
https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods
I’m sorry I can’t answer your question but on a related note I wonder if anyone has used AirPods Pro 3 as hearing aids either as their first pair or replaced their traditional ones with AirPods? I’m considering getting a pair for a family member who has been reluctant to wear traditional ones but I think would be willing to do AirPods.
I did and it is amazing for someone with just mild 40s hearing issues. Took a bit of effort and updates to run the hearing test for AirPods Pro 3. Turns out I connected over Bluetooth when I should’ve paired them the Apple/iOS way.
The live listening mode is very good. I can hear my kid trying to quietly walk past 10pm :) There are a lot of features however you cannot selectively choose to lower / raise certain frequencies. I wish it had an equalizer I could use.
The ANC is fantastic, sometimes I even forget fans around me are on. Only issue is that when I use live listen mode and everything is super clear, people still treat me like I’m using full noise cancellation.
Thank you!
I got my father-in-law to try AirPods Pro 2 last year. He’s needed hearing aids for about a decade, but wouldn’t get them, I think for vanity reasons. I’m at the in-laws for thanksgiving and he’s wearing the AirPods now.
From the other side, it’s night and day. We can have conversations. He can hear my kids. The TV volume is set to reasonable levels.
Sample size of one, but it’s been a tremendous improvement. A lot of places are closing out the second gens right now for $140. I’d give it a go. It’s a pretty low price of entry for something that could literally be life changing.
I would absolutely love for Apple to make proper hearing aids or license their chipset to a HA maker. Before I became completely dependent on HAs I had a set of Beats headphones with the Apple wireless chipset in it and the ease of switching between devices with it was amazing. With my current HAs I essentially only can use it for sound with my phone.
This seems like such an easy win for them, hopefully they see the value
I did the same with my mom. Big improvement for her. She’s also subsequently gotten ‘real’ hearing aids and finds them much more fiddly to use than her AirPods Pro. She’s 83, FWIW.
Yes I’d love HAs as easy to use as AirPods. AirPods with the HA form factor would have some real advantages, even for those not hard of hearing.
I don’t ever hide my hearing aids but the discrete nature of them is great.
Thank you! My family member is in a similar boat. I guess I found my christmas present for him.
We also did this for my mom, but keep in mind this is a bit of a crutch that may keep them even more from getting a real hearing aid. My mom later had to go to the hospital, and because of battery life and other problems we regretted not pushing for a real hearing aid earlier. This caused real problems in the hospital.
Adam Savage made a video about them. If I remember correctly, they won’t be replacing his primary hearing aids, but would be a serviceable backup. Note that I could be misremembering, as I watched the video 9 months ago.
https://youtu.be/uykq5aJCwBw
In your situation they could be a low stakes way to get someone to try a hearing aid and sell them on the idea, while still being a useful thing to have around even if they do upgrade to something more purpose built.
Thanks! I wonder if he was able to try the Airpods pro 3 as well.
I have severe hearing loss in my right ear and no to mild hearing loss in the left. AirPods Pro 2 make it so that I feel like I can hear in stereo while streaming without resorting to setting the balance 90% right and jacking the volume. In that respect I love them. However, they are designed only for moderate loss so they will not amplify the right ear sufficiently to hear well in that ear unless the left ear is uncomfortably loud.
For me, I need a real hearing aid to hear a person that is at my right shoulder.
If both ears are about the same, I think the hearing aid volume (separate slider from general volume) could be adjusted to get past the “designed for moderate loss” limitation.
I have the latest AirPods, and I do use them quite a bit for calls and noise cancellation when using power tools and such.
But irrespective of any capability to act as hearing aids from the acoustic perspective, I don’t think they are the same.
For me hearing aids are glasses for my ears. Like glasses they need to be “put them on/in and forget about it”. If AirPods would not fall out of my ears when I walk or put on a hat or pull on/off a sweater, I might consider them.
I wake up in the morning, grab them from the nightstand and put them in. And they stay there all day until I go to bed. Only come out if I’m taking a shower or in a loud environment.
One thing to consider though, hearing aids are rated as medical devices. That means they have to fulfill a lot of requirements in terms of durability and reliability. They need to work if it is -/+50 deg C outside and still after you accidentally showered with them. Just as examples..
My 84 year old mom uses AirPods Pro 2 as an aid for moderate hearing loss and has been satisfied. As others have noted, the difference is night and day; I went from having to yell just to be occasionally understood to being able to have a normal conversation.
My understanding is they are pretty good hearing aids, but they don't have the battery life that purpose-built aids do (4-5 hours vs 18-24) so they're not optimal for full-time use. This is fine for her use case, since she only uses them when she wants to talk to someone, but could be an issue for someone who wants to wear them all day, every day.
My only concern with custom hearing aid is getting eczema in my inner canal, I'm at lost of how to overcome this issue for years.
Because custom ones fit so snugly? Why do non-custom fit ones not give you eczema?
Has anyone tried AirPods Pro as hearing aides? I remember Apple talking big game about getting them certified or something
I have worn HAs for 40 years and will give my take. HAs are better, especially the new ones with AI built in. However, if you already own AirPods Pro, it's straightforward to take the test and give yourself a boost if needed. And it's an excellent way to introduce people to the idea of HAs, without breaking the bank. I've even used old pairs of them for my parents. Of course, battery life isn't sufficient for all-day use, but if you need it for a recital or one-on-one talks, and the like, it's the best bang for your buck on the market.
I dropped my Oticon Opn1 for Airpods Pro. I have moderate to severe hearing loss on one ear and struggle with conversations in noisy environments.
The Airpods are perfect for lowering the background noise and elevating the speech.
And since I use them anyway for music and podcasts, I don't have to remove my aid to listen to music and vice versa.
I tried them and I have moderate to severe hearing loss.
Interestingly, they work well for the realtime audio adjustments for music - but sadly not well enough for external speech.
I will keep trying them with every new software and hardware release though!
Someone I know does in fact use the m for that. I am not sure how serious they are about to though, it's their first hearing aid.
I wear the new(ish) Starkey AI Genesis. Jump ahead in terms of battery life and water resistance. Great overall. Use a CROS in one ear.
What about bone conduction headphones (like Shokz) typically used for swimming and running?
I have had my hearing tested at an audiologist. My hearing curves are identical with air conduction and bone conduction. There are very few cases where bone conduction might be better, like when something is obstructing air conduction. But with most people, bone conduction headphones will not help. I have been a regular user of Shokz for around 4 years now. They have other advantages (and disadvantages).
My anecdata for that is that they're all universally a bit rubbish. They're good for maintaining situational awareness but bad at musical quality or for communication in high ambient noise (like a loud room or restaurant).
With so many hearing aid users around, this may be the perfect time for me to ask what it is like to wear one, and how it improves dayly life.
I have some hearing loss (suppose moderate) only in my left ear. As this is only on single one I think I am coping enough with the right for now. With regular "ha , sorry, what?" moments.
In your experience should I be investing in one immediately or trying my best with current coping situation for now?
Not sure why this is directed at deaf people only,
adjective 1. having a high degree of heat or a high temperature.
Hope that helps!
Ouch. Sorry, does it help if I say I'm a big Leslie Nielsen fan? :P
Surely you know jokes on here don't always lead to upvotes!
Yes, but don't call me Shirley.