Review: Elehear Beyond

My first encounter with Elehear, an over-the-counter hearing aid brand, earlier this year was positive. The company’s Alpha Pro hearing aids are traditional behind-the-ear devices designed for users with mild hearing loss. They come with an online audiologist session to help new users get up to speed and a “remote sound” feature that lets you drop your phone in front of an audio source and have it piped directly to the hearing aids. At $459, they’re solidly priced and were good enough to earn a runner-up spot on my Best Hearing Aids guide.

Now the company is back with a follow-up: the Elehear Beyond. Outfitted with a larger operational frequency range, better noise cancelation, and a tinnitus mode, on paper the Beyond aids look like everything you get with the Alpha Pro and more. Unfortunately, as I discovered after a few weeks of testing, more doesn’t always mean better.

Photograph: Christopher Null

Let’s start with the hardware because it’s a big change, and I mean that literally. Elehear’s Alpha Pro hearing aids, weighing about 4 grams, aren’t exactly tiny, but the Beyond aids are even bigger. At 4.75 grams each, they're nearly double the weight of Jabra’s 2.56-gram Enhance Select 500 aids, though both have a traditional behind-the-ear (BTE) design. I was taken aback by the size from the moment I unboxed them, and even more so after I looked in the mirror. There’s no hiding these gargantuan teardrops—they caused my ears to visibly stick out from the side of my head.

But let’s say you're not as vain as me. What about the audio quality? Here, the Beyond aids didn’t overly impress me either. From the moment I put them on, these hearing aids exhibited a noticeable level of background noise, audible even at fairly low amplification levels. It’s better described as closer to a rattle than a hiss, a bit like an old desk fan nearby that’s grinding on bare metal as it spins.

Photograph: Christopher Null via Elehear app

Elehear doesn’t include a hearing test mode or an in-depth equalization feature but it does have copious options that can at least help you fine-tune the hiss out and the good sounds in (and, naturally, a new AI-powered algorithm that claims to “continuously learn and adapt to your unique hearing profile”).

Volume and tone (more treble versus more bass) can be adjusted per ear, and there are eight levels of noise cancellation you can cycle through. (A rocker on the back of each aid also lets you adjust the volume for each ear individually.) You can hear the noise cancellation kick in when ambient sounds start to pick up, which helps to reduce the level of hiss. Finally, the unit can be set to directionally focus on sounds straight ahead of you or 360-degree mode for all-around listening. You can save four custom user modes to try them out for different environments.

Photograph: Christopher Null

When tasked with improving the quality of my hearing, my results were mixed. The units can get loud if you crank them up—uncomfortably so—but I found it hard to dial in a balance that worked well for my generally mid-frequency hearing loss. At higher volume levels, voices felt boomy or tinny, with the occasional disconcerting echo. I was most comfortable when I set the aids at low amplification levels—around 25 percent—which dulled the more cacophonous elements of the experience while gently boosting audio levels across the board. It’s not overly the kind of hearing help I need, but your mileage may vary. (Update: After a variety of firmware upgrades suggested by Elehear, I was able to marginally improve the sound quality, but ultimately my experience remained about the same.)

As with the Alpha Pro aids, the Beyond aids quickly switch into streaming mode when a Bluetooth audio source is playing or when you’re taking a phone call. I was surprised by the high quality of the aids in streaming media. Media mode disables all other features in the Elehear app, but both highs and lows sounded clear and vibrant, the latter a particular rarity among hearing aids. The app does include a “phone-call boost” mode that promises better clarity for phone calls. I found the improvement for incoming voices to be small, but noticeable.

Photograph: Christopher Null

The aids feature some bonus features, including a tinnitus therapy system, the same remote sound capture feature available on the Alpha Pros, and a new translation feature built into the app. This is similar to Google Translate and other one-on-one translation apps (press a button to talk and a translation appears in text and piped to the hearing aids), but it’s potentially handy to have it built into the hearing aid control app. Too bad only 10 languages are supported.

While the Beyond aids’ audio performance was hit and miss for me, they may work better for people with different types of hearing loss and the proper attention to tuning. But there’s no getting around the sheer size of these aids. They aren’t just an eyesore—they’re uncomfortable to wear even for a relatively short period, pressing on the back of the ear with a substantial amount of force. I had to take a lot of breaks when testing the Beyond aids to give the backs of my ears a rest (a first), and I never fully acclimated to them.