Consumer Reports survey of hearing aid brands and retailers

@MDB said:

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.

Ty for this, @MDB. You are a wonderful contributor here and certainly have been used to keep my head on straight!

That said, I do subscribe to CR’s and took a look at the reviews. Before this place and before getting my feet wet by following you guys, Dr. Cliff and others, I found CRs reviews confusing. Now, that I know more, I find them too broad and general and therefore very lacking. How do you review an entire brand on something so specific like the ability to hear voices in a noisy environment and give one rating for the brand’s entire lineup? You have so many different hearing needs and so many different types of HAs within each brand. It’s true they rate Costco well in value because you’re getting the P90 sibling (KS10) for a third of the price and they do REMs, which is good, but the Jabra and the Phillips are different than the KS10. Yet, they review the entire store as one rating.

If I were ignorant, I would think that Costco was the proverbial “cat’s meow”. It’s good but it isn’t all that. There are other great HAs out there that are better for some people than the KS10, Jabra or Phillips or whatever else Costco carries.

Another reason I find this review lacking is that you can’t get a good handle on what you need simply by looking at CR. They have some good things to say but this topic is far more extensive than what you can get from CR. It’s not like car ratings. LOL. More 1 is good for me and lousy for someone with a different need and a different pocket book.

This CR survey seems largely useless to me. There seems to be little difference among the various brands.

I think most members here would agree that what this survey would rate as a medium-level brand would be top of the line IF it were tweaked repeatedly by a skilled and caring audi.

And vice-versa: a poorly-programmed top-of-the-line HA would rate lower than it should. It’s almost impossible to design an objective survey.

My takeaway from this survey would be that the skill and dedication of the audi makes more of a difference than the brand of HA, as long as we are comparing each manufacturer’s most-recent top-of-the-line model.

I’ll quibble a bit about what “useless” means. If by “useless” people mean that it doesn’t tell you what hearing aid to buy, I’d agree. If “useless” means providing no information, then I disagree. Many people come here looking for the “best” hearing aid. There is general agreement on the forum that the person fitting the hearing aids is far more important than the hearing aids themselves. To me the CR survey data supports that idea. Perhaps their analysis is useless, but the data itself supports the idea that there is not a great deal of difference between hearing aids. It also supports the idea that they all do pretty well in quiet and all struggle in noise and wind.

Nobody can tell anyone what hearing aid to buy. At best they can recommend a group of aids that fit the range of the individual’s loss