Digital Hearing Aids

Digital hearing aids boast today's most advanced technology. Digital hearing aids are programmable hearing instruments with digital circuits. These digital circuits are more flexible than analog circuits. The analog circuits increased the volume of all incoming sounds and sometimes made loud sounds too loud and soft sounds too soft. These types of circuits were also prone to feedback (whistling noise) and distortion. Digital circuits can be precisely programmed to match the patient's individual hearing loss, sometimes at each specific frequency/pitch. Digital circuits offer improved clarity of sound, less circuit noise, faster processing of sound, and improved listening in noise when compared to analog circuits. Digital hearing aids are easy to use because they adjust volume automatically. Find out more information on the cost of digital hearing aids.

Digital hearing aids represent the most advanced technology available today allowing the most precise prescriptive fitting available. Older analog hearing aids turned everything up, but digital hearing aids focus on clarity and comfort through sophisticated control of the sound signal inside the hearing aid.

If you think about the sounds that you can hear and sounds that you cannot hear, these sounds differ in pitch (ex. keys on a piano) and they differ in volume/loudness. Digital processing can shape your amplification (volume and clarity of signal which you hear through the aid) by changing pitches and changing volumes.

Digital hearing aids also offer many other feature like directional microphones and multiple programmable memories to enhance the user’s benefit in different listening environments. The key is the tiny computer chip that manipulates the incoming soundwaves according to logic principles supplied by the various manufacturers. The modern digital hearing aid can provide a hearing-impaired person with an improved and more pleasant sound picture. But it cannot bring back normal hearing. Even digital hearing aids are limited by many factors of hearing loss such as speech understanding abilities, extent of damage to the inner ear and entire auditory pathway. Like many other high-tech devices, high expectations can accompany digital hearing aid devices. Counseling patients as to the realistic expectations of digital amplification will continue to be most important. But the future looks bright as technology and processing schemes continue to improve. Find out more information on how digital hearing aids work.