HearAdvisor has given 13 hearing aids its HearAdvisor Expert Choice badge, an award that recognizes quality.

HearAdvisor, an independent sound performance lab, is today awarding 13 hearing aids with a “HearAdvisor Expert Choice” badge. In a market flooded with poorly-performing imports, the Expert Choice badge aims to give consumers a simple and reliable way to identify high-quality hearing aids.

Founded by three hearing experts, Abram Bailey AuD, Steve Taddei AuD, and Andrew Sabin, PhD, HearAdvisor is on a mission to help consumers make better-informed decisions while navigating a confusing, sometimes deceptive marketplace.

The recent introduction of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids in the US has brought a flood of new hearing aids of inconsistent quality (even in FDA-compliant devices) offered by top retailers, according to HearAdvisor.

Some of the “Expert Choice” badge winners include Sony CRE-E10, Sony CRE-C10, Jabra Enhance Select 200, Lexie B2, and Lucid Engage.

HearAdvisor is also launching an overall sound performance score—the HearAdvisor SoundScore—that summarizes, in a single easy-to-compare number, a hearing aid’s overall sound performance combined across quiet settings, background noise, and streaming audio. HearAdvisor has measured most of the most popular hearing aids on the US market in 2023.

“Coming up with a single number to quantify the overall sound performance of a hearing aid is super challenging,” said Bailey. “We leaned on the latest research in audiology and hearing science to make realistic recordings and compute perceptually-validated metrics from the scientific literature. We even conducted our own research to find which of our metrics were most important to consumers and audiology professionals. This helped us to create a composite score that captures the priorities of both groups.”

Today, hearing aids with the highest SoundScore are awarded the 2023 HearAdvisor Experts Choice award. Two such winners include the Lucid Engage and Sony CRE-E10 hearing aids. Both are OTC devices that are rechargeable and support Bluetooth streaming.

Consumers can also now listen to realistic recordings of all devices measured by HearAdvisor.

Using its acoustic testing laboratory, HearAdvisor records each hearing aid in a range of realistic environments presented with ambisonic reproduction in a semi-anechoic room and recorded on an industry-standard hearing manikin.

The resulting binaural hearing aid audio recordings place the listener in 3D sound environments, allowing customers to preview hearing aids from their homes with just a pair of headphones.

Consumers can listen to the recordings now on HearingTracker.com.

Image courtesy of HearAdvisor