Sony CRE-C10 In-Ear Hearing aids are great in every way, except for one drawback: the little devices you put in your ear use replaceable hearing aid batteries instead of built-in rechargeable ones. Some people might appreciate replaceable batteries because they have a much longer runtime and you don’t have to wait for them to charge, but I hear so many complaints about them. Most people seem to gravitate toward hearing aids that don’t require them to handle tiny batteries once a week and worry that their dog will swallow a used one.
Sony has solved this problem with its new CRE-C20 hearing aid, and done so in style: the new aid looks nearly identical to the well-received C10 hearing aid, but the hatch for the replaceable battery has been replaced with tiny contacts that allow the internal cells to be charged within the new case.
It’s true to say that nothing else has changed in the look and feel of the C20 hearing aids: to the untrained eye they are nearly indistinguishable from their predecessor, and their smaller size means they fit snugly in the ear canal. The weight of each hearing aid remains the same at 1.34 grams.
Photo: Christopher Null
For better or worse, very little has changed under the hood. Incidentally, Sony is touting one of the biggest upgrades as the inclusion of six hearing settings instead of the C10’s four. Note: these are not environmental programs, but frequency tuning settings pre-configured to work with the most common hearing test results.
These hearing presets cannot be selected manually; settings are only selected after taking Sony’s in-app hearing test, and users don’t know which setting they’ll get. A moderately updated version of Sony’s Hearing Control app provides detailed setup instructions that send sounds to each ear. Users count how many times they hear a sound in each round. After about 10 minutes, the app selects the hearing setting it believes best suits the user’s particular type of hearing loss.
If the assigned settings don’t work, you can retake the test or try Sony’s fine-tuning feature, which lets you register a complaint (such as “my voice sounds weird”) and wait for a correction to be delivered to your hearing aid. There’s a volume slider and a “sound balance” option that lets you choose “more sharpness” or “less sharpness.” This is mainly effective for gently adjusting the way certain consonants reach your ears.
Professional support is also available free of charge, either before or after purchase. It’s all effective, but it’s basically the same as before. The bottom line is that most users won’t notice a difference in sound quality compared to the C10. It’s no surprise that the sound quality of the C20 is still superior. The underlying processing technology developed by Signia’s parent company, WS Audiology, remains fundamentally unchanged.
Like the C10, these aids don’t have Bluetooth capabilities. They connect to your phone via inaudible radio frequency signals (there are no on-device controls either) during setup or when doing simple things like changing the volume. The app doesn’t even tell you how much battery life you have left in the aids. You press a button in the app and wait for a tone to play in each ear; the more tones you hear, the more battery life you have left. I had a bit of trouble getting all this to work when I tested the C10 aids, but I had no trouble setting up the C20 aids, although the process is quite lengthy as it involves ultrasound going back and forth.
The lack of Bluetooth simplifies the experience and means you can’t stream media or take calls directly from the headphones, but it keeps the hardware small and sleek. Like the C10 hearing aids, the C20 hearing aids are comfortable to wear for long periods of time, both physically and aurally. When properly adjusted, they provided near-perfect support for my mild hearing loss, with very little hiss. I rarely had to adjust the volume outside of noisy environments. Again, there are no environmental settings to compensate for crowds, wind noise, etc., but I found this one-size-fits-all protocol to work well anywhere.
