Come in. I’m Matthew, and this is hear.

Try Lyric, the world's first truly invisible hearing aid and rediscover the joy of listening

hear. is a one-person audiology clinic in Lincoln.

Why not rediscover the joy of listening with a custom rechargeable earbud style hearing aid?

One person?

There’s a front desk, which the solo audiologist occasionally sits at, to look busier than he actually is. Some day someone else will too, in a more meaningful capacity. There is no account manager, no rotating roster of clinicians. When you book an appointment, you’re seeing the person who owns the clinic, holds the qualifications, and makes every decision about your care. That’s not a pitch. It’s just what this particular small independent practice looks like, and I think it’s what hearing care should look like.

Who are you?

You are someone who cares about your hearing, you understand that it is not trivial, and you demand the best hearing care because you need to get on with your life. You are not seduced by offers, hype and buzzwords. All you care about is practical outcomes and excellence. You are cost-conscious, you love efficiency, and you demand return on your investment. If all of that is you – you need to see me at hear. If none of that is you, I am happy to recommend other clinics.

How hear. came about

hear. started from a straightforward conviction: that hearing care should be done properly, without the overhead of a large organisation deciding how long an appointment runs or which manufacturer sits on the shelf. As a small independent clinic in Lincoln, every clinical and practical decision is made by the person you’re sitting across from. Hearing is too important to be trivialised or rushed. Everything at hear. is transparent and simple. Just like the name.

Meet The Owner, Matthew

I am an audiologist, a software builder, a runner, and an occasionally frustrated Ford owner. The common thread, if there is one, is that I prefer doing things properly to doing them quickly, and I’d rather build something myself than pay someone else to do it badly at scale. The Q&As below probably explain it better than any summary could.

Why audiology?

Hearing is personal in a way that not many other senses are. It connects people to each other – to conversation, to laughter, to the sounds that make daily life worth paying attention to. Helping someone recover that, or hold onto it, feels like the right use of my training. From a technical standpoint, the field never stops moving. I work with technology from Phonak, Starkey, Oticon, MED-EL, and Cochlear – manufacturers whose engineering I respect – and I’m permanently interested in pushing what hearing aids can actually do rather than settling for a default setting. If someone leaves an appointment hearing music a little more clearly, or feeling less exhausted after dinner with friends, that’s what this is for.

What education, what training?

I hold a Master of Clinical Audiology from the University of Canterbury, completed my final clinical examination in 2021, and am a registered member of the New Zealand Audiological Society. The path was slightly unconventional – I already had a PhD by the time I started the audiology degree. The PhD came first, at the University of Otago School of Medical Sciences, in Pharmacology – specifically in balance and cognition, which was part of what drew me toward audiology in the first place. I wanted the research background to stay relevant. It has. Balance work remains an active clinical interest alongside hearing care, and I am a Phonak-certified Lyric specialist.

Outside of work?

Outside the clinic, most of my spare time has quietly been absorbed by software. I built a practice management system from scratch because patient data belongs on the clinical machine under the clinician’s control, not on someone else’s server behind a monthly subscription that has crap I don’t need. It’s nice to be able to pass that saving on to patients as well. Being solo I need as much help I can get, so I made an AI tool for my own admin, to handle the parts of clinical note-writing and correspondence that eat time I’d rather spend with patients. It works well enough that I released it to other audiologists in New Zealand and Australia for ten dollars a month, which is roughly what it costs to run. The booking system you used to get here is also mine. So is this website, which is gradually migrating off WordPress into something I actually understand and can maintain. Running keeps all of that from taking over completely – I’m out every second day, working toward a full marathon, which turns out to be a reasonable way to think about something other than code.
The Ford Falcon XR6 is sitting in the garage. Racing is on hold for now – the budget has other priorities – and Sebastian, who was supposed to be the next driver, turned out to prefer PC gaming, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome and one I completely understand because I used to as well. The plan hasn’t changed. It’s just patient. More track time, more modifications, possibly an unreasonable amount of horsepower. Eventually.