Cheap hearing aids and affordable hearing aids may sound like they’re nearly the same thing, but knowing the differences between the two can help save you time, money, and frustration in the long run. When it comes to hearing aids, you really do get what you pay for. Cheap hearing aids have an ultra-low price because they are made with the cheapest materials and designed to meet the bare minimum requirements.
If the device you’re considering is $100 or less, it’s important to pay close attention to exactly what you’re getting for the price, as well as what customers are saying online in the product reviews. On the other hand, affordable hearing aids can save you thousands of dollars per ear. They also deliver nearly the same exact quality and even higher customer satisfaction as the big name, traditional prescription hearing aids do.
Cheap Hearing Aids
Cheap hearing aids tend to only do two things: make everything sound louder or make everything sound softer. Where they fail is in the variable regulation of the sounds around you. Instead of being able to amplify the conversation with your granddaughter in your living room, everything from the television to the noisy dishwasher is going to be amplified along with it, which completely defeats its intended purpose.
Not only that, but because the lowest quality parts were used their production, you can experience ear-shattering feedback screeching that could damage your hearing even worse. There was a noted study done in 2008 by Michigan State University where the low-cost, cheap hearing aids were not only found to not meet the needs of the hearing impaired, but they also posed as a hearing safety hazard.
Most people don’t experience sudden hearing loss, it is more often a progressive loss over time, and they struggle with hearing specific frequencies. The most common type of permanent hearing loss, called sensorineural hearing loss, affects frequencies over 1000 Hz-which is essentially most levels of human speech. So even if you were to turn up the volume on the sounds around you, if you’re unable to hear those frequencies anyway, then making them louder isn’t going to help you much and you end up back where you started from.
The same clinical study mentioned above concluded that all of the cheap hearing aids they tested helped mostly with only the low frequencies, as opposed to the high-frequency hearing loss most people experience and need help with.
Cheap, low-quality hearing aids also lack many of the most beneficial features and parts compared to their high quality, affordable hearing aid counterparts. Cheap hearing aids will use low-quality microchips, limited channels, low bands, and single (instead of two), low-quality microphones. In short, what a cheap hearing aid offers is an allover, grossly inadequate hearing experience not even worth the diminished price tag.
Affordable Hearing Aids
Affordable hearing aids are high quality, durable, hearing aids created with the most cutting-edge technology, but without the jaw-dropping price tag. While you may pay a little more for affordable hearing aids versus the cheap hearing aids, what you get is an investment in quality that will save you time, money, and frustration in the long run. The high quality of the parts used to create the affordable, OTC hearing aid are of the same caliber used by expensive, traditional prescription hearing aid manufacturers.
So, why are hearing aids so expensive? Simply put, there are enormous markups that occur several times on the device’s trip from the manufacturer to the doctors’ office or audiology center. Companies like Otofonix, an FDA approved manufacturer of low-cost hearing aids, cuts out the middleman, and passes the massive savings along to you, the consumer.
In the end, it’s important to understand what you’re buying and how whichever device you choose will help you hear overall.
The Otofonix Solution
For more information on the very best FDA-approved over the counter hearing aids available on the market, get in touch with us now for answers to all your questions, or to start shopping for your new hearing aid today. To learn more about the difference between traditional prescription hearing aids and OTC hearing aids, check out this post.
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