America's Leading Independent Hearing Aid Evaluation Laboratory
HearAdvisor's mission is to provide consumers with the objective data they need to make more informed hearing aid purchasing decisions.
Independence and Transparency
HearAdvisor is independently owned and has not taken any money from the hearing aid industry or outside investors. We share our data and methodologies openly for the world to scrutinize.
Integrity and Honesty
We believe in reporting the truth, even when it's difficult. We have been approached by companies who find our data inconvenience, but we refuse to let that get in the way of our mission.
Evidence-Based Science
Our hearing aid sound performance scoring approach is based on the most current evidence in the peer-reviewed academic press. To learn more about our methods, see our white paper.
HearAdvisor is run by two doctors of Audiology and a Ph.D. of hearing science.
Abram Bailey Au.D.
Andrew Sabin Ph.D.
Steve Taddei Au.D.
General FAQs
Commonly asked questions about HearAdvisor. Stay tuned as more answers are on the way. We're currently engaging users on the Hearing Aid Forum to understand their questions and will publish our official responses here shortly.
Our goal is to evaluate hearing aids in realistic environments and with the most common settings. We have built a custom laboratory to create these environments, and use an industry-standard acoustic manikin to make recordings. The recordings are passed through validated models from the hearing science literature. The outputs of those models are presented as the scores on this site. To learn more visit our How We Measure page which includes a brief video and a thorough outline of our scientific approach in our whitepaper.
Our methods leverage the best our scientific community has to offer; however, we understand that no testing method is perfect. We can not account for every hearing loss or the numerous ways hearing devices can be programmed. We remain humble and are continuously working to improve our current v1.0 methods.
We are an independent test lab, and we do not make money on hearing aid sales nor do we participate in affiliate programs. We currently fund our work by offering private hearing aid evaluations. HearAdvisor also awards Expert Choice badges to top-performing products each year. We require awardees to pay for the licensing rights to use the badges on their own websites or in their marketing, and also offer a paid licensing package that includes a sponsored video detailing the results of the award-winning product.
Though we are separate entities, we work closely with our partner HearingTracker sharing audio files and performance data with the goal of offering consumers the most meaningful information about assistive hearing technologies.
We also partner with GRAS Acoustics, a worldwide leader in sound and vibration equipment, who has offered us guidance and helped configure our state-of-the-art anthropomorphic manikin to better capture the advanced electro-acoustic capabilities of modern hearing technologies.
