I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a listening to assist 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 appear and feel like an earbud, they usually make no effort attempting to be discreet. Every assist is shiny white with a strip of coloration throughout the outward-facing facet—blue for left, orange for proper—and these strips embody a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing by way of Bluetooth. (The items are additionally out there in “cosmic blue.”)
Extra instantly noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the highest of every assist. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps maintain the system 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 may 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 cellular app and pull double responsibility as strong 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 assist, 4 operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and out of doors), and a “focus mode” that enables the aids to directionally deal with sound coming from in entrance of you.
An “superior settings” button provides you entry to an equalizer of kinds, although it’s fairly obtuse and takes a little bit of trial and error to determine what sounds greatest. Every ear will be tuned individually alongside 5 dimensions: general, 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 manner that’s troublesome to totally clarify, both introducing or eradicating a slight stage of hiss at a unique pitch. Person experimentation is clearly so as, however the impression isn’t important sufficient to advantage investing quite a lot 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 in all probability wish to hear (particularly voices). The upper you go, nevertheless, the decrease the quantity of hiss you’ll expertise. There’s fortuitously not quite a lot of hiss to deal with all through the person expertise, however it did are typically current even at low volumes and in all sorts of settings.
