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COMPARING DIGITAL VERSUS ANALOG HEARING AIDS When trying to understand the difference between analog and digital hearing aids, you need to first understand the history of analog versus digital, and the alternative ways that they process and amplify sounds. Analog technology appeared first, and consequently most hearing aids were analog until digital signal processing (DSP) was developed, after which digital hearing aids appeared. The majority of (up to 90%) hearing aids purchased in the US 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 work is that they take sound waves from the microphone in the form of electricity and then amplify the waves, 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. After the sound

has been digitized, the microchip within the hearing aid can process and manipulate the data in complex ways before converting it back into 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 allow you to hear well. Both analog and digital hearing aids can be programmable, which means that they contain microchips, which can be customized to alter sound quality to match the individual user, and to create different configurations for different listening environments. The programmable hearing aids can, for example, have one particular setting for listening in quiet spaces, another setting for listening in loud restaurants, and still another for listening in large stadiums.

 

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Digital hearing aids, because of their capacity to manipulate the sounds in digital form, generally offer more features and flexibility, and are commonly user-configurable. They have an array of memories in which to store more location-specific configurations than analog hearing aids. They can also employ sophisticated algorithms to detect and minimize background noise, to remove feedback and whistling, or to selectively detect the sound of human voices and “follow” them using directional microphones.

As far as pricing is concerned, analog hearing aids are generally less expensive, although some digital hearing aids are approaching the price of analog devices by removing the more sophisticated features. Some users notice a difference in the sound quality produced by analog versus digital hearing aids, but that is largely a matter of personal preference, not really a matter of whether analog or digital is “better.”