WHY TODAY’S HEARING AID CHIPS ALLOW FOR BETTER HEARING
 I am often asked if the new hearing aids are really any better than older technology hearing aids. The answer is Yes. The manufactures put millions of dollars into improving the chip technology in their hearing aids and every year they get faster and smarter. They typically release a new “chip” or core platform every couple of years. The hearing aids released for sale in the Canadian market this year are capable of over 200 million calculations per second. Two years ago when I went for training on a launch of a new product it was 120 million calculations per second. That’s almost doubled in two short years. There are now 8 processors in most hearing aid chips with over 16 million transistors. What all this means for a person wearing hearing aids is that these little chips are much better at determining what needs to be amplified and by how much. They can better discern speech from noise. They can also detect the direction of the sound with great precision, allowing for finer speech focus or “zoom control”. The hearing aids have the capability of talking to each other and sharing information. With the press of a button, when you answer the phone, you can stream the sounds from one ear to the other allowing you to hear the voice in both ears. With these advanced processing applications, even feedback , that annoying whistling sound you used to hear from hearing aids all the time, is now eliminated! There really is no reason with today’s technology to have a hearing aid sitting in a dresser drawer. If you know of someone who isn’t getting the full benefit from their hearing aids, have them give us a call. We may be able to “tweek” their hearing aid so that it “fits” better for their hearing loss.
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