Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The AV157 does improve voices. I have an older SB500 that has AccuVoice but not the 12 adjustments, so I did a comparison between the two on an English TV show where the actors all had varying degrees of English accents. Both speakers made nearly equal improvements in the voice clarity, and there was very little difference between the 12 settings on the AV157 once the AV was set on level 2 or 3 of AccuVoice. (However, speech clarity is a personal issue based on individual hearing.) The BS500 has a fuller richer sound because it has 2 small 4" base speakers which the AV157 doesn't have. After using all 12 settings on the AV157 and switching between the two speakers several times, my wife and I both agreed the SB500 was just as good for voice clarity, but it was better on overall sound. Both of us have different hearing losses. Hers is more of a volume issue and mine is speech understanding. The latest BS500 now has the first 6 AccuVoice adjustments, which are the main ones on the AV157, so If you can afford the $200 price difference and have the space to hold it, buy the SB500. My wife and I also agreed the AV157 is better than the TV speakers, which are both mid-range devices. Since both of us wear hearing aids, we get the voice clarity issue really well. Ninety percent of the time the SB500 is good enough. There are still bits and pieces of whispered conversation or dialogue spoken with heavy accents we miss. And of course we hear more when we're focused and not distracted by other stuff. A month ago I bought a pair of Tozo T6 ear buds. They pair with the blue tooth on the TV. It takes some fiddling around to get them to work seamlessly, but once they were set up and I figured out how to control them, the dialogue on every show has been totally clear. Now, when the SB500 is not adequate, my wife and I each use one T6 in our left or right ear. We keep a hearing aid in one ear and the sound on the SB500 turned on. That enables us to hear each other talk, and provides back ground sound from a larger speaker. The T6 does have a limited volume range, so if someone has a severe hearing loss, those might not work. Also our TV has a latency (sound lag) adjustment that was sufficient to match up the sound from the SB500 and the streamed audio from the blue tooth to the ear bud, so there's no detectable sync issue. (Even before the adjustment, the lag wasn't very noticeable.) The ear buds cost less than $40. Don't buy other models, only the T6. It works the best for this application. We don't use them to talk on our phone, listen to music in the shower or exercise with them on.. My wife now has a pair she uses to listen to music without hearing aids from her Ipad, and the T6 does that well also. We can turn the SB500 off without any impact to the ear buds if we want quiet TV time. I am considering buying a new SB500 even though I don't think we'll see enough difference between the A1 through A6 adjustments to justify $400. Our current one is 5 years old. Update: Oct 2021 My wife and I both wear Phonak Hearing Aids. I've explained the problems with dialog already. A month ago, we both bought the Costco KS10 hearing aids for $1500 a pair. They are the Phonak Paradise version. These are terrific hearing aids. With the TV Connector attached to the optical output of the television, we can both listen to TV at same time using blue tooth 5. No problem understanding dialog now. Using an optical signal splitter, we can have the sound on the Zvox and in our ears at the same time. Of course, our phones connect directly to the hearing aids also. The blue tooth in these is stereo. The Phonak paradise is a big up grade from both the marvel and brio versions, and $1500 a pair is really inexpensive in the world of hearing aids. The TV connector is in short supply. I found one on ebay. Works great. Update 8/20/22 We listen to TV part of the night through the Zvox speakers. And we also watch a couple of shows with the Phonak TV connector paired with our hearing aids. The difference is amazing. Nothing we've ever had works better than streaming the TV directly into our hearing aids. Recently, we got a partner mic. When it's worn by someone else, it streams their voice into our hearing aids just like the TV connector. Then we bought a Roger Select in, which is like the partner mic only it has three microphones, and they switch in the direction of the person speaking. Again, amazing clarity. We can hear everyone at the table in a restaurant, for example. And the sound is nearly perfect. The Roger Select products only work with the set of hearing aids they are set up with. Using Roger products, my speech recognition in my worst ear has gone from 50% or so to between 85 to 95%. Wow! Costco has the Phonak hearing aids, TV connector and the partner mic, but not the Roger products. I found those myself for a steep discount against the list price.