In the world of hearing aids, size is second only to audio quality. Manufacturers regularly tout when they shave a few hundredths of a gram off a model, and many jockey for top position as “the smallest hearing aid on the market.”
Never mind any of that, Elehear said in 2024 when it released its Elehear Beyond. At 4.75 grams, the devices were some of the largest I’ve ever tested (nearly double the weight of some competing models), which made them cumbersome and uncomfortable, a major theme in my review. Recently, Elehear announced the Beyond Pro. Back to the drawing board with a slimmer, lighter profile, right? Nope: At 4.73 grams, the Beyond Pro hearing aids look and feel functionally identical to the original. The hardware looks nearly the same—the upgrades are under the hood.
New Algorithm
Photograph: Chris Null
I’ll start with what’s new. Most of it revolves around audio processing, with a new algorithm that Elehear says improves speech intelligibility by 30 percent and “eliminates muffled, distorted, and sharp tones.” The frequency range over which the hearing aids work has expanded from 125 Hz to 7,000 Hz to 125 Hz to 8,500 Hz, and there’s a new music mode designed to improve both live music and streaming experiences. Naturally, the price has changed too, from $399 for the Beyond to $599 for the Beyond Pro.
Out of the box, I was shocked to find that audio quality was rather dismal: scratchy and filled with gravelly hiss, and rather bombastic when listening to both live speech and recorded media. My solution to this was to dial down the volume level quite a bit—but anything above level four on the 19-step volume scale in the Elehear app led to so much static that I couldn’t even think straight.
A firmware update arrived just as I was ready to give up, and thankfully, this provided a major improvement. The staticky hiss was still present after the update, but it was far less noticeable, and I was able to crank the volume up to level seven or eight without being inundated with background noise. The update also evened out various frequencies so that talking to my wife no longer made it sound like she was yelling at me, as well as making my own voice more tolerable.