Could $250 Apple AirPods disrupt the OTC hearing aid market? One study shows it's possible

"As the FDA finally paved a new pathway this year allowing some hearing aids to be sold over the counter, swaths of devicemakers have hit the ground running, revamping their existing lines of hearing aids and rolling out entirely new ones to cater to the OTC market.

But an effective hearing aid may already be in users’ pockets: A study published in the journal iScience this month concluded that Apple’s AirPods earbuds meet most of the benchmarks developed by the Consumer Technology Association for personal sound amplification products, despite not being marketed as hearing aid alternatives.

The study pitted the second-generation version of the original AirPods and the more advanced AirPods Pro against basic and premium models of currently available hearing aids. Around two dozen adults—none of whom had previously used hearing aids—were asked to wear each of the devices throughout a battery of tests.

The experiments were designed to test for the CTA’s five core standards: the smoothness of a device’s frequency response, the bandwidth of that response, its maximum output sound pressure level from an input of 90 decibels, its total harmonic distortion and the amount of equivalent internal noise (EIN) generated by the devices themselves.

Ultimately, while the AirPods 2 met only two of the standards—with a frequency response bandwidth around the accepted range and 0% harmonic distortion—the AirPods Pro hit four of the five. The only one Apple’s premium earbuds didn’t meet was the measure of EIN: CTA suggests that internal noise fall below 32 decibels of sound pressure, but the AirPods Pro clocked in at 37 decibels—though that’s much closer to the standard than the AirPods 2, which measured about 50 decibels of internal noise..." Lire la suite