Sony CRE-C20 Hearing Aids Review: Rechargeable Batteries Leave a comment

Sony’s CRE-C10 in-ear listening to aids are stunners in each dimension aside from one: The tiny in-the-ear units depend on replaceable listening to support batteries as a substitute of an built-in, rechargeable one. Whereas some folks could admire replaceable batteries—for much longer run time, no want to attend for a recharge—I’ve heard nothing however complaints about them. For probably the most half, folks now appear to be gravitating to listening to aids that don’t require fumbling with miniature batteries as soon as every week, after which worrying if the canine will swallow the spent cell.

With its new CRE-C20 listening to aids, Sony corrects this situation, and it does so in fashion: The brand new listening to aids look practically similar to the successful C10 aids, however the hatch for a replaceable battery has been changed with a small contact that permits its inside cell to recharge in its new case.

After I say nothing else has modified on the appear and feel of the C20 listening to aids, I imply it. To the untrained eye, they’re virtually unimaginable to inform other than their predecessors, they usually nonetheless vanish extremely properly into the ear canal resulting from their small measurement. The burden of every support stays the identical at exactly 1.34 grams.

For higher or worse, little has modified beneath the hood as properly. For context, Sony touts one of many largest upgrades as having six current listening to settings as a substitute of 4 like on the C10s. Word: These aren’t environmental packages however moderately frequency-tuning settings preconfigured to work for the commonest audiograms.

You may’t manually choose certainly one of these listening to presets. The settings are chosen solely after you’re taking Sony’s in-app listening to check, and the person doesn’t know which one they’re getting. A modestly up to date model of Sony’s Listening to Management app walks you thru an in depth configuration process that sends pings to every ear; the person counts what number of pings are heard with every spherical. After about 10 minutes, the app chooses the listening to setting it deems finest to your explicit fashion of listening to loss.

In case your assigned settings don’t work, you possibly can retake the check or experiment with Sony’s fine-tuning characteristic, which helps you to register a criticism (“My very own voice sounds bizarre,” maybe), after which watch for a repair to be delivered to the aids. There’s a quantity slider and a “sound stability” choice that lets you choose between “extra sharp” and “much less sharp,” which is principally efficient for evenly tweaking the way in which sure consonants hit your ears.

Skilled help is accessible freed from cost earlier than or after buy too. It’s all efficient, however largely the identical as earlier than. The underside line is that, in comparison with the C10s, I doubt most customers will discover any distinction in sound high quality. That the C20s nonetheless sound nice is not any shock: The underlying processing expertise, created by Signia mother or father WS Audiology, has not essentially modified.

Just like the C10s, there are not any Bluetooth options on these listening to aids. They join together with your cellphone through inaudible, high-pitched alerts, whether or not you’re strolling by means of setup or doing one thing so simple as altering the amount. (There are not any on-device controls, both.) The app can’t even inform you the battery life remaining on the listening to aids: Punch a button within the app and also you watch for pings to be despatched to every ear. The extra pings, the extra juice you might have remaining. Whereas I encountered some complications getting all of this to work after I examined the C10 aids, the C20 aids arrange and not using a hitch—though once more, the method is moderately sluggish because of the ultrasonic forwards and backwards.

The shortage of Bluetooth makes for a blunt method to do issues—and it means you possibly can’t stream media or take cellphone calls straight by means of the headphones—but it surely does hold the {hardware} small and svelte. As with the C10 aids, the C20 aids are comfy for long-term put on, each bodily and aurally. As soon as adjusted correctly, they gave me a near-perfect quantity of help for my delicate listening to loss, nearly freed from hiss. I hardly ever even wanted to regulate the amount, besides in louder environments. Once more, there are not any environmental settings that compensate for issues like crowds or wind noise, however I discovered the all-around protocol to work properly in every single place.