I don’t think so I’ve once seen a hearing aid that looks quite similar to Linner’s Mars devices. Depending on your point of view, that’s good or bad.
Let’s start by getting appearance out of the way. Mars headphones are in-ear devices designed to look and feel like a headset, and they make no effort to be discreet. Each aid is bright white with a colored stripe on the outward-facing side (blue for left, orange for right) and these strips include a small LED that lights up when charging and pairing via Bluetooth . (Units are also available in “cosmic blue.”)
What is most immediately noticeable is the rubber hook that protrudes from the top of each aid. This horn-shaped “ear flap” fits into the ear and helps keep the device in place, following the contour of the shell. While the earhook largely disappears when worn, the earbud itself is bulbous and quite visible (you can remove the ear fin if it bothers you). At 5.52 grams each, they are the second heaviest headphones I’ve come across.
Photography: Christopher Null
Despite being a low-cost offering, the Linner Mars headphones are compatible with the Linner mobile app and do double duty as robust Bluetooth headphones with media streaming. Again, for a relatively basic product, there’s a lot to explore here, including independent volume controls for each aid, four operating modes (dialogue, restaurant, commute, and outdoor), and a “focus mode” that allows aids to focus directionally on the sound coming in front of you.
An “advanced settings” button gives you access to an equalizer of sorts, although it’s fairly obtuse and requires a bit of trial and error to figure out what sounds best. Each ear can be tuned separately in five dimensions: overall, thickness, fullness, clarity and transparency, with weightings from -3 to +3 for each. What do these settings mean? I haven’t had much luck finding that out. Each changes the audio experience, but in a way that’s hard to fully explain, either by introducing or removing a slight level of hiss at a different pitch. User experimentation is clearly necessary, but the impact is not significant enough to merit a time-consuming investment.
You can feel a much more powerful influence by adjusting the three levels of noise reduction, although higher levels tend to mute the sounds you probably want to hear (i.e. voices). However, the higher you go, the less amount of hiss you will experience. Fortunately, there isn’t much hiss to deal with during the user experience, but it tends to be present even at low volumes and in all types of settings.