I keep seeing ads for hearing aids that cost a few hundred each. Some of them even come with rechargeable batteries. I know from friends that the batteries are a major expense as well as a major PITA when they have to be changed. On the other hand, my family doctor says they’re no good. I have mild hearing loss, not enough to qualify for a hearing aid at provincial expense (that is the expert opinion of an audiologist after an examination). But especially in a noisy environment, I have problems hearing speech.
Costco has a reputation for selling good hearing aids for quite reasonable prices.
Having tried cheap hearing aids, I can aver to the the opinion they are a waste of money. There may be a brand out there that will help you pick out speech better, but everyone I’ve tried just made everything louder, and background noise most of all. Talking on a cellphone (or telephone) gave me feedback. I’m fortunate now that my insurance has paid for some nice ($2,000/pair) hearing aids, but I went through 4 or 5 of the cheaper ones in vain hope. Good luck!
Tried some hearing aids made for hunters. About $300. Didn’t work for me.
Went to a proper audiologist and got some in ear aids. Expensive, yes $6000. Perfect? No. But do a very good job.
The batteries are not expensive, and easy to put in and take out for me. 25 cents each. Supposed to last about 4-5 days. (I say supposed because my left aid is starting to use about one a day. Not enough of a hassle to worry about taking it back. At least not yet)
I read the FDA is looking at regulating the cheap ones but hunters are mad about that , they seem to think they help out when you are hunting.
I have expensive hearing aids and in my experience, the “hearing speech in noisy environments” doesn’t work particularly well, and I’d assume it would work even more poorly in cheap hearing aids.
Thanks all. You have confirmed my doctor’s advice and I won’t try them.
Here’s an article I have posted before from the Wall Street Journal. It’s a profile of audiologist Dr. Mead Killion:
I have recommended hunter’s ears to several friends with age-related hearing loss and they all report that the vastly less expensive devices worked as well as the expensive ones prescribed by their audiologists, one who had been a gunner on a ship in WWII said they worked much better.
The better ones have a number of different EQ curves. Your results are going to vary depending on the type of loss you have.
Some years ago (holy cats, it looks to be almost 12 years ago), we had an “Ask the Audiologist” thread. Perhaps something in there can help with the OP’s question:
A cheap hearing aid just makes everything louder. It helps you hear soft sounds in a quiet environment. Nobody I know has ever thought they were any good at all for understanding speech in a noisy environment.
My dad loved his expensive hearing aids when he got them. Expensive hearing aids are particularly good for people who have gradually lost the high frequencies and are having trouble understanding speech in a noisy environment.
My mother gets some value from her expensive hearing aids. But she has almost no hearing in one ear. With only one good ear, there is no way she is ever going to have good hearing of speech in a noisy environment. And she can’t hear even when it’s quiet. I suspect that a single cheap hearing aid might do just as good as the expensive pair she got. Which she got partly because for Dad, the cheap ones were worthless.
At minimum, an “expensive” hearing aid must be adjusted by an audiologist. If it’s not adjustable, it’s the kind that will help you hear the sermon in church (a traditional value of older hearing aids), or follow quiet conversations, but it’s not the kind that’s effective in helping ordinary people hear speech in a noisy environment.
Please read the link I posted about Dr. Killion.
What?
Have you ever looked through somebody else’s glasses?
He played two recordings, to people who had good hearing, and asked them which recording was better. They replied that they thought the recording which wasn’t “looking through somebody else’s glasses” was better.
He played samples to an audience of his fellow audiologists. Please read the article, he’s the fellow who invented the amplifier used in most modern hearing aids.
My perspective is as an audio engineer. A hearing aid is a microphone, a processor, an amplifier and a speaker - all things that I know very very well. Dr. Killian’s point is that there is no reason, other than greed, for a miniaturized version of these things to cost $6,000.
If you want to hear speech in noisy room, you must buy an equalizer, and have it tuned to your ear. The point that the amp is better in the device without the equalizer is of only marginal interest.
As you no doubt know, the $6000 device has more channels, there are diminishing returns for more channels, and you pay a larger amount for a smaller benefit at the top end. As an audio engineer, how many channels does a typical pro-grade equalizer have, and how many channels do you typically require?
The $6000 device also has more features, like bluetooth and earth-loop etc etc. These features are of marginal value to most people, but some people are willing to pay extra for them.
One of the hearing aid companies bought Walker’s Game Ear and decimated their line, but before they did, they had models with multiple EQ curves, as well as very sophisticated compressors to block loud sounds yet boost quiet ones.
Typical Pro graphic equalizer has 31 bands, and a typical Pro parametric one has four continuously variable bands. And if you do this only as hardware, it can be very expensive.
But the thing is… processing power has declined so much that you could get a software 31 band graphic equalizer or 4 band parametric equalizer for nothing as an open-source download and run it on a $150 computer.
True, but let’s use a more accurate analogy - eyeglasses. I wear them. When I need new ones, I can pay $50 for an eye exam, then take that prescription to place like Zenni Optical buy some truly excellent prescription eyeglasses for $20. My brother, who has just age-related farsighted, can go to any drug store and buy “readers” without any eye examination.
Yes, there are people who are going to spend hundreds of dollars to go get custom or designer frames. Some of them may have any conditions that will require them to have lots of professional assistance.
But the current situation with hearing aids as if opticians had the exclusive right to sell them, if Zenni were outlawed, if there were no $6 readers for people with normal age-related vision loss, and the cheapest pair of glasses were $2000.
How many nearsighted people would be wandering the streets unable to afford the help they needed?
As the great Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
If your interpupillary distance is close enough to standard, you can get $10 reading glasses: If you need custom lenses, it costs more.
I don’t know if the difference between $4000 and $2000 is real: I don’t know if the prices are justified. My relatives report that the difference between $500 and $4000 is real.
My wife just got a recent eye exam, and insisted that she also receive her left and right interpupillary distance numbers. She used that prescription to buy five pairs of glasses from Zenni for $39.70.
Sure, but I suspect much of that improvement is due to the audiologist spending more time tuning the equalization and compression for the more expensive unit.
I’m not wanting to jump all over you, and I’m happy that your relatives have received the help they needed. But I would prefer a world in which audiologists would spend their time making accurate diagnoses of their patient’s hearing problems and producing prescriptions for inexpensive hearing aids. They would make far less per client, but would have far more of them.
What makes you think they don’t accurately prescribe?
An audiologist is a medical professional, bound by professional ethics, no different from a physician, lawyer, or accountant. As a lawyer myself, I will not, and cannot ethically prescribe a course of action that will only pad my bill, and cause the client to lose in the end. Neither, I suspect, do audiologists.
How do I know? I married an audiologist. She took great care with her patients. If their problem could be solved by a $2000 hearing aid, she prescribed it. If it could be taken care of by a $6000 hearing aid, she prescribed it. There was little-to-nothing in it for her–she was on salary, not commission. And when patients came to her, complaining that their $150 hearing aids that they bought over the internet didn’t help, she just said, “Do you want to buy quackery, or do you want something that works for your needs?”
We’re divorced now, but remain on civil terms. I’d trust her with my ears more than I would the Hearing-Aids-R-Us (special this week, hearing aids tuned to 15KHz!) website. Why? Because I need help at 18KHz, a little less help at 16KHz, and I need something that can adjust around 17KHz, all twigged by an audiologist who knows what he or she is doing. A modern hearing aid costing thousands can do that; a $159 hearing aid just makes everything louder.