My Dad only had one hearing aid, and in fact a failed middle ear operation left him with one bad ear and one “dead” ear.  He would have been a cochlear implant candidate.  Anyway, two hearing aids were never really an option.  However, two hearing aids are commonly the best choice.

Why are two hearing aids generally better than one?

We have two ears, and the brain uses information from two ears, just like from two eyes.  We use two eyes to see in 3D – we use two ears to tell where sound is coming from and to hear better in background noise.  It’s like 3D hearing.

Hearing loss is often the same in both ears, so if you only choose to get one hearing aid, and make the input to the brain unbalanced, you might actually be making it harder to hear in background noise., than without hearing aids

If you use two good quality hearing aids, with adaptive directional microphones (like ours at Blamey & Saunders Hearing), and good visual contact strategies then you have the best chance of hearing better in background noise.

Let me explain; if your hearing aids have good directionality, and have good quality sound processing, then when you turn your head to a talker, when there background noise,  the hearing and the vision engines can kick in.  Most people lip read, even if they don’t realize it, and when you point those adaptive directional microphones at the talker of interest, they will favour the sound from the direction they are pointing to.

There are other reasons for using two hearing aids too.  When the sound comes in from both sides, the hearing pathways and brain cleverly add the sounds together so that neither side has to be quite as loud as if it was only on one side.

This is a clever feature of our hearing system.   It also means that when you are setting up with hearing aids its best to tune the two from the start to get the loudness right on both sides (easily done with IHearYou)

Last , but not least, if you leave one ear till later, not only do you train the system up in a kind of lopsided way, but the side there’s scientific evidence in the cochlear implant literature, that the side you leave behind loses part of it’s capacity to process sound.  It’s like you close the station, and then someone takes up the train lines.

So if you have hearing difficulties in both ears, you are probably best with two hearing aids.