I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a listening to help that appears fairly like Linner’s Mars units. Relying in your perspective, that’s both or dangerous factor.
Let’s begin by getting the looks out of the way in which. The Mars hearing aids are in-ear units designed to feel and look like an earbud, and so they make no effort making an attempt to be discreet. Every help is brilliant white with a strip of colour throughout the outward-facing facet—blue for left, orange for proper—and these strips embrace a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing by way of Bluetooth. (The items are additionally obtainable in “cosmic blue.”)
Extra instantly noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the highest of every help. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps maintain the gadget in place, following the contour of the concha. Whereas the hook largely disappears when worn, the hearing aid itself is bulbous and fairly seen (you possibly can take away the ear fin if it’s bothersome). At 5.52 grams every, they’re the second-heaviest hearing aids I’ve encountered.
{Photograph}: Christopher Null
Regardless of being a low-cost providing, the Linner Mars listening to aids include assist for Linner’s cell app and pull double obligation as sturdy media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Once more, for a comparatively entry-level product, there’s rather a lot to discover right here, together with unbiased quantity controls for every help, 4 operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and out of doors), and a “focus mode” that permits the aids to directionally give attention to sound coming from in entrance of you.
An “superior settings” button offers you entry to an equalizer of types, although it’s moderately obtuse and takes a little bit of trial and error to determine what sounds greatest. Every ear may be tuned individually alongside 5 dimensions: total, thickness, fullness, readability, and transparency, with weightings of -3 to +3 for every. What do these settings imply? I haven’t had a lot luck figuring that out. Every adjustments the audio expertise however in a method that’s tough to completely clarify, both introducing or eradicating a slight degree of hiss at a distinct pitch. Person experimentation is clearly so as, however the impression isn’t vital sufficient to benefit investing loads of time.
You’ll be able to really feel a way more highly effective affect by tweaking the three ranges of noise discount, although the upper ranges are likely to mute sounds you most likely need to hear (specifically voices). The upper you go, nevertheless, the decrease the quantity of hiss you’ll expertise. There’s thankfully not loads of hiss to cope with all through the person expertise, however it did are typically current even at low volumes and in all kinds of settings.
