The Four Hearing Aid Types

At Atlanta Hearing Associates, we work with hearing aids that fall into four main categories:

• Premium digital hearing aids
• Advanced digital hearing aids
• Basic digital hearing aids
• Economy hearing aids

Premium digital hearing aids

A premium digital hearing aid provides excellent gain for soft sounds, active feedback cancellation, adaptive microphones, adaptive noise reduction circuit, and data-logging. They also provide the best technology available to compensate for hearing loss and will usually be the most expensive variety of hearing aids.

Advanced digital hearing aids

The type of hearing aids known as advanced provide a good gain for soft sounds, feedback management, adaptive noise reduction, and a fixed directional microphone. The are the second most expensive hearing aids.

Basic digital hearing aids

Typically, basic digital hearing aids do not provide directional microphones, and their feedback management (if found in this category) reduces the gain for soft sounds in the high frequencies and therefore may compromise understanding of speech. They also provide minimal help in reducing background noise.

Economy hearing aids

While they are the most affordable of all hearing aid device types, economy hearing aids also have significant limitations. They typically amplify speech but have no noise reduction capabilities. The aid should be comfortable to wear with minimum volume changes.