Tag: accessibility

Sony’s CRE-C10 in-ear hearing aids are stunners in every dimension except for one: The tiny in-the-ear devices rely on replaceable hearing aid batteries instead of an integrated, rechargeable one. While some people may appreciate replaceable batteries—much longer run time, no need to wait for a recharge—I’ve heard nothing but complaints about them. For the most part, people now seem to be gravitating to hearing aids that don’t require fumbling with miniature batteries once a week, and then worrying if the dog will swallow the spent cell.

With its new CRE-C20 hearing aids, Sony corrects this issue, and it does so in style: The new hearing aids look nearly identical to the winning C10 aids, but the hatch for a replaceable battery has been replaced with a small contact that allows its internal cell to recharge in its new case.

When I say nothing else has changed on the look and feel of the C20 hearing aids, I mean it. To the untrained eye, they are almost impossible to tell apart from their predecessors, and they still vanish incredibly well into the ear canal due to their small size. The weight of each aid remains the same at precisely 1.34 grams.

For better or worse, little has changed under the hood as well. For context, Sony touts one of the biggest upgrades as having six present hearing settings instead of four like on the C10s. Note: These aren’t environmental programs but rather frequency-tuning settings preconfigured to work for the most common audiograms.

You can’t manually select one of these hearing presets. The settings are chosen only after you take Sony’s in-app hearing test, and the user doesn’t know which one they’re getting. A modestly updated version of Sony’s Hearing Control app walks you through a detailed configuration procedure that sends pings to each ear; the user counts how many pings are heard with each round. After about 10 minutes, the app chooses the hearing setting it deems best for your particular style of hearing loss.

If your assigned settings don’t work, you can retake the test or experiment with Sony’s fine-tuning feature, which lets you register a complaint (“My own voice sounds weird,” perhaps), and then wait for a fix to be delivered to the aids. There’s a volume slider and a “sound balance” option that lets you select between “more sharp” and “less sharp,” which is mainly effective for lightly tweaking the way certain consonants hit your ears.

Professional support is available free of charge before or after purchase too. It’s all effective, but largely the same as before. The bottom line is that, compared to the C10s, I doubt most users will notice any difference in sound quality. That the C20s still sound great is no surprise: The underlying processing technology, created by Signia parent WS Audiology, has not fundamentally changed.

Like the C10s, there are no Bluetooth features on these hearing aids. They connect with your phone via inaudible, high-pitched signals, whether you’re walking through setup or doing something as simple as changing the volume. (There are no on-device controls, either.) The app can’t even tell you the battery life remaining on the hearing aids: Punch a button in the app and you wait for pings to be sent to each ear. The more pings, the more juice you have remaining. While I encountered some headaches getting all of this to work when I tested the C10 aids, the C20 aids set up without a hitch—although again, the process is rather slow due to the ultrasonic back and forth.

The lack of Bluetooth makes for a blunt way to do things—and it means you can’t stream media or take phone calls directly through the headphones—but it does keep the hardware small and svelte. As with the C10 aids, the C20 aids are comfortable for long-term wear, both physically and aurally. Once adjusted properly, they gave me a near-perfect amount of support for my mild hearing loss, virtually free of hiss. I rarely even needed to adjust the volume, except in louder environments. Again, there are no environmental settings that compensate for things like crowds or wind noise, but I found the all-around protocol to work well everywhere.

In use as a hearing aid, the Melodia has two modes—all around and “hear in noise,” which is designed for louder settings. Both were reasonably effective, but I had the best results with the aids in quieter settings, as the noise reduction feature—tunable to three different levels—tended to block out more essential sounds like voices when dialed up. With noise reduction at a minimum, I encountered a constant bit of barely-there background hum and a noticeable touch of echo.

However, the biggest issue I had with the Melodia aids was that I had to turn the volume all the way up to maximum to get much of an impact, something I rarely encounter on other aids. The Kingwell app has an in-app system to ask for support if your hearing experience isn’t perfect. A tech support agent quickly suggested resetting my audiogram settings with numbers 10 points higher across the board, among other fixes. This did help with overall volume, but the echo effect got worse, with audio seeming to flux in and out, up and down in level—a problem which can make you feel a little crazy over time.

As streaming earbuds, the Melodia units sounded great, at least with music: Great instrumental depth, solid but not thumping bass, and crystal-clear vocals across the board. Strangely, I ran into a new issue when watching a dialog-heavy film with the aids: Voices didn’t seem to be in sync between both ears, creating more echo. Further testing after restarting the aids by putting them back in the case and changing modes to hearing aid mode and back seemed to alleviate the issue to some degree.

Unfortunately, Kingwell’s noise reduction mode only works in hearing aid mode. In fact, you can’t even control volume to the aids in the Kingwell app when you’re in streaming mode—although, bizarrely, you can still interact with volume sliders for each ear that don’t actually function. You’ll need to use your phone’s volume controls instead.

The promised battery life seems ambitious, and streaming really does some damage to the charge level: An hour of solid streaming had knocked the reported battery life down by a third. Kingwell says that the nine-hour lifespan is valid for hearing aid mode only, and you’ll get closer to six hours in streaming mode. But even that seems optimistic.

While the Melodia hearing aids are a little rough around the edges, they’re moderately effective and surprisingly comfortable for long-term wear. I was able to keep them in for hours on end without so much as an itch, a claim I can’t make for many other aids. At the sub-$500 level, they’re not my favorite aids, but they’re at least worth a listen.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hearing aid that looks quite like Linner’s Mars devices. Depending on your point of view, that’s either a good or bad thing.

Let’s start by getting the appearance out of the way. The Mars hearing aids are in-ear devices designed to look and feel like an earbud, and they make no effort trying to be discreet. Each aid is bright white with a strip of color across the outward-facing side—blue for left, orange for right—and these strips include a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing via Bluetooth. (The units are also available in “cosmic blue.”)

More immediately noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the top of each aid. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps hold the device in place, following the contour of the concha. While the hook largely disappears when worn, the hearing aid itself is bulbous and quite visible (you can remove the ear fin if it’s bothersome). At 5.52 grams each, they’re the second-heaviest hearing aids I’ve encountered.

Despite being a low-cost offering, the Linner Mars hearing aids come with support for Linner’s mobile app and pull double duty as robust media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Again, for a relatively entry-level product, there’s quite a lot to explore here, including independent volume controls for each aid, four operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and outdoor), and a “focus mode” that allows the aids to directionally focus on sound coming from in front of you.

An “advanced settings” button gives you access to an equalizer of sorts, though it’s rather obtuse and takes a bit of trial and error to figure out what sounds best. Each ear can be tuned separately along five dimensions: overall, thickness, fullness, clarity, and transparency, with weightings of -3 to +3 for each. What do these settings mean? I haven’t had much luck figuring that out. Each changes the audio experience but in a way that is difficult to fully explain, either introducing or removing a slight level of hiss at a different pitch. User experimentation is clearly in order, but the impact isn’t significant enough to merit investing a lot of time.

You can feel a much more powerful influence by tweaking the three levels of noise reduction, though the higher levels tend to mute sounds you probably want to hear (namely voices). The higher you go, however, the lower the amount of hiss you’ll experience. There’s fortunately not a lot of hiss to contend with throughout the user experience, but it did tend to be present even at low volumes and in all types of settings.