I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a listening to help that appears fairly like Linner’s Mars units. Relying in your viewpoint, that’s both a great or dangerous factor.
Let’s begin by getting the looks out of the best way. The Mars hearing aids are in-ear units designed to appear and feel like an earbud, they usually make no effort making an attempt to be discreet. Every help is shiny white with a strip of colour throughout the outward-facing aspect—blue for left, orange for proper—and these strips embody a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing through Bluetooth. (The models are additionally accessible 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’ll be able to 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 help for Linner’s cell app and pull double responsibility as strong media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Once more, for a comparatively entry-level product, there’s quite a bit to discover right here, together with impartial quantity controls for every help, 4 operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and out of doors), and a “focus mode” that enables the aids to directionally concentrate on sound coming from in entrance of you.
An “superior settings” button provides you entry to an equalizer of kinds, although it’s reasonably obtuse and takes a little bit of trial and error to determine what sounds finest. 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 modifications the audio expertise however in a method that’s tough to totally clarify, both introducing or eradicating a slight stage of hiss at a special pitch. Consumer experimentation is clearly so as, however the affect isn’t important sufficient to benefit investing quite a lot of time.
You possibly can 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 need 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 take care of all through the person expertise, but it surely did are typically current even at low volumes and in all varieties of settings.