Vancouver Kerrisdale
Hearing Clinic

Hearing aid prices vary from several hundred dollars up to a few thousand, and it all depends on the technology level in each device. Affordable hearing aids and the more expensive options come with different features and capabilities.
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You can think of hearing aids as coming in levels of gold, silver, or bronze. If your listening needs are simple, it just might be that even the most basic hearing aid is enough for you. If your life is more active and you find yourself wanting to hear better in more active and noisy listening environments, then a more sophisticated level of hearing aid features will give you more benefit.
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NexGen Hearing also offers financing options to help you with an affordable option to improve your hearing. Learn more about our lease to hear financing and other hearing aid financing options.

• Store batteries at normal room temperature.
• Wash your hands before changing batteries to keep oil and dirt from causing damage to the battery or clogging up the air pores.
• Leave the battery compartment in your hearing aid open at night to let moisture escape.
• Use a hearing aid storage container or dehumidifier.
• Check the expiration date on the package before you purchase new batteries. Try and purchase batteries with an expiry date that is a year in the future or further.
• Do not remove the protective seal on the battery until you’re ready to use it. Once the seal is removed, the battery begins to lose charge.
• Use rechargeable batteries. Our clinic staff would be happy to help you find a rechargeable option for your device.

• Voices sounding muffled or unclear
• Not being able to tell where a sound is coming from (known as localization)
• Needing higher volume settings on televisions, stereos and headphones
• Trouble differentiating between foreground and background noise

A hearing aid will usually have anywhere between 4 and 24 channels that divide captured sounds so the wearer can hear different sounds more clearly. The more channels a hearing aid has, the more divided the sound gets, allowing the wearer to hear more sounds clearly. We generally recommend our patients to choose a hearing aid with at least 12 channels because this will allow us to adjust the sound on the device in a much more personalized way based on the type of hearing loss they are experiencing.

An analog hearing aid is an older type of hearing aid that makes continuous sound waves louder. Speech and noise are amplified in the same way, so an analog hearing aid can be thought of as a device that turns the volume up on everything around you. They can be programmed for different listening environments that can be switched at the push of a button on the hearing aid.

More commonly found these days, a digital hearing aid will have all of the features that come in an analog device. Instead of amplifying all sound waves, a digital hearing aid will convert sound waves into digital signals, and then produce an exact duplication of the sound. The technology used in a digital hearing aid is more sophisticated and allows for more complex processing of sound. This gives them greater flexibility in programming to allow the sound they transmit to be matched to the specific type of hearing loss a patient is experiencing.

If you are unsure which type is right for you, contact our clinic and come see us to discuss your needs and options!