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We put 3 of the best hearing aids in the world in a realistic noisy environment – to show you how well they can help you.
Imagine you’re in a café. Lots of people are talking and there’s activity all around you. You’re sitting with a friend, but it’s a bit difficult to hear what she is saying.
Now more friends arrive. There are lots of conversations going on. You want to be able to talk to different people at different times, so you need to be aware of what’s going on all around you.
This is a real challenge for most hearing aids!
That’s why, if you want to see how good hearing aids are, situations like these are very important.
So when we set out to make a hearing aid comparison of three of the best hearing aids, this is what we used.
Hearing aid tests using real-life sound
First, we took a real-life situation where people were talking, and recorded it with a 360° microphone. This captured their speech, as well as the surrounding sound and noise.
Then we recreated it all in a special sound studio.
The best hearing aid at giving you speech
The tests show that with Oticon More 1 hearing aids, you can hear the people you are looking at very well.
And, we are proud to say that when compared to our top competitors, the test results also show that Oticon More™ hearing aids can help you hear other people around you far more easily. In the test, they gave far better access to speech coming from the side – so you can be more aware of your surroundings and you don’t have to turn your head to hear things.
Watch more about these amazing test results here
Far more of the other meaningful sounds around you
What is more, with Oticon More hearing aids, your brain can be more easily aware of the other things happening around you, like people chatting, birds singing, or many of the thousands of things that help to make life interesting!
Surrounding sounds like these are vital for the brain to be aware of what’s going on around you. So it’s good news that Oticon More hearing aids give better access to more of the important sounds around you – and not only what people are saying.
Hearing aids that adapt to your sound environment
Now here comes a tough question: How many different sound environments do you think you experience in a day?
Maybe it’s fairly quiet when you’re inside in the morning, then noisier when you go outside on the street. How about if you go into a shop? Or when you turn on the TV or radio?
In fact, the sound environment can change many times a day – especially when you go out somewhere or other people come to see you.
This is why it’s very important that hearing aids can quickly adapt to changes in the sound environment around you. If they are too slow, you have to wait for them to ‘settle down’ before you will actually get the best sound they are designed to give you.
When we tested the speed at which these three hearing aids adapt to changes in the sound environment, Oticon More was much faster.
This means that with Oticon More, you can get clearer sound, much more quickly. But with the competitors, you may have to wait much longer until you can hear as well as you’d like to – over 20 seconds in some cases.
And what’s more, it’s better quality sound too …
Much higher fidelity sound
Much like different Hi-Fi music systems, the quality of the sound you get from different hearing aids varies enormously.
But unlike music systems, hearing aids are devices you typically wear all day. So the sound they make actually becomes the way you experience the world.
The quality and definition of different sounds – and the contrast between them all – are vitally important. We call this the sound fidelity.
Good sound fidelity makes it easier for your brain to separate sounds from each other, and to understand what people are saying. And above all, higher fidelity sound gives you more of a feeling that you are really, fully there.
So we are also very proud to say that in our test, Oticon More hearing aids gave sound in higher fidelity. In other words, they were better than the competitors at recreating important sound with more precision, contrast, and details.
See more about Oticon More hearing aids here
It’s because they’re brain-friendly hearing aids
We believe the reason that Oticon More outperforms the competitors is that Oticon More are brain-friendly hearing aids. This means they support the way your brain naturally works, so they try to give the brain as much information as possible, instead of cutting off the sounds around you.
This unique approach is based on the realisation that the brain is the world's best sound processor!
See how hearing works in the brain here
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