Review: Eargo 8 Hearing Aids

It’s been more than two years since Eargo last updated its hearing aid hardware, and that’s not a slight: Eargo makes some fine products that have successfully stood the test of time. Upgrades for the sake of upgrades are never a good idea.

But the hearing aid world of today is in flux, and it’s beginning to diverge from the way it looked back in 2023. Not only is technology changing, but so is the business landscape. Namely, Eargo recently merged with hearX (maker of the Lexie brand hearing aids), forming a parent company called LXE. The premium Eargo brand remains unchanged, but consolidation like this is usually a sign that prices may come down as the manufacturer landscape shakes out a bit.

Alas, don’t hold your breath that Eargo, which has always had expensive hardware, will be cutting prices any time soon. In fact, with the Eargo 8, the company has released its priciest hearing aids to date, though the quality of the product is compelling enough to merit at least some level of consideration.

Smarter Aids

Photograph: Chris Null

Like nearly all of Eargo’s models, the Eargo 8 are fully in-the-ear hearing aids, designed explicitly to keep size at a minimum. At 0.94 grams each, the tiny, cylindrical Eargo 8 are functionally the same size as the Eargo 7 and Eargo 5 before them, though a bit more bulbous—almost bottle-shaped—rather than cylindrical.

The real upgrades are under the hood. The biggest update involves the way the Eargo 8 handles noise. A new feature called Smart Sound Adjust “analyzes your environment and automatically adjusts to the noise levels when entering a noisy restaurant or crowded place,” the idea being that the app will tweak its noise cancellation levels automatically in response to ambient sound. The other added feature is a device scanner, which Eargo describes as an on-demand “wellness check” for your aids, ensuring they aren’t clogged with earwax. In the app, the on-demand Device Scan requires you to return the Eargo 8 hearing aids to the charging case and, after a few minutes, reports the results of its speaker and microphone tests. (So far, I have only seen “Passed” results.)

In daily use, I found the Eargo 8 hearing aids to be top-notch, with no discernible difference in quality over the Eargo 7. I found my voice to be a bit over-amplified—a common complaint with hearing aids—with no good way to adjust it. Otherwise, hearing support was solid, with no hiss and any feedback limited to minor instances when removing or inserting the aids. Like most high-quality hearing aids, the units provided me with just a moderate boost where I needed it the most, and the auto-adjust noise cancellation seemed to work well, though there’s no indication as to how much noise cancellation is being applied at any time.

That’s because, like all of Eargo’s premium aids, communication between the aids and the Eargo app is a one-way street. You can use the app to change volume or environmental programs, but the aids don’t report their status back to the app. All changes are confirmed when the aids beep a couple of times in your ear, only offering a voice response when volume hits “min” or “max” or when changing environmental modes.

More importantly, there is no indication of battery life in the app. An update to the Eargo app now reports the battery life remaining in the case, but not the hearing aids themselves. Like the Eargo 7, the Eargo 8 claims an impressive 16 hours of running time (plus a whopping 224 more hours of charge in the slightly larger carrying case), but there’s no way to tell where you’re at until the battery nears empty. The good news is it’s hard to exhaust 16 full hours of operation in one go. In my testing, I could only drain the battery fully by leaving the aids out of the case overnight.

Iffy Software

Photograph: Eargo

I’ve complained (twice before) about Eargo’s rocky audiogram training system, which uses ultrasonic signals from your phone to communicate with the hearing aids rather than wireless tech like Bluetooth. It keeps the hearing aids very small because they don’t need a Bluetooth radio to work. Eargo is not unique in using this tech, but its implementation remains iffy, even after years on the market.

My training session took nearly half an hour because the hearing aids missed a large portion of the ultrasonic signals, causing them to fail to send a tone to my ears when they should have. That’s a big problem, because there’s no telling whether you couldn’t hear the tone because you’re going deaf or because the hearing aids failed to register the signal properly. I found training more frustrating than ever this time around.

That same technology is also used to control the aids via app commands. While it’s not as big a deal if a volume change is missed and you have to send the request again, it’s still a pain (especially if one hearing aid gets the signal and the other does not). It also means you can’t use these aids for streaming over Bluetooth, which is a bigger issue today than ever. At this point, it’s probably time for Eargo to explore something more reliable, even if it means selling a larger device.

The units support physical double-taps on the ear, but only to switch among the three environmental programs you can choose in the app. The taps registered reliably in my testing, though I didn’t notice much difference among the various modes.

The aids are plenty comfortable, in part because of their very light weight, though Eargo’s ear tips are a little on the itchy side. After a few hours of wear, I invariably had to remove them to give my ears some time to recover. (Oddly, only three pairs of ear tips are included: small, medium, and large, with open vents.)

The Eargo 8 aids are not cheap, now running $2,699 per pair. (The Eargo 7 aids now cost $2,399.) While Eargo products have always been expensive, in today’s market, a near-$3,000 asking price puts these aids almost into prescription pricing territory, which is difficult to justify. The Eargo 8 aids remain excellent in audio quality, and the small size is perfect, but the upgrades here are simply not enough to merit this kind of price, given the surfeit of equally excellent over-the-counter competitors available for less.