Abram Bailey, Au.D.
Founder, Business Development
America's Leading Independent Hearing Aid Evaluation Laboratory
Independent lab testing and evidence-based rankings of prescription and OTC hearing aids.
Mar 3, 2026How We Test
HearAdvisor's mission is to provide consumers with the objective data they need to make more informed hearing aid purchasing decisions.
Our values
1
Independence and Transparency
HearAdvisor is independently owned with no industry investors or outside stakeholders. No company can buy a better score, a higher ranking, or a positive review. We publish our data and methodologies openly so anyone can verify our work. Our Ethics Statement explains our funding, disclosures, and editorial standards.
2
Integrity and Honesty in Reporting
We believe in reporting the truth, even when it is inconvenient. If our findings challenge industry narratives, we still publish them so shoppers get objective facts and makers receive clear feedback.
3
Evidence-Based Science
Our hearing aid sound performance scoring approach is based on the most current evidence in the peer-reviewed academic press. To learn more, see our methodology.
HearAdvisor is run by two doctors of Audiology and a Ph.D. of hearing science.
Our lab team
Frequently Asked Questions
Our goal is to evaluate hearing aids in realistic environments and with the most common settings. We built a custom laboratory to create these environments and use an industry-standard acoustic manikin to make recordings. Those recordings are passed through validated models from the hearing science literature to produce the scores you see on our site. Read our How We Measure overview and our detailed methodology.
Our methods leverage the best our scientific community has to offer; however, no testing method is perfect. We cannot account for every hearing loss or all of the ways devices can be programmed. We remain humble and continually improve our v1.0 methods.
We are an independent test lab. We do not sell hearing aids, and companies cannot pay for positive reviews, higher scores, or better rankings. Our funding includes public testing fees, private laboratory work, licensing of earned HearAdvisor Expert Choice badges, paid video packages, and affiliate commissions.
Public testing fees are paid in advance for evaluation work and do not guarantee publication or a particular result. Awards are selected based on performance before any optional badge licensing. Paid videos publicize completed results; we identify them as paid content and disclose who funded them. Affiliate links are added after testing. These arrangements do not determine scores or editorial conclusions. Our Ethics Statement explains these relationships.
Though we are separate entities, we work closely with HearingTracker, sharing audio files and performance data with the goal of helping consumers make the most informed decisions about hearing technology.
We also partner with GRAS Acoustics, a worldwide leader in sound and vibration equipment, who helped us configure our anthropomorphic manikin to capture the advanced electro-acoustic capabilities of modern devices.