Designer Jon – hearing help Review

The ability to store a variety of hearing enhancement profiles now works as expected in IOS 8 making Hearing Help an even more useful app. I am very pleased with Hearing Help. It is, by a wide margin, the best hearing assist app that I have found. I am using it with an iPhone 5 with the outstanding Rode iXY (Lightening version) stereo microphone, and with Westone ear buds to provide regular hearing assistance. I place the iPhone in my shirt pocket with the i-XY mic pointed upward. Directing the primary pickup pattern upward causes much less problem than I expected. I am excited about the stereo, the low noise, the great sound, and the benefit of the cardioid pickup pattern in significantly reducing background noise pickup plus the benefit of allowing my ears to do their normal job of selecting between or combining left and right ear audio content. I have never worn standard hearing aids but took this approach because, as an engineer, I expect that this combination of superb audio features, that really go a long way toward providing natural, intelligible, lifelike sound, would be impossible to achieve with the space confinements of a standard hearing aid and all this for the cost of about $375 (Includes i-XY, Hearing Help app, and Westone ear buds) over that of of the iPhone. Hearing Help delivers outstanding audio quality with the detailed audio compensation and compression that are key features for a functioning hearing app. The combination is somewhat power hungry and, thus, my plan to upgrade to the iPhone 6 Plus with its much larger battery. Another iPhone app, Hearing Trumpet, provides an excellent hearing test that I use as the base for the equalizer settings in Hearing Help.
Review by Designer Jon on hearing help.