{"id":13934,"date":"2025-01-25T05:50:48","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T05:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=13934"},"modified":"2025-01-25T05:50:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T05:50:48","slug":"starkey-edge-ai-ric-rt-review-best-prescription-hearing-aids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=13934","title":{"rendered":"Starkey Edge AI RIC RT Review: Best Prescription Hearing Aids"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When the US<\/span> Food and Drug Administration opened the door for hearing aids to be sold over the counter<\/a> in 2022, I was all in. Prescription hearing aids are criminally expensive, and several OTC models have proven that you don\u2019t need to visit a hearing aid shop in a mall to get a product that gets the job done. I\u2019ve tested 38 hearing aids<\/a> to date, and 29 have been available over the counter. All of my favorite hearing aid products have been OTC models<\/a>. Until now.<\/p>\n

Starkey is a major name<\/a> in the hearing aid business, and it\u2019s not some white-label company that slaps a logo on someone else\u2019s product (an epidemic in this industry). Starkey has been around since 1967, and while it no longer designs or manufactures its own digital signal processing chips, it is intimately involved with hearing aid development\u2014and famously brags that it has outfitted everyone from Ronald Reagan to Mother Teresa with its hearing aids.<\/p>\n

Now, with its new Edge AI RIC RT hearing aids, Starkey takes a position at the very top of the heap in product quality and performance thanks in large part to a new audio processor that includes an integrated neural processing unit\u2014just like our laptops<\/a> and phones<\/a>. Starkey says this is the only NPU-powered hearing aid line on the market.<\/p>\n

Receiver in Canal<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s nothing particularly inventive about the way the Edge AI RIC RT (which stands for \u201creceiver in canal, rechargeable with telecoil\u201d) looks, built on the classic, teardrop-shaped behind-the-ear design, though it is available in your choice of seven colors. Each aid weighs 2.62 grams, which is competitive for a behind-the-ear hearing aid. (To compare, the Jabra Enhance Select 500<\/a> weighs 2.56 grams.) A single button on the back of each aid controls volume: down on the left aid, up on the right aid.<\/p>\n

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