When the United States Food and Drug Administration Opening the door to selling hearing aids without a prescription In 2022, you are everything. Prescription hearing aids are criminally expensive, and many OTC models have proven that you don’t need to visit a hearing aid store in a mall to get a product that gets the job done. I’ve tested 38 stethoscopes To date, 29 of them have been made available without a prescription. All my favorite hearing aid products The models were OTC. yet.
Starkey is Main name In the hearing aid business, it’s not a white label company that slaps a logo on someone else’s product (an epidemic in this industry). Starkey has been around since 1967, and although it no longer designs or manufactures its own digital signal processing chips, it is closely involved in hearing aid development – and boasts that it has outfitted everyone from Ronald Reagan to Mother Teresa with its own hearing aids.
Now, with its new Edge AI RIC RT hearing aids, Starkey sits at the top of the heap in terms of product quality and performance, thanks in large part to its new sound processor that includes an integrated neural processing unit – just like ours. Laptops and Phones. Starkey says this is the only NPU-powered hearing aid line on the market.
Reception in the channel
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the way the Edge AI RIC RT (which stands for “receiver in canal, rechargeable using a telecoil”), built on the classic teardrop-shaped behind-the-ear design, looks, although it is available on Your choice of seven colors. Each aid weighs 2.62 grams, which is competitive for a behind-the-ear hearing aid. (For comparison, Jabra boost select 500 It weighs 2.56 grams.) There is a single button on the back of each plugin to control the volume: down on the left plugin, up on the right plugin.
Photo: Christopher Noll
Since these are medical assistive devices, you will need an audiologist to fit and adjust them. Instead of sending me to a local doctor, Starkey took the unusual step of flying its chief hearing health officer, Dave Fabray, to my home to complete this task. Fabbri brought a bag full of equipment to recreate the typical doctor’s office experience, just on my dining table. After that, he gave me a course on utilities and guided me through the course My starkey appjust like a standard audiologist.
Fabry also provided me with custom ear tips molded to fit the exact shape of my ear canals. (This type of service will be at the discretion of your audiologist.) This is a simple process that involves placing the paste in your ears and waiting for it to harden. This paste can then be used to create a custom ear piece that fits perfectly – although the usual range of open and closed ear pieces in various sizes are included in the box too.
Photo: Christopher Noll
