Review: Lizn Hearpieces

Don’t call them hearing aids. They’re hearpieces, intended as a blurring of the lines between hearing aid and earbuds—or “earpieces” in the parlance of Lizn, a Danish operation.

The company was founded in 2015, and it haltingly developed its launch product through the 2010s, only to scrap it in 2020 when, according to Lizn's history page, the hearing aid/earbud combo idea didn’t work out. But the company is seemingly nothing if not persistent, and four years later, a new Lizn was born. The revamped Hearpieces finally made it to US shores in the last couple of weeks.

Half Domes

Photograph: Chris Null

Lizn Hearpieces are the company’s only product, and their inspiration from the pro audio world is instantly palpable. Out of the box, these look nothing like any other hearing aids on the market, with a bulbous design that, while self-contained within the ear, is far from unobtrusive—particularly if you opt for the graphite or ruby red color scheme. (I received the relatively innocuous sand-hued devices.)

At 4.58 grams per bud, they’re as heavy as they look; within the in-the-ear space, few other models are more weighty, including the Kingwell Melodia and Apple AirPods Pro 3. The units come with four sets of ear tips in different sizes; the default mediums worked well for me.

The bigger issue isn’t how the tip of the device fits into your ear, though; it’s how the rest of the unit does. Lizn Hearpieces need to be delicately twisted into the ear canal so that one edge of the unit fits snugly behind the tragus, filling the concha. My ears may be tighter than others, but I found this no easy feat, as the device is so large that I really had to work at it to wedge it into place. As you might have guessed, over time, this became rather painful, especially because the unit has no hardware controls. All functions are performed by various combinations of taps on the outside of either of the Hearpieces, and the more I smacked the side of my head, the more uncomfortable things got.

The good news is that Lizn's app can be used for everything, and it provides a very intuitive and natural way to work with the devices. The system is built around two modes. Lizn mode is the hearing aid mode, with ambient audio boosted, pretty much across the board. Three “speech clarity presets” let you tune the way dialog sounds, at least to a degree. The Soft, Medium, and Bright settings aren’t dramatically different from one another, but I did ultimately have a slight preference for the way voices sounded in the crisper, more staccato Bright mode.

Earphone mode is designed for streaming via Bluetooth. It offers two basic sub-modes, Dimmed and Transparent. Transparent mode allows ambient sound in, while Dimmed mode dulls it with a modest level of noise cancellation. It doesn’t block external sounds the way a real active noise-canceling earbud would, but it’s not really designed to. The goal is more to blur the line between the outside world and the streamed one.

Mixed Messages

Photograph: Chris Null

I found the overall audio quality to be mixed but better than passable, with the Lizn mode offering a blunt but useful boost to ambient sounds. There’s no frequency-tuning capability here—a major caveat—which unfortunately means that all users get the same across-the-board lift to external sounds. The impact was slightly muddy in my experience, but the lack of hiss at all but the highest volume levels was refreshing.

I think the units work better as earbuds, and the streaming experience with Lizn Hearpieces was surprisingly solid—much better than most hearing aid products. They’re certainly no AirPods Pro, but compared to what you’ll typically find on the market, they felt rewarding. The only real drawback is the lack of a true active noise cancellation mode. In moderate to heavy ambient noise, even the Dimmed noise reduction mode didn’t cut the mustard. On a recent flight, the roar of the plane’s engines was much too powerful for clear, comfortable listening.

Lizn Hearpieces are charged by and stowed away in a compact and convenient case, which provides up to 21 hours of total battery life for the units, depending on usage mode. The hearing aids themselves are specified at five to six hours in Earphone mode and six to seven hours in Lizn mode per charge. (Both of those figures are quite short.) I got slightly more than those marks in my testing, though this can be difficult to assess, as the units have a tendency to shut down when removed and left out of the case, even for a short while. Compounding matters, I was never able to keep these hearing aids in my ears for more than an hour before my ears got too sore. Getting them reconnected could sometimes be a hassle, as I usually had to return them to the case before they’d come back to life.

Ultimately, I think the Lizn Hearpieces are a solid concept with respectable audio quality in hearing aid mode and (especially) when streaming media. But while your mileage will vary, comfort was a major issue for me, and I wasn’t able to get through a feature-length movie wearing these aids in my ears, much less an entire workday.