The difference between hearing aid technology (easy to understand guide)

Olivia explains the difference between different levels of hearing aid technology and why it’s important to choose the best technology level to suit your budget, lifestyle and listening needs when buying your new hearing aids.

Q – What are the advantages of a premium level hearing aid in comparison to an entry level hearing aid?

A – So I think the difference between hearing aid technology levels is something that  most people ask me about and I’m going to need to explain properly in the assessment before we actually choose which ones are right for the patient.

I describe it a little like cars in that you can get different specifications of cars, so it may be  a car on the outside but different radio, different seats and things on the inside and that’s an easy to understand way of explaining it really.

Hearing aids are exactly the same in that you can have a hearing that is premium and its got quite a lot of features on it or you can have something more basic and generally depending on which manufacturer you’re looking at there’s going to be between three and five different levels within each range.

So, you will have the same hearing aid on the outside and then a different chip on the inside, or different features on the chip on the inside to make it a different technology level.

Generally if you are somebody that leads a relatively quiet life style then you are going to be exposing the hearing aids to less listening environments and therefore it might be that a basic hearing aid is all that you need.

The more active you are and the more listening environments you are going into, then you are going to need something a bit more advanced so that it can cope with different listening environments as they change.

So for example of you were someone who  is still working, if you were very social going to restaurants or busy places it tends to be as you go up in the scale in the technology levels, that they become more advanced for the way that they deal with background noise so if you need noise reduction then you’re going to find you need to go up a scale there.