Review: Linner Mars

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hearing aid that looks quite like Linner’s Mars devices. Depending on your point of view, that’s either a good or bad thing.

Let’s start by getting the appearance out of the way. The Mars hearing aids are in-ear devices designed to look and feel like an earbud, and they make no effort trying to be discreet. Each aid is bright white with a strip of color across the outward-facing side—blue for left, orange for right—and these strips include a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing via Bluetooth. (The units are also available in “cosmic blue.”)

More immediately noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the top of each aid. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps hold the device in place, following the contour of the concha. While the hook largely disappears when worn, the hearing aid itself is bulbous and quite visible (you can remove the ear fin if it’s bothersome). At 5.52 grams each, they’re the second-heaviest hearing aids I’ve encountered.

Photograph: Christopher Null

Despite being a low-cost offering, the Linner Mars hearing aids come with support for Linner’s mobile app and pull double duty as robust media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Again, for a relatively entry-level product, there’s quite a lot to explore here, including independent volume controls for each aid, four operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and outdoor), and a “focus mode” that allows the aids to directionally focus on sound coming from in front of you.

An “advanced settings” button gives you access to an equalizer of sorts, though it’s rather obtuse and takes a bit of trial and error to figure out what sounds best. Each ear can be tuned separately along five dimensions: overall, thickness, fullness, clarity, and transparency, with weightings of -3 to +3 for each. What do these settings mean? I haven’t had much luck figuring that out. Each changes the audio experience but in a way that is difficult to fully explain, either introducing or removing a slight level of hiss at a different pitch. User experimentation is clearly in order, but the impact isn’t significant enough to merit investing a lot of time.

You can feel a much more powerful influence by tweaking the three levels of noise reduction, though the higher levels tend to mute sounds you probably want to hear (namely voices). The higher you go, however, the lower the amount of hiss you’ll experience. There’s fortunately not a lot of hiss to contend with throughout the user experience, but it did tend to be present even at low volumes and in all types of settings.

Photograph: Christopher Null

A bigger issue is the problem of nearby sounds booming in volume—including your voice, which can drown out everything around you. I found that things like running water and keyboard taps could be deafening if I pushed the volume too high. Most hearing aids mitigate this by offering open eartips that don’t block out all the ambient sound, which have always been my chosen type of eartips for the best hearing aid experience. But Linner includes only two types of eartips— “comfort tips” and “boom tips”—and both of them are closed. Aside from slightly differing levels of firmness, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two styles.

Closed eartips do have one big advantage, as they make for a much better streaming experience, and the Mars aids excel at providing an impressive, balanced listening experience when you’re consuming audio. Music and dialog are crisp and clear, and the bass is thumping without ever being blown out.

Additional features include a built-in hearing test—though there’s not any real way to automatically incorporate the results of this test into the settings on the Mars—and, most curiously, three “meditation modes” that “remix the streaming content to generate unnoticed brain waves, select the mood and calm your spirit.” I tried them all and can only say with authority that they are indeed unnoticed.

In addition to using the app to control settings for both the hearing aid and streaming functions of the Linner Mars units, you can physically tap on the aids to change the volume or answer a phone call. These features are reasonably intuitive and are quick to master.

Photograph: Christopher Null

Despite the significant size of the hearing aids, they are comfortable to wear over long periods, though I never felt compelled to do so. They’re easy to pop in and out as needed—and, perhaps a positive side effect of their size—difficult to misplace. Unfortunately, the specified battery life of just 8 hours is on the weak side, and that figure may even be optimistic based on my testing, with the app’s battery meter visibly draining at a healthy clip. The slim, USB-C powered charging case holds an additional three charges and is easy to tote around in a pocket.

The Linner Mars hearing aids are a bit of an oddball in what can be a stodgy market, but they grew on me the more I used them. The $400 price puts them above the cheapest hearing aids on the market—and sales will frequently knock another $50 or $60 off that. If you’re looking for something that provides more than a bare-bones hearing aid can supply, the Mars are worth strong consideration, especially if you want a great streaming experience to go with a workable hearing boost.