One or two hearing aids?

Better Sounds

When you wear two hearing aids, you will need 2-8 dB less gain than with one hearing aid. That means you decrease the problems with squealing (feedback) because you get less gain.

Hearing Loss Prevention

Clients with symmetric hearing loss who only wear a single hearing aid, slowly losing the ability to understand speech in the unaided ear due to a lack of brain stimulation.  

Localization

Two hearing aids grants the ability to localize sounds relatively the same as people with normal hearing.

Our brain recognizes the difference in loudness and time of arrival sounds.

Loudness: high pitch sounds coming from one side of the head, lose up to 15 dB when they reach another ear.

The time: sounds reach one ear faster than another ear. That is how we know where the sounds come from.

When a person wears only one hearing aid, other people don’t have to raise their voice anymore, but instead speak softer. Hence, there is less audibility in the unaided ear.  A hearing aid in one ear causes a mismatch in timing. Over time, the brain starts to ignore the weak sound from the unaided ear. There is no localization anymore.

Speech in Noise

When you wear two hearing aids, the sound is combined which means the speech becomes a minimum of 3 dB louder than noise. For that reason, 2 hearing aids improves speech understanding in noise by 20%. The same as your headphones, the sound is much better with two headphones compared to only one. 

Hearing Aids Can “TALK” To Each Other

Two hearing aids can wirelessly share full-audio signals which help to focus on a source of speech and significantly improve understanding of speech in background noise.²