Best Hearing Aid Features of 2022 | 11 Top Rated Features!

Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and Founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. And in this video, I'm gonna show you how to get some amazing hearing aid features at a discount coming up. Do you ever wonder what happens to the premium hearing aid features from last generation's hearing aids? I mean, just a few years ago, I was telling you about some amazing new feature that completely revolutionized the way that hearing aids work, only to have me tell you right now that there are even newer features that were just released. Well, it isn't that these older premium features just become obsolete and vanished, never to be heard from again, they actually trickled down to lower levels of technology as the years go by. So, individuals who cannot afford premium hearing aids can actually get access to these features several years later. But before I explain exactly what this means, if you could do me a huge favor and click the Like button, it really helps out my channel because it gets these videos in front of a broader audience. And while you're at it, if you have not yet hit that Subscribe button with notification bell, go ahead and do that as well because that ensures that you never miss one of my newly released videos.

With that out of the way, I really appreciate it. Now let's talk about what happens to these older premium features inside of hearing aids. Let's consider noise reduction. Noise reduction is an amazing feature that basically takes steady-state noises, whether they're soft sounds like your refrigerator humming, or louder sounds like a fan running, and it actually lowers down the amplification given to those particular sounds to increase your auditory comfort. When noise reduction first made its way into hearing aids, it was only available in the premium levels of technology. So, only individuals who purchased premium devices would actually get the benefit. However, as time went on, noise reduction was incorporated into lower technology levels. So, individuals who could not afford premium level hearing aids could still benefit from this amazing technology.

This is one of the biggest benefits of hearing aid manufacturers like Oticon, today's video sponsor, continuously pushing the envelope when it comes to research and development. You see, it is a continuous development of new hearing aid technology that allows Oticon to take their older premium features and push them out into other lines of devices that are lower cost. Right now, Oticon's premium line of hearing aids is called the More. This hearing aid is the first hearing aid to use a deep neural network that can perform deep learning when processing sound. Now, if you wanna learn more about deep neural networks and deep learning, I will have a video link down in the description. But the Oticon More is one of the most advanced hearing aids known to man because of all the great features that Oticon developed inside of it. But do you remember several years ago when Oticon came out with the Opn line of hearing aids? Well, if you don't, just know that they were an extremely popular hearing aid because they were the first hearing aid of their kind to completely change the way that sound was processed in a background noise situation to give you better speech intelligibility. The specific premium feature inside of the Opn line of hearing aids that allowed them to do this was called Open Sound Navigator. This is what allowed the hearing aid to help you focus in on speech of a person who's talking to you without completely shutting down all the other sounds around you. The traditional way that hearing aids would improve your signal-to-noise ratio to help you understand speech better is to use very narrow directionality to where the microphone's primarily picked up speech from in front of you, but eliminated everything else around you. Now, you can see the potential problem with this narrow directionality, right? I mean, if you are focused in on the person talking in front of you, that's great. But if anyone around the sides of you or behind you starts talking to you, you would be completely oblivious to it. While this specific form of directionality can significantly improve your word recognition ability in a background noise situation,

Open Sound Navigator allows you to meet or exceed this capability of narrow directionality without shutting off everything else around you. This completely new concept and premium feature inside of the Oticon Opn hearing aids made them some of the best-selling hearing aids in history. The only problem is it was only available in the Oticon Opn flagship models, that is until now. You see, Oticon just announced a release of their new essential line of hearing aids called the Zircon 1 and the Zircon 2. These hearing aids are at a lower price point than the Oticon More hearing aids, but they still have some great premium features from several years ago at a fraction of the cost. One of those premium features, you guessed it, is Open Sound Navigator that you will find inside of the Zircon 1 hearing aid, but that is not the only premium feature that you will find inside of this line of devices. The Zircon line of hearing aids are available in four different styles with disposable or rechargeable batteries and telecoils. They also have Bluetooth wireless connectivity and they are even cross-compatible for individuals with single-sided deafness. Oticon understands that not everybody can afford premium level hearing aid technology with all of the newest features from the latest research and development. This is why over time, they let their premium features trickle down into their essential level devices, so more individuals with hearing loss can experience better hearing at a lower price point. This is why I also recommend that you always stay up to date with new hearing aid technology that's released because today's premium technology could be tomorrow's essential technology. And the best way to do this, of course, is to make sure that you're subscribed to my channel with notifications turned on, so you always get notified every single time I publish a new video about new tech.

Overall, it just goes to show that you do not have to have a lot of money to get a good set of hearing aids at a lower price. You just have to have a little bit of patience to wait for these premium features to work their way down into lower tier devices. That's it for this video. If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below. If you like the video, please share it. And if you wanna see other videos just like this one, go ahead and hit that Subscribe button. Also feel free to check out my website, drcliffaud.com.