Sony CRE-C10 In-Ear Headphones Hearing aids are wonderful in every way except one: These tiny in-ear devices use replaceable batteries instead of built-in rechargeable ones. While some people may appreciate replaceable batteries (much longer run time and no need to wait for recharges), I’ve heard nothing but complaints about them. For the most part, people now seem to be preferring hearing aids that don’t require fumbling with tiny batteries once a week and then worrying about whether the dog will swallow the dead battery.
With its new CRE-C20 headphones, Sony fixes this problem, and does so in style: the new headphones look almost identical to the award-winning C10, but the hatch for a replaceable battery has been replaced by a small contact that allows its internal cell to be recharged in its new case.
When I say that there have been no changes to the look and feel of the C20 headphones, I mean it. To the untrained eye, they are almost indistinguishable from their predecessors, and thanks to their small size, they still disappear incredibly into the ear canal. The weight of each headphone remains the same: exactly 1.34 grams.
Photography: Christopher Null
For better or worse, there hasn’t been much changed on the inside, either. To put that into context, Sony touts one of the biggest improvements: having six current listening settings instead of four as on the C10s. Note: These aren’t ambient programs, but rather preconfigured frequency tuning settings to work with the most common audiograms.
It is not possible to manually select one of these hearing presets. The settings are chosen only after performing the hearing test in the Sony app, and the user does not know which one corresponds to him or her. A modestly updated version of Sony’s Hearing Control app guides you through a detailed setup procedure that sends signals to each ear; the user counts how many signals are heard in each round. After about 10 minutes, the app chooses the hearing setting it considers best for your particular type of hearing loss.
If the settings you’re assigned don’t work, you can either retest or experiment with Sony’s fine-tuning feature, which lets you log a complaint (“My own voice sounds weird,” perhaps) and then wait for a fix to be sent back to the audiologists. There’s a volume slider and a “sound balance” option that lets you select between “higher” and “lower,” which is mostly effective at slightly altering the way certain consonants reach your ears.
Free professional support is also available before or after purchase. Everything is effective, but largely the same as before. The bottom line is that compared to the C10s, I doubt most users will notice any difference in sound quality. That the C20s still sound great is no surprise: the underlying processing technology, created by Signia’s parent company WS Audiology, hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Like the C10s, these hearing aids don’t have Bluetooth capabilities. They connect to your phone via inaudible, high-pitched signals, whether you’re going through setup or doing something as simple as changing the volume. (There are no controls on the device, either.) The app can’t even tell you how much battery the hearing aids have left — you press a button in the app and wait for signals to be sent to each ear. The more signals, the more battery you have left. While I had a few headaches getting all this to work when I tested the C10 hearing aids, the C20 hearing aids set up without a hitch — though again, the process is fairly slow due to the back-and-forth ultrasonic motion.
The lack of Bluetooth makes for a simpler way to get things done (and means you can’t stream media or take phone calls directly through the headphones), but it keeps the hardware small and svelte. As with the C10 headphones, the C20 headphones are comfortable for extended wear, both physically and aurally. Once properly fitted, they provided near-perfect support for my mild hearing loss, with virtually no whistling. I rarely needed to adjust the volume except in noisier environments. Again, there are no environmental settings to compensate for things like crowds or wind noise, but I found the general protocol worked well everywhere.