Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am 55 years old and developing mild hearing loss. My wife and father-in-law have more serious hearing impairments, and both wear a behind-the-ear aids on both ears, and have paid $6000 and $7000 for their sets. Of course they get little help from insurance. They see an audiologist regularly to maintain their aids, and wear custom ear-molds. My wife's first $3000 set of aids had one battery door break and was "no longer being made" so there was no replacement for that small, trivial plastic part and that aid was thus no longer usable. Maybe it was 5 years old then. Her current $6000 set is now about 5 years old, and she's told that the manufacturer is about to end-of-life the product and there will be no repair parts for them, either. I am CEO of an electronics manufacturing start-up, a well-known software innovator, and as a hobby have been member of a team that has produced a system for converting a voice signal into the minimum possible number of digital bits (see codec2.org and freedv.org). You can read more about me in Wikipedia. I understand the physical theory of speech and hearing, the means of digitally processing speech, and the computer and electronic technology involved. I am scandalized by the costs of the hearing aid industry and by the cavalier way that manufacturers refuse to stock repair parts for units only a few years old, forcing their customers to upgrade too soon. Once hearing aids used very specialized parts and the vendors had to manufacture many of their own components, but that was before smartphones made miniaturized electronic components commonplace. Today, most of the parts for hearing aid manufacture are cheap and are stocked on the shelves of vendors like digikey.com . The customer is being ripped off. I understand that some people with severe hearing loss need special tuning of their aids, and that for them, an improperly tuned hearing aid can actually injure them, permanently increasing their hearing loss. But I am not such a person, and neither are many people who can be served well by the Walkers Game Micro Elite assistive listening devices. What do hearing aids do? Mainly amplify, but there are a few embellishments: frequency equalization, audio level compression, noise reduction. Frequency equalization: An audiologist measures the frequency curve of your hearing loss, and sets the aid to compensate for your particular frequency deficits. This is a more sophisticated version of the tone control on your stereo. If you know of the "graphic equalizer" that was common on old stereos and some musician's amplifiers, that's the function. The Walkers Game Micro Elite can not be set that way. It is set for the frequency curve that would work to enhance speech comprehension for someone with a simple age-related loss. So, if you have a more complicated impairment, this may not be for you. Audio level compression turns the volume up automatically when you're hearing soft sounds, and down when there are loud sounds. This device has compression, and when used with the full-seal ear tips, works as an ear protector for firearm users. It will cut off for a moment when there's a really loud sound, thus protecting your hearing. Noise reduction reduces the level of extraneous noise when there's nothing but noise to hear. This reduces hissing sounds that you would otherwise hear - some from the environment, some from the device itself. Modern devices provide multiple "programs" for different sorts of sound environment. This device provides four: general, crowds, music, nature. The "nature" program seems to disable the noise reduction, and thus you can hear the very quiet sounds made by animals around you. Walkers Game mainly markets to hunters, and this setting is for them, but it's excellent for bird watchers and anyone who might want to hear more in the outdoors. The "crowd" program is supposed to help you understand your companions voices in the hubbub of a busy restaurant. Hearing aid manufacturers all claim to have their own proprietary embellishments on the processes I've explained, and Walkers Game claims some for this device. Maybe they help, but sometimes they are just attractive buzzwords and false business differentiation. For this device Walkers Game claims a 20-bit digital signal processor, an internal graphic equalizer which is driven by their four preset programs, and the usual: noise reduction, compression, amplification. The Micro Elite is really small. It fits in your ear and I wore them all evening without my own wife and son noticing that I'd gotten an assistive listening device. The snap-tips it uses are comfortable - and there are three sizes so you can find the right one for you. Snap tips are disposable and the ear wax goes with them, so no problem cleaning wax out of your aid. Ear molds are a real pain compared to this, snap-tips are a sort of memory foam and fit the way your ear is shaped today, not the way it was shaped when your audiologist made molds. The cylindrical snap-tips provide protection from loud noises (for those gun users, or power tool users, etc.) and there are tulip-shaped tips that let more air in and out of your ear canal, so might be more comfortable. The cylindrical tip stops feedback better than the tulip-shaped one. The purchaser who commented that his aids would not stay in probably never worked out how to handle the tips. Not his fault, the instructions are insufficient. The instruction guide stinks. It does not say which aid is for which ear, which way is right-side up, or which way the plus side of the battery should be pointed. It doesn't say much about the tips, although they come with a short instruction of their own. It gets wrong the pattern of beeps made as you change volume. The instruction guide is so bad, in total, that I am tempted to write an unofficial version. The bottom line: This device allows the user with a mild, simple form of impairment to stay off of the hearing-aid merry-go-round of overpriced devices, planned obsolescence, and no insurance. It works as well as those expensive devices if you are one of the many millions of people who does not need special equalization or does not have severe loss.