Cearvol’s Wave design combats hearing loss and the stigma associated with aging

Unfortunately, improving surround sound is not one of the Wave Lite’s strengths. Across all of its different modes and settings, I was only able to achieve a moderate improvement in my hearing. As mentioned, while the units can get quite loud – keeping hiss minimal even at higher volume levels – it’s the sound quality that misses here.

Voices regularly sounded tinny and thin during testing, while sharper intermittent sounds like keyboard clicks and footsteps can be overpowering. Instead of filtering out low-level background as I would have preferred, the Wave Lites instead dramatically boosted the sound.

Finally, the app has a system that allows you to lower your volume, and while this works to an extent, I needed more audio attenuation than was offered at the highest settings.

Ultimately, my hearing experience was often better with the Wave Lite hearing aids than without, but I found that conversations and movie watching didn’t measurably improve no matter how I tweaked the settings in the app.

Limited lifetime

Photo: Christopher Noll

Cearvol claims up to 6.5 hours of battery life per charge; I achieved close to that in my testing – 5 hours and 45 minutes, with a mix of listening and streaming. The case adds another 15.5 hours of playtime when fully charged. (Cearvol says it’s working on extending those times, and that upcoming production batches will have up to 8 hours of battery life, with an additional 20 hours of life in the case.)

Speaking of the case, spin it around and you’ll find a strange feature that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a hearing aid product: a 3.5mm AUX port that lets you connect the case directly to an audio source. These sound tubes reach the canister, which then transmits them directly to the hearing organs. It’s an odd addition to the product and I doubt it’ll get much use, but it’s not something to complain about.

At $299, the Cearvol Wave Lite system isn’t a huge investment considering the inflated prices endemic to the hearing aid market. Unfortunately, although there were some bright spots, the voice assistance provided was unfortunately not accurate enough for me.