Review: Jabra Enhance Select 700

If the Jabra Enhance Select 700 hearing aids look familiar, there’s a good reason for it. These aren’t just a spiritual successor to last year’s Jabra Enhance Select 500; they’re practically identical twins. In fact, the 700 series has replaced the 500 altogether, leaving the Enhance Select 300 and 50R as the two other lower-end options in Jabra’s hearing aid lineup.

The similarities are difficult to overstate. At 2.58 grams per device, each 700 is functionally equal in weight to the 500 model; the 0.02-gram differential between them is probably due to receiver wires of different lengths, larger ear tips, or a speck of wax lingering somewhere. They look and feel almost the same, too, and fortunately, I received the 700 in silver instead of the gray my Enhance Select 500 are clad in, so I could more easily tell them apart. (The 700 is now available in six colors; red has been added as a new option.)

Same Specs

Photograph: Chris Null

Jabra’s Enhance Select mobile app has not changed since our last go-round with it, offering the same four preset environmental modes (All-Around, Restaurant, Music, and Outdoor), the ability to adjust volume on each ear separately, and a three-level frequency adjustment system that gives you some fine-tunability without having to involve Jabra’s audiology team. That professional team is always at the ready to help with initial setup or to make tuning adjustments on demand, whenever you need them. (They responded to my requests for tuning tweaks within an hour.)

The charging case and battery life are identical to those on the 500 aids: A full charge remains good for about 24 hours of use, and the large case holds an extra 72 hours of juice. While the Select 700 can still do double duty as earbuds for media streaming, the quality of this experience remains terrible.

One of the changes behind the scenes is that Jabra no longer offers its hearing aids with an option for a one-year warranty and no audiology support. That plan, previously available on all of its aids, used to trim $200 off the sales price of any of its products. Now, all of its aids come with three years of warranty and support.

Photograph: Chris Null

So what is it about the Enhance Select 700 aids that makes them 200 better than the Select 500? The big sell is a new audio feature called SoundScape Auto Focus. This technology is designed to improve speech clarity in noisy conditions, filtering out background sounds and automatically prioritizing human voices. Auto Focus is integrated into the hardware and can’t be toggled off or tweaked; Jabra describes the technology as non-directional and dynamic, able to pick out voices even if they aren’t being generated directly in front of you.

I struggled a bit with Auto Focus when I first started using the Enhance Select 700, as I had trouble hearing my wife in a restaurant playing loudish music over the PA—exactly the scenario Auto Focus was designed for. I requested a programming change from Jabra to mitigate this issue, and new tuning was promptly pushed to the hearing aids through Jabra’s app. I’ve had better luck with them since, but technologies like this always tend to provide variable results from one environment to the next.

Overall, audio quality is otherwise up to Jabra’s high standards, but I wasn’t able to tell any dramatic difference between the 700 and their predecessor.

Tiny Filters

Photograph: Chris Null

The only other change of note is a minuscule feature on the hearing aid hardware. The microphones on the Select 700 are now covered with tiny filters that can be changed the same way the wax guards on the hearing aid receivers are changed, in the event they become dirty. Since the microphones are located on the backs of the hearing aid instead of inside the ear canal, chances are you won’t need to change those filters very often, but active users (or anyone who wears a lot of hair product) may find this a helpful way to streamline maintenance. To Jabra’s credit, tons of replacement filters are included in the box, along with a copious number of ear tips in multiple sizes.

The bottom line is that if you’re happy with your Enhance Select 500 (or 300), there is absolutely no need to rush to upgrade to the Select 700. The same calculus that applied to the decision of whether to purchase the 300 or 500 models also still applies: At $1,695, the Select 300 are $300 cheaper than the Select 700's MSRP, and most users with mild or moderate hearing loss probably won’t be able to tell the difference between the two experiences. For that reason, the Jabra Enhance Select 300 remains my top pick for over-the-counter hearing aids, with the 700 making for a compelling product if price is no object.