Elehear Delight hearing aid review: Good fit, poor sound

Delight hearing aids come pre-configured with four additional environmental modes in addition to the default, with room for four additional modes that you can create yourself. Unfortunately, none of these made any real difference to overall hearing clarity, no matter what type of setup I found myself in. Streaming media sounds fair but is largely devoid of bass and unusable in noisy environments.

Finally, the Delight system provided fairly minimal support even in the best-case scenario (watching TV in a quiet room), and was not at all effective in noisy environments, where amplified ambient sound drowned out attempts at conversation.

The app has some interesting extras waiting for the user, including a simple language translator, an environmental noise measurement system, and a remote audio pickup system that lets you place your phone in front of an audio source so you can deliver the sound directly to your hearing aids from its microphone. Elehear’s “Serene” sound clips can also be used to generate various meditative background sounds directly into the hearing aids, with 26 track types available, including Waterfall, Cicadas and even Cat. In the end, I enjoyed playing with all these extra features more than using the Delight aids for daily hearing support.

Photo: Chris Noll

One downside to the Elehear app is its strange need to manually reconnect to hearing aids almost every time they’re opened — even if those aids are already connected via Bluetooth and working normally. It takes a few extra clicks and a few extra seconds when you open the app, which is an unnecessary step that has to be handled behind the scenes. It’s also worth noting that I had a lot of trouble getting the Delight Assistant to pair with my phone in the first place — the left Assistant would pair but not the right — requiring several factory resets before I could finally get everything working.

If I could rate these hearing aids strictly based on their design and fit, it would get a near-perfect score, but despite Elehear’s promises to incorporate a new AI-powered audio engine with better noise cancellation and amplification, I’ve never seen any tangible benefits from the upgrades. I hesitate to say that as a blanket no, because while most hearing aid wearers are likely to benefit from using a tuned audiogram, others may get more benefit from this kind of sharp amplification.