The hearing aid market has undergone a lot of change in the past few years, but if your hearing is normal, you can be forgiven for not paying attention. What used to mean spending thousands of dollars through an audiologist or a custom hearing aid merchant has changed. Thanks to a long-awaited ruling from the US Food and Drug Administration, you can now get hearing aids over the counter, without a prescription.
The market for consumer electronics has been flooded with new entrants, with the latest sets arriving from Sony. Here is the proof you need that hearing aids have gone mainstream.
The entry-level set of over-the-counter hearing aids from Sony is less than half the price of popular models. The C10 is a far cry from hearing aid models released a year or two ago, with only a short removal cord visible to even a careful observer. The replaceable sleeves are included to make your fit better, but mine fit perfectly out of the box.
It is simple to get started configuring and fine- tuning the aids since there is no audiologist involved. There is no wi-fi here. Like many consumer-grade hearing aids, these use an app called Sony Hearing Control that uses high-frequency sound waves from your phone to communicate with the miniature speakers.
The photograph is of Sony.
You will need to follow the configuration instructions exactly. The phone wouldn't communicate with the hearing aids after I forgot a key step after breezing through the material. The problem with Sony is that it should have made this process more idiot-proof. I was certain that my phone was not silenced since I was talking on it just minutes before. The app tried to send signals to the hearing aids through a silent speaker, even though my phone volume wasn't muted. It was my fault that I didn't follow directions perfectly, but Sony should change its setup process to help users determine if simple issues like this are affecting them.
After figuring out the muting mistake, configuration proceeded normally, with a roughly 10-minute session asking me to listen for various frequencies and volumes in either ear, using my "did you hear it?" results to set the frequencies for the hearing aids. Once finished, these settings can't be directly changed without running through the configuration again, but various controls can let the user change volume in each ear independently. I found the default calibration to be quite effective, and I relied on some minor volume adjustments to get clear audio out of the aids.
The performance is good. The aids amplify all sounds, but lows were bumped up a bit. The echo sensation can be caused by this, so pay attention to the app's volume adjustments. Everything from media watching to conversation was improved with the help of hearing aids. The more ambient sound around you, the more noticeable it tends to get, and I never encountered any of the high-pitched whine I've seen in other OTC models. The units are so small that I was able to wear them for hours at a time without feeling uncomfortable. Had I had time for long-term testing, I would have easily reached the forget-they're-there point.
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