Elehear Delight Hearing Aids Review: Good Fit, Poor Sound

Delight hearing aids come pre-configured with four additional environmental modes beyond the default setting, with room for four additional modes that you can create yourself. Unfortunately, none of these made any real difference to my overall hearing clarity, regardless of the type of environment I was in. Streaming media sounds fair but largely lacking in bass and unusable in noisy environments.

All told, the Delight system provided relatively minimal assistance even in the best of times (watching TV in an otherwise quiet room), and was not at all effective in noisy environments, where amplified ambient sound drowned out attempts at conversation.

The app has some cool extras waiting for the user, including a simple language translator, an ambient noise measurement system, and a remote sound capture system that lets you place your phone in front of an audio source so you can direct sound directly to your hearing aids from its microphone. Elehear’s ‘Serene’ soundscapes can also be used to generate various meditative background noises directly into the hearing aids, with 26 track types available, including Waterfall, Cigadas and even Cat. Ultimately, I had more fun playing with all these bonus features than using the Delight aids for everyday hearing assistance.

Photography: Chris Null

One downside of the Elehear app is that it requires manually reconnecting to hearing aids almost every time it is opened, even if those aids are already connected via Bluetooth and working normally. This requires a few extra taps and a few extra seconds when opening the app, an unnecessary step that must be handled behind the scenes. It’s also worth noting that I had a lot of trouble pairing the Delight Aids with my phone in the first place – the left Aid would pair but not the right – requiring several factory resets before everything finally worked.

If I could rate these hearing aids strictly on their design and fit, they’d 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 never saw any tangible benefits from the upgrades. I hesitate to say this as a blanket dismissal, because while most hearing aid wearers are likely to benefit from using a tuned audiogram, others may benefit more from this type of abrupt amplification.