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Consumer Reports survey of hearing aid brands and retailers

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Consumer Reports has new ratings out on hearing aids and they’re more useful than they’ve been in the past. My take: There’s not a lot of difference in how satisfied people are with different hearing aids. They all do well in quiet and they all struggle in noise and wind. I’m not including a link because there’s a paywall.

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It all depends on the person’s hearing loss, how well the audiologist adjusted the aids, how well the person with the hearing loss can communicate the issues and the good things to the audiologist, and how well the person is willing to return for additional adjustments.

Hearing in noise is an area where every manufacturer claims their aids are the best and almost every user claims they still struggle

I wish I could read the article, but can’t afford to subscribe to CR. Fortunately for me I get my hearing aids at no cost from the . Which brands to they favor? Or say to avoid? Thanks.

I wonder if Customer Reports use individuals with hearing loss

Edited

The ratings are based on a survey about 27,000 readers who bought hearing aids in 2017 or later, so yes the survey participants had hearing loss. There just wasn’t much difference in ratings. The highest rated was Costco’s Kirkland with a 78 score and the lowest was Beltone with a 69, so a total of 9 points difference. In the comments they mention that differences of less than 6 are not meaningful. They also broke out individual categories like understanding speech in noise. They all did poorly. Kirkland scored among the highest with a score of 2 (out of 5), but Phonak scored a 1 so these scores aren’t very precise since Kirkland since 2019 have been made by Sonova, the company who makes Phonak.
isn’t included. My advice is to find an audiologist you like and follow their advice unless you have some very specific needs/wants.

So - they rate hearing aids based of four categories, two of which are ease of cleaning, and ease of charging or changing the batteries…

That is entertaining.

No, there are actually 20 different categories. They just don’t show up on that screenshot.

That’s interesting - although I wonder if they separate rechargeable vs battery as for charging/battery life that would make a big difference… And yes- the fact that the difference between best and worst is so small it really doesn’t help much.

I can see this as a slight help for some secondary features but overall I don’t think there really is a replacement for trying the aids in person…

I think the takeaway is don’t focus on a particular hearing aid unless there’s some special feature or issue that you want to prioritize. With proper fitting, they can all likely do a decent job.

True ish… What I’ve really seen, and read many comments to confirm, is that everyone’s loss is different and you won’t know going into the assessment which aid will really work best without trying them out.

Also I have tried three times to like Widex hearing aids as they are supposed to be good for music. Twice I bought them and lived with them for a while. Resound rescued me from Widex’s mediocrity and mostly they have been excellent (but I think the Quattro was not well conceived). The One is very good for music though.

So what works for you is very personal I think.

I would agree that what works is personal. I think the hearing aid fitter can have a great deal to do with one’s satisfaction and even their familiarity with a certain hearing aid. I have yet to meet a hearing aid I didn’t like, with possible exception of floor noise in some Oticons.

You always have to question these surveys when several of those products are physically the same model but get scored differently.

The Sonova difference from Costco to Unitron and the Philips to Bernafon really makes no sense especially when the reported differences are things like Charging - which has to be an identical process.

Isn’t the Beltone line the same as Resound too?

Yes, Beltone is basically the same as Resound. To me that’s useful info though. It lets me know there’s a pretty big variance or margin of error or whatever one wants to call it. The same is true of Hearing Tracker’s users survey results. There is basically no meaningful difference between the ratings of the different hearing aids. The only real difference I saw between aids on the CR Survey was for Value and Costco won that hands down, but that’s all about price.

In reply to @MDB

Among the top aids, the range is small enough to have occurred by chance.

But, I think the ratings miss the point.

My wife has been a hearing aid user for years. She abandoned her five year old Siemens when her audiologist began to spend more of her rare appointments selling rather than servicing her aids.

Her Resound/Costco aids have much superion after sale service - the staff is not commissioned and don’t hard sell. But, beyond the minimal adjustments, they don’t seem especially well trained and since they don’t provide a readout of what was done at each visit, every visit is like the first visit. Some of the staff just blindly reset the program and say something like the previous staff didn’t know what they were doing.

It is crucial that the patient have full access - even if only read access - to all setting in the program so the patient can intelligently participate in the settings. There is, for example, no technical reason why the adjustment of maximum volume (attack?) should cause the TV2 program to disappear - but it did more than once. She uses the aids to listen to TV, Zoom sessions, music and suich - all quite good when they work, but they are not terribly reliable. The low power bluetooth frequently goes haywire and the ReSound solution is to delete the bluetooth link and rediscover the device.

I don’t know how to discover a good audiologist from the Consumer Reports ratings - but hearing aids are not dish soap - it isn’t a one shot purchase.

The ancillary services such as bluetooth, , IPhone coupling, Live Listen all seem to interact in strange and wonderful ways - but they never seem to work for long.

Battery life is another issue. We understand even low power bluetooth is a battery burner - but manufacturers can do better. Give technically sophisticated users who demand more from bluetooth the option of a larger behind the ear unit that has more battery capacity.

Evaluation of hearing aids has a long way to go. Among the top tier aids, I’m sure a better technician can get more performance out of any of the units.

The Costco model almost works - if they would give each patient something like a memory stick with the settings and the ability to actively discuss what changes to make, the model would improve significantly.

My local library branch has removed all newspapers and magazines. They are now available through the library website. I regularly read my local newspaper, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Consumer Reports, National Geographic, etc for free…at home on my Samsung tablet or desktop PC.

Edited

I haven’t read the review but my past experience with consumer reports reviews regarding hearing aids was the reviewer wasn’t very knowledgeable. I find I can get better info on this forum

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