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Quick Consumer Guide to Digital versus Analog Hearing Aids  

When trying to understand the difference between analog and digital hearing aids, you need to first appreciate the history of analog vs digital, and the alternative ways that they amplify and process sounds. Analog hearing aids came out first, and were the standard in most hearing aids for many years. Subsequently, with the introduction of digital signal processing (DSP) technology, digital hearing aids also started to appear. Currently, most (90%) of the hearing aids purchased in the United States are digital, although analog hearing aids are still sold because they’re often lower priced, and because some people prefer them.

Analog hearing aids handle inbound sounds by taking the electrical sound waves as they leave a microphone and amplifying them “as is” prior to sending them to the speakers in your ears. In contrast, digital hearing aids utilize the very same sound waves from the microphone, but before amplifying them they turn them into the binary code of “bits and bytes” that all digital devices use. This digital data can then be manipulated in numerous sophisticated ways by the micro-chip inside the hearing aid, prior to being converted back into regular analog signals and delivered to the speakers.

 

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It is important to remember that analog and digital hearing aids serve the same purpose – they take sounds and boost them so you can hear them more easily. Both analog and digital hearing aids can be programmable, which means that they contain microchips, which can be customized to adjust sound quality to match the individual user, and to develop various configurations for different listening environments. As an example, there can be different settings for low-noise rooms like libraries, for busy restaurants, and for large areas like sports stadiums.

But beyond programmability, the digital hearing aids often offer more controls to the user, and have additional features because of their ability to manipulate the sounds in digital form. For example, digital hearing aids may offer numerous channels and memories, allowing them to save more location-specific profiles. Other capabilities of digital hearing aids include being able to automatically minimize background noise and eliminate feedback or whistling, or the ability to prefer the sound of human voices over other sounds.

As far as pricing is concerned, analog hearing aids are in most cases less expensive, although some digital hearing aids are approaching the price of analog devices by removing the more advanced features. Some users detect a difference in the sound quality generated by analog vs digital hearing aids, but that is largely a matter of preference, not really a matter of whether analog or digital is “better.”