Bingo.
This is exactly right.
While I don't particularly like paying through the nose for these things - and then paying again for the inevitable repairs - there is more to a modern programmable hearing aid.
Based on those frequencies where my hearing is deficient, the aids are programmed to amplify only those frequencies and only as much as necessary to match hearing of the other frequencies.
This is MUCH better than applying the same amplification across the board which ends up over-amplifying many sounds, resulting in an overall sucky experience.
My opthalmologist tells me to just keep using the dollar general glasses.
I’m too stubborn and cheap to buy hearing aids, but would sure consider the OTC option for that too.
They use a computer to adjust mine up or down, I’m low Freq loss due to botched Inner Ear Perfusion by a SADISTIC SOB ENT. Nor do they solve all hearing problems, run water or be in another room, turn up the TV to much and you over drive them just like loud speakers do when in the grocery store, if you go to the movies, mall, shopping, you have to remove them or you’d go nuts trying to survive the over drive, and you can’t turn them down enough to compensate. Let the wax trap get to full and you don’t hear. That word Battery in you ear is a pain in the tush as it is to loud and you have 1 min to change the battery or less depending on brand of aid.
Considering the cost why not make them rechargeable?
“It sounds like these devices are the ear equivalent of the $10 drugstore reading glasses that also don’t need a prescription.”
BOL! Like bad mojo, when I turned 40, I started having headaches and in particular when I tried to read something. My RN wife told me to see a Neurologist friend and ask him what was happening.
He asked me when this started happening, and I told him a few months ago and my reading problems. He pulled a drug store set of reading glasses off his desk, handed me them, told me to put them and a medical journal to read a few paragraphs from the journal.
I did, and suddenly I could read. He asked a couple of questions about what I had read, and I passed the test.
He told me to keep the cheap reading glasses and to go to the local chain pharmacy and buy about 6 pairs of the lowest power and to check them out on the reading chart. I asked him why so many pairs. He laughed and said, “You will find out very soon how fast they hide themselves.”
I took his advice. My headaches went away, and after a few days, I knew why he told me to buy 6 pairs of the reading glasses.
Fast forward a few decades, my wife and I have performed the same cheap miracle with our adult children, in laws, nieces and nephews. Their headaches disappeared, and they didn’t need 6’ long arms to read.
A processor which can handle a one channel, 40 kHz (the Nyquist rate for 20 kHz audio) signal is almost trivia now. If you had Bluetooth for adjustments it would probably need 100 times the processing power of the digital filter and amp alone.
The problem is that audiologists want to keep the hearing aids as a major profit item. Even optometrists have seen the split of their profits from glasses. I still get my expensive progressive lens glasses from them, but I take my prescription (which the optometrist muss give me now) and order my single vision readers and distance glasses online. I tried a set of progressives online but they were not quite right, so I figured the optician earned her money setting those up right. But that is my choice.