EARGO Max Hearing Aids Review

     I am sure most senior citizens will agree that diminished eye sight and hearing go hand and hand with the normal aging process. If your first reading glasses were purchased with a prescription and your current ones were bought at a dollar store you might be surprised to learn that hearing aides are now beginning to also be sold without a visit to a doctor or audiologist. These hearing aids are being called Personal Sound Amplification Products (PSAP) and if you are getting a little hard of hearing, but don’t feel you are ready for a hearing aid, you might find this review rather interesting. The device tested, EARGO Max is a Class 1 FDA-registered hearing aids that you can also purchase online without a hearing test.
     Personally I feel it is a very good idea for candidates for a PSAP device or hearing aid to first see a doctor or audiologist to determine that their hearing loss is not a symptom of a serious medical condition. That would be the correct time to determine if you just need a simple inexpensive PSAP device or something much more powerful like the EARGO Max hearing aids.
     At CES 2018 I talked to the representatives of EARGO about their newest product the EARGO Max. See photo 1 2 & 3. To my knowledge I don’t have hearing loss but I did agree to try a pair on to determine if this was a new product that I would want to review. I was surprised by its tiny size and how comfortable it was to wear. See photo 1 again. I found their EARGO Max hearing aids, in a sense very similar to a high quality set of fully wireless earbuds. The earbuds boost the volume of your favorite tunes for personal listening and the EARGO Max boost the sound of your natural environment to compensate for your slight loss of hearing.
     The company developed a flexi fiber suspension system that floats the actual hearing device inside your ear canal. This allows air to freely flow around the aid which makes them extremely comfortable to wear. The actual hearing aid is very small and basically consists of a rechargeable battery that powers the microphone, amplifier, micro computer chip hearing program, and speaker. See photo 3. The microfiber holder comes in two sizes and two styles and you control the volume of each ear’s hearing aid separately by double taping on your ear with an open hand. This action causes the hearing aid to switch sound profiles (SP1-SP4) and whisper in your ear which of the four sound profiles you have selected. Each double tap will take you up to the next level and then back down to first sound profile. You can learn more about these hearing aids online at <https://eargo.com>. The specific details about the new ERGO Max are covered at <https://shop.eargo.com>.

Reason’s to Drool
     My wife, who does have a slight hearing loss, has been testing them for a few weeks and has found that they do improve her hearing. They are easy to put in your ears. She tends to use the EARGO Max only when she feels she will be in a situation where better hearing is important and all other times they are in their charging case in her purse.

Not So Cool
     The EARGO Max is not cheap though I expect that since PSAP hearing devices are new to the market, just like the cost of reading glasses, prices of high quality units like this one which is FDA listed as a hearing aid rather than a PSAP, will drop as sales and competition increases. The only other negative I found is they are not even water resistant enough to wear while taking a shower. You must remember to remove them when you swim or shower and I can see how easy it would be to forget to remove them; a very expensive mistake.