Well, marketing is all about pith, analogy, emotion, whatever will catch attention in this attention-sapped world. While looking into OTC aids on the CVS site, I took their hearing test–which is focused on speech-in-noise. And that’s what their marketing is based on remedying. After you take the test, the screen below comes up–hear what the world sounds like with and without aids. At first I thought, oh, that’s kinda cool. Then I thought about it for a moment and realized, all they did was play a recording of sentences spoken with staticy background noise (what you hear without aids) and a recording without background noise (the clear speech you hear with aids). OTC’s have found the holy grail I guess. Or maybe hearing aids really do help in noise when you only have mild loss. Hearing professionals on the forum @Neville @Um_bongo @Zebras, is that the case?
I’ll go ahead and report here though, as part of my looking into this, I thought the hearing test was BS. Listening to a set of 3 numbers in staticy background noise and clicking on what I heard to determine how well I hear. It never seemed to me like the background noise was changing in volume or type and I thought I’d got most of the number sequences correct. But, the test came up telling me I have considerable hearing loss and should see a hearing professional. So, whatever it’s doing, it got me.
I could still buy the aids though if I chose. Which is one of the purposes of OTC.