Steve Evans asked:




Hearing aids are electrical devices that assist perception of speech or other sounds, and they are used for mild to moderate to severe hearing loss by millions of people worldwide. Hearing aids vary in price according to selected style, electronic features.

You should be careful to remember that no matter how impressive a particular hearing aid manufacturer’s device may sound when you are told about it by the salesman, no hearing aids can yet restore normal hearing; but they do offer a substantial benefit to most persons with hearing loss.

Hearing aids are generally not covered by Medicare or commercial insurance and pricing varies according to the manufacturer, vendor, and service arrangements, so you will have to fund the purchase cost yourself.

Before you part with your money you should also bear in mind that even the best hearing devices will seldom last for more than 5 years before they will need replacement. This will therefore not be a one-off purchase cost.

Hearing aids are not a perfect solution either and they do have their limitations. The first hearing aids were all ‘analogue devices’ and based upon a direct amplifier similar to that in a hi-fi. However, it was soon recognised that most people with hearing difficulties can hear some notes but not others, and if the hearing aid was able to amplify the particular range of notes an individual person was unable to hear, by applying a selective filter, the resulting hearing improvement was much better than just amplifying every note equally.

The device which does this very well is called a digital hearing aid, and it is based upon computer technology which converts the sound to data, before filtering the sounds to amplify only those that the owner needs help to hear. The advent of digital technology has allowed this to be achieved in very small devices which can be programmed to only replace those parts of the sound spectrum that the purchaser needs to have amplified.

Now that these digital hearing aids have become common, the buyer of a hearing aid needs to know that hearing aids are distinguished by their technology or circuitry. You will therefore probably be asked whether you want an analogue hearing aid, or a ‘digital’ version.

Both digital and analogue hearing aids look much the same, and usually consist of a battery-powered transistorized microphone/amplifier unit and an earpiece. Hearing aids vary in cost by size and by the type and sophistication of the electronic circuits used to improve your hearing. Digital hearing aid models cost more than analogue aids.

However, the additional cost is worth spending, if you can afford it, as digital hearing aids are said to offer the user a more accurate reproduction of sound, resulting in superior sound quality. This is because digital hearing aids take the continuous sound wave and break it up into very small, discrete bits of information. But, do be aware that many analogue hearing aids are advertised as digital or ‘digital programmable’ simply because they are programmed using a computer, but may not be as good as true digital aids.

This is due to the fact that acoustic programming is not nearly generally as flexible as programmable-and-digital hearing aids. There is ample qualitative and quantitative evidence that digital instruments outperform analog hearing aids. In fact, the circuitry and programming applied to the best fully digital hearing aids represents the state-of-the-art technology available today.

It is said that more than six million Americans wear hearing aids and 20 million more should wear them, if you have a hearing problem, be one of the six million and get the most out of life.

Resound Hearing Aids

Anne Clarke asked:




As more and more people have gravitated toward digital hearing aids and moved away from analog hearing aids, it has been found that the digital options do truly have a number of advantages that their analog counterparts do not. Some of the advancements and advantages associated with hearing aids that are digital include:
More comfort – One of the main annoyances for wearers of analog hearing aids is the discomfort that results from high intensity sounds. Those who use digital aids have found that this discomfort has been nullified for the most part. The reason for this is because digital aids have an input signal-specific band dependence, more channels and knee pints with lower compression thresholds. This leads to a greater level of satisfaction among users because it reduces the intensity of environmental sounds and microphone noise that is commonly annoying to those users who have used analog hearing aids. Digital feedback reduction – There are feedback reduction systems that are so advanced that they are able to monitor for feedback while the user is wearing the hearing aid. When this occurs, moderate feedback is eliminated through a cancellation filter that is included in the hearing aid. People that bother them during jaw movement or when they are in close proximity to noise can benefit from this common feature of digital hearing aids. Digital noise reduction – This feature of digital hearing devices is able to reduce noise gain that comes in the form of low frequencies or in specific bands. Although there have been studies done with digital noise reduction aids that show that the effectiveness of these systems is mixed, experts agree that they can be effective at working to improve speech recognition as long as the noise is non-fluctuating. Digital speech enhancement – These systems are effective at increasing the intensity of certain segments of speech. The digital speech enhancement technology is new in hearing aids and, as a result, its effectiveness is not completely known. Case studies are still being performed to find out how effective this speech enhancement is among users.Directional microphones – Although there were some bumpy roads that had to be traveled in developing this technology, the use of directional microphones in hearing aids is now well-established. In fact, when these microphones are used with DSP, the benefit may even be enhanced.

Before too long, there is a good chance that hearing aids which use digital technologies will completely replace analog hearing aids. However this is not likely to occur until the price for hearing aids that are digital decreases a little more.

In addition to this, there are still some bugs being worked out of certain aspects of digital technology. Many users of hearing aids do not want to volunteer to be test patients while the bugs are worked out. For this reason, many have decided to forego using digital aids until the time comes when they feel the devices can be relied upon to work effectively. Because of these high expectations associated with the use of digital hearing aids, manufacturers are constantly trying to make new advancements which would make these more attractive to potential buyers.

Maxisound Digital Hearing Aids