Indiegogo-backed Ceretone is another hearing aid company aimed at people looking for an affordable and hassle-free way to improve their hearing. At $349 for a pair or $229 for a single ear aid, the tiny hearing aids are designed to have minimal impact on hearing. Fortunately, they also have an equally modest impact on your wallet.
The first thing you’ll notice about the Core One is how small the hearing aids are. I weighed them 0.96 grams each (with a small earbud), making them perhaps the smallest tools I’ve tested to date – just a hair lighter than the Sony CRE-C10. The shiny white aids slide completely into the ear canal, with only the recovery thread protruding a few millimeters for removal. Unless you examine your ears closely, they are functionally invisible.
Outside the ear they are not so inconspicuous. Color-coded, cone-shaped earplugs (one blue, one red) provide a somewhat glaring indication of which aid goes where. Only six ear tips are included, one pair of each in three sizes – although Ceretone also included some clear ear tips, which I found a little more comfortable. All of Ceretone’s earplugs are considered “closed” domes, which produced a moderately distorted, echo-like effect in my testing. At the very least, a wider range of earbuds, including open domes that are better suited to users with mild hearing loss, would help improve sound fidelity.
Photo: Ceretone
Aside from the echo, I found the Core One experience to be a bit bumpy at first, largely due to the noticeable, screeching feedback whenever I even slightly touched the tools or recovery thread. While the impact of amplification was clearly evident, the aids were affected by this high-frequency interference. This was exacerbated by problems getting the aids to fit properly in my ears. It may not seem like it at first glance, but these devices are “right side up” because the recovery thread is intended to be directed downwards out of the ear canal. I found this surprisingly difficult, partly due to the small size of the aids, which meant I had to constantly fiddle with them.
The Core One hearing aids are not tuned to your audiogram and there are no frequency compensation options available. As with many inexpensive hearing aids, the volume gain is broad-based, providing even but blunt amplification of all sounds in the spectrum. You need the mobile app to control the aids, as there are no integrated hardware controls available (and they are inaccessible anyway).
These controls are also a bit dull: Six volume settings and two program modes (Standard and Restaurant) are available in the app – and must be set individually for each aid. Strangely, there is no indication of the active volume or program setting in the app. Instead, you have to tap a control button (such as “Volume Up”) and listen for beeps to guess whether the sound is loud enough. Three beeps mean you have set either the minimum or maximum volume. The same goes for programming mode: one beep means you’re in standard mode, and two beeps mean you’re in restaurant mode. Again, visual cues showing the live status of these settings seem to be a bare minimum, even in a budget hearing aid product.