If you’re anything like the average person in San Jose, you will be doing some online research before you make a major decision, like buying hearing aids. In fact, there is so much information online about hearing aids that it gets a bit confusing. What are the differences between brands? What are the differences between technologies? What features are important?

After working with hearing aids for 20 years, I still have to stop and ponder these questions. During my early years, I really listened to the manufacturer rep who would come to visit me to sell their brand. If they said that their brand did the best job at processing sound and he or she showed me all of the reasons why, I really listened. I took it all to heart. I learned the terminology and memorized the reasons. After a while, though, it all began to sound the same. Same but different, if you know what I mean. Each manufacturer was saying the same thing, but using different terminology. For example, Starkey, one of the major hearing aid manufacturers, has Binaural Spatial Mapping, Voice IQ, Acuity Directionality, and Speech ID for their Halo product line. Oticon has the Voice Aligned Compression and Soft Speech Booster in their new Inium Sense platform. ReSound has Surround Sound and Spatial Sense for their Linx2 along with the direct connectivity to the Apple products. And the words go on and on. By the time we learn one brand, we can hardly think about another one. Maybe that is the strategy? I don’t know, but I can tell you that it has always been like this since I first started learning about hearing aids in 1995. And what I have learned after all this time is that it’s not the hype and the pretty photos and the fancy marketing terminology that matters. What matters is that the features of the hearing aid are useful to me. If I stay at home all day, never go out, and just want to hear my TV and my spouse talk to me, I don’t need most of the features. I just need clean sound from one source, the TV or my spouse. I don’t need sophisticated sound processors or direct connectivity to an iPad that I don’t even own. And guess what? I don’t need to pay for all of these features! So my cost for hearing aids will be $1,000 to $1,500 each. But if I am an executive going to meetings and I’m on my cell phone constantly, I need many more features. I need hearing aids with bluetooth capability, with a great noise management system, and directionality features that make sense. I need an App on my iPad or iPhone that will let me control the hearing aids or listen to music. Then I’m going to pay $ 2,500 or more for each hearing aid. So you see when we say “The Best Hearing Aid For Me,” the most important words are at the end….”For Me.”

If you’re in the San Jose, CA area, come visit Nobuko Ito, Au.D. at Hearbright. She, along with her full staff and multiple locations, welcome you to make an appointment for a hearing test and hearing aid consultation. www.hearbright.com