Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?

One of my Phonak Audeo 90’s (RIC) died the other day after 5 years and I’m shopping for new. What’s your go to hearing aid currently if you’ve upgraded recently or have been thinking of doing so?

Moderate loss, have worn them for many years, enjoy listening to music and nature, but also need help in meetings and noisy environments.

Not worried about cost and wanting to get one more good deal out of work insurance before I retire.

Adam Savage made a video about them. If I remember correctly, they won’t be replacing his primary hearing aids, but would be a serviceable backup. Note that I could be misremembering, as I watched the video 9 months ago.

https://youtu.be/uykq5aJCwBw

In your situation they could be a low stakes way to get someone to try a hearing aid and sell them on the idea, while still being a useful thing to have around even if they do upgrade to something more purpose built.

I have worn hearing aids since childhood in the '90s. Moderate sloping to profound loss. Been through all the tech since the equalized analog era.

For a while now, like the last 15 to 20 years, since hearing aids went DSP, I had not been much impressed by each new generation. At the risk of sounding like a bit of an advertisement, that changed this year.

I have the new Oticon Intent. RIC style aid. They have some of the best spatial awareness I've experienced. They're capable of quite a lot of directionality - accelerometer and three microphones in each. I had to have the intensity of the directionality turned down a bit. It was startling me when I turned my head and I wasn't hearing things behind me enough. But that's at the expense of less signal due to more environmental noise.

The machine-learning based noise reduction is an improvement over the previous generations, too.

They have a music mode. It drops all the speech remapping and noise reduction and just makes it feel loud. It's some sort of perceptual algorithm: in my case as I turn up the volume it gets more and more treble, because only at the loudest volumes would I hear those high frequencies. All while being power limited at 95 dB SPL so I know I'm not blowing my ears. I used to wear over-the-ear headphones for that but I now prefer the hearing aids. It's nice to not worry about if it's too loud.

I have moderate-to-profound hearing loss and have worn hearing aids since I was 4. I currently have Oticon Opn1’s and have had Oticons since 2017 (and got new ones in 2022) and they are fabulous. I find the sound quality in noisy environments much better than any other aid I’ve had - much better perception of voices in restaurants, for example. I rarely have to fiddle with the volume control and in fact do not even use any other settings than the main program - I find that whatever the core program is doing tends to be basically what I want.

I also very much appreciate that they can natively connect to iPhones (this is also essentially the main reason I have an iPhone). This makes phone calls and music and podcasts very easy. (Whereas up until 2017, I used to dread phone calls.)

I actually tried Phonaks briefly in 2022 and hated them. Lots of controls to fiddle with (some with oddly unintuitive names), but that meant I was constantly trying to adjust it and was rarely able to just exist in the moment. I found them markedly worse in noisy environments - I basically couldn’t have a conversation in a restaurant.

I'm not a hearing aid wearer, but I came across https://www.envoymedical.com/ during investment research activities. They seem to have the leading candidate for a fully implantable device. FDA Breakthrough Device designation. I'm interested in the reaction of any hearing aid wearers to what they are developing.