An Introduction to Analog versus Digital Hearing Aids

A bit of background and an explanation of how analog devices work versus how digital devices work is essential to understand the differences between analog and digital hearing aids. Analog hearing aids came out first, and were the standard in the majority of hearing aids for a long time. Then with the arrival of digital signal processing (DSP) technology, digital hearing aids also started to emerge. The majority of (up to 90%) hearing aids sold in the United States today are digital, although you can still get analog hearing aids because some people have a preference for them, and they’re often cheaper.

The way that analog hearing aids operate is that they take sound waves from the microphone in the form of electricity and then amplify them, delivering louder versions of the sound waves to the speakers in your ears “as is.” Digital hearing aids take the sound waves from the microphone and transform them to digital binary code, the “bits and bytes” and “zeros and ones” that all digital devices understand. After the sound is digitized, the micro-chip within the hearing aid can process and manipulate the data in sophisticated ways before converting it back to analog sound and passing it on to your ears.

Both analog and digital hearing aids carry out the same work – they take sounds and boost them to enable you to hear better. Both varieties of hearing aids can be programmed by the dispensers of the hearing aids to produce the sound quality desired by the user, and to create configurations ideal for different listening environments. The programmable hearing aids can, for example, have one setting for listening in quiet rooms, another setting for listening in noisy restaurants, and still another for listening in large auditoriums.

Digital hearing aids, due to their ability to manipulate the sounds in digital form, often have more features and flexibility, and are often user-configurable. For example, digital hearing aids may offer numerous channels and memories, permitting them to save more environment-specific profiles. They can also employ sophisticated algorithms to identify and reduce background noise, to eliminate feedback and whistling, or to selectively prefer the sound of human voices and “follow” them using directional microphones.

Cost-wise, most analog hearing aids continue to be less expensive than digital hearing aids, however, some reduced-feature digital hearing aids fall into a similar general price range. There is commonly a perceivable difference in sound quality, but the question of whether analog or digital is “better” is up to the individual, and the ways that they are used .