Analog Hearing Aids
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Hearing loss can affect any family and any person regardless of your ability to afford sophisticated equipment to get help. The challenge of affording a good hearing aid especially in these difficult economic times can be such a roadblock that many people end up going without hearing assistance even though they clearly need it. And that is a tragedy because our ability to hear affects our ability to have quality personal relationships. It even affects how well you can do at work, which is the only way any of us can get out of our economic problems that we face.
One route that is available that can get you a perfectly workable hearing aid while side stepping the fancy digital units with the high prices that come with them is to go with an analog unit. Before digital hearing aids came along, analog units were all that people used. And they are still in use and perfectly functional today. The primary differences between an analog and a digital unit is that an analog unit passes the sound to your ear the way you would have heard it in the first place except with amplification. A digital unit, as the name implies, digitizes the sound and then replicates it inside your ear. A computer chip is needed to do this albeit a tiny one.
The advantages of a digital unit are more in the form of how they can program themselves and their size. But for many thousands of hearing aid users, the old phrase "less is more" works well. If you can do well with a very basic amplification unit that does its job day in and day out without the need for a sophisticated computer chip in your ear, you can save a lot of money just going the analog route when buying your hearing aid.
Even within the analog world, you can opt to buy a basic unit that simply amplifies what it picks up or to get a programmable analog hearing unit which gives you some of the programming ability that a digital unit might provide. Your doctor can help you get a feel for whether you need a programmable unit to filter out some ranges of sounds and to be set to bring in the sounds you need to hear and ignore ones that are a distraction.
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Even if you go with the programmable analog unit, that is still going to be cheaper than even a basic digital unit. While most of us are drawn to the best of modern technology, as long as a analog unit does what you need it to do and they are still be produced and supported, there really is no reason to spend the extra money just to have an ultra modern hearing aid when the old standard will do just fine.
