Behind-the-ear headphones with Bose technology The Lexie B2 is a great option in the world of hearing aids, but Lexie discontinued them earlier this year to make way for the B2 Plus, a direct successor and, it must be said, as small an improvement as you could imagine to merit a new product name.
There’s a reason the Lexie B2 Plus hearing aids aren’t marketed as B3s: the amplification technology inside them hasn’t changed. I’ll talk about that in more detail in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the two things that have been improved.
Photography: Christopher Null
The first is the most important: the revamped case contains a battery. One of the most common complaints about the original B2 is that the case didn’t hold a charge. To recharge the earbuds, the case had to be plugged into a USB-C charger. If you were on the road and your battery ran out, you were out of luck, because the B2’s case only served to store the earbuds if it wasn’t plugged into a power source. While the earbuds’ 18-hour charge meant they were good for an all-day charge and more, they weren’t a great solution for a weekend away off the grid.
The new B2 Plus case, which doesn’t look much different from the B2’s case and is still fairly thick, holds an additional charge, so you can get 36 hours of battery life before you need to plug it in. That’s less than most competitors, but a big improvement over its predecessor.
Photography: Christopher Null
The second improvement is the hearing test in the Lexie app. This test is much like the one for other over-the-counter hearing aids, in that it asks you to listen to beeps of different pitch and volume in each ear and tap a button when you hear the sound. In most hearing aids, the results are used to adjust the frequencies amplified by the hearing aid, like an equalizer. Lexie’s hearing test doesn’t go that far, because it can’t: hearing aids only have two real adjustment mechanisms: overall volume (balanceable between the two ears) and a “bass/treble” slider that lets you adjust one side at the expense of the other.