Hearing care for Canterbury, at every stage of life
01.
Diagnostic Hearing Assessments
A hearing assessment at hear. begins with pure-tone audiometry – a systematic test of the softest sounds you can hear across the speech frequency range, measured separately by air conduction through headphones and by bone conduction through a small vibrator placed behind the ear.
The comparison between those two results matters. When bone conduction thresholds are better than air conduction thresholds, there’s something affecting the outer or middle ear – sometimes as temporary as a recent cold or fluid behind the eardrum, sometimes something that warrants further investigation. Where there’s a meaningful difference between the two ears, masking is applied to the better ear so the results from the poorer ear can be measured accurately and in isolation.
Speech audiometry compliments pure-tone testing as a cross-check. Most of the time the two results align predictably, but when they don’t – when someone hears tones reasonably well but struggles more with speech than the audiogram would suggest – that points toward a different kind of processing difficulty. In those cases the assessment typically extends to speech-in-noise testing and an audible contrast threshold measure to get a clearer picture of what’s actually happening. Tympanometry and acoustic reflex testing are in most cases routinely tested as well.
Tympanometry measures how well the eardrum and middle-ear system are moving. This test is very useful when an audiologist is trying to determine why bone-conduction results are better than air-conduction results in the audiogram. Acoustic reflexes measure how well nerve pathways are working between the ear and brainstem. Specific reasons for doing this test may be because of an unexplained speech discrimination difficulty, or unexplained hearing asymmetry, or inconsistent responses to tone audiometry despite fairly normal speech understanding. Where there are any clinical concerns around balance, simple bedside vestibular testing may also be carried out before a referral is written.
Every assessment at hear. includes a referral letter to a GP, ENT specialist, or balance physiotherapist where one is indicated. There is no additional charge for this. The point of the assessment is not just a set of numbers on a page – it’s leaving with a clear explanation of your hearing and a practical plan for what, if anything, comes next.
02.
Hearing Aids and Devices
Most people arrive at a hearing aid conversation with a single image in mind – a small beige device curled over someone’s ear. That’s one option. It’s not the only one, and for many people it’s not the best one. hear. works with devices from Starkey, Oticon, and Phonak – three manufacturers whose technology genuinely earns attention. The starting point is never the product range. It’s you: what you struggle with, how you live, and what you’d actually be comfortable wearing day to day.
Invisible-in-canal (IIC) devices sit deep in the ear canal and are essentially undetectable. Completely-in-canal (CIC) devices sit slightly proud of the canal entrance – still highly discreet, and barely noticeable in normal conversation. If discretion matters, whether for personal or professional reasons, both are worth knowing about. Canal devices aren’t right for everyone, but they’re right for more people than they’re often offered.
Modern hearing aids connect wirelessly to phones, televisions, and streaming accessories. If that kind of connectivity matters to you alongside a discreet look, it’s achievable – rechargeable CIC devices and behind-the-ear styles alike can pair with TV streamers and table microphones without giving anything away.
A behind-the-ear device is larger, but size brings power and durability. And sometimes the goal is simply this: being able to follow your partner’s voice at home and out on a Sunday afternoon walk together. A well-fitted BTE can make that happen for a little over $200 through government funding. That’s not a compromise. That’s the right tool for the job at the right price. Yes, there are more expensive models with broader feature sets; but these are not ten thousand dollar instruments at hear.; they’re about six thousand for the same cutting edge tech. That’s only possible because the clinic runs lean and passes that cost efficiency on to where it matters – you.
For some people the issue isn’t about hearing aids in principle – it’s the feel of a substantial acrylic fitting sitting in the bowl of the ear. Even when it’s vented and acoustically well-matched, that physical sense of something solid in the concha isn’t for everyone. Those same people are often completely comfortable with a small speaker sitting at the canal entrance on a thin wire, which is a very different experience. There are also specific listening environments – busy social situations particularly – where the microphone placement on an mRIC gives a measurable advantage in extracting speech from background noise.
Colour is a real choice too. Not everything is grey or beige. Some devices come in a range of colours, and there’s no reason a hearing aid has to look like it’s trying to disappear if you’d prefer it didn’t.
Conventional hearing aids work well for most people – but not for everyone. Where there’s a large air-bone gap, fitting an air-conduction aid is likely to disappoint regardless of how advanced the technology is.
Where chronic ear infections make fitting and sealing a conventional aid impractical, the same problem applies. In both cases, a bone-anchored hearing aid is often a better starting point, and hear. can refer you to an ENT surgeon to assess your candidacy and discuss costs. In a small number of cases – where air-conduction aids have been exhausted and speech intelligibility remains genuinely poor even with well-fitted, well-verified devices – a cochlear implant becomes the right conversation. hear. will do the necessary clinical groundwork before referring to the Southern Cochlear Implant Program, so nothing is left incomplete before the referral goes out.
The point of slowing down for this conversation is that the wrong device, however technically capable, tends to end up in a drawer. The right one disappears into your life.
03.
specialised services
Some of what hear. does sits outside the standard hearing aid and assessment pathway, and that’s worth explaining properly.
Tinnitus is one of the most under-assessed conditions in audiology. An appointment begins with a detailed history – the nature of the sound, when it started, what makes it worse, how much of your life it’s consuming. The assessment includes full audiometry with extended high-frequency testing, pitch matching to locate where in your frequency range the tinnitus lives, and an exploration of how effectively masking sounds suppress what you’re hearing.
Pulling all of that together has one central purpose: to make sense of the tinnitus with you, explain where it’s most likely originating, and take away some of the fear that grows around a sound you can’t explain and can’t switch off. Ongoing support is available. If hearing aids are likely to help, that conversation happens honestly. If they’re not, that gets said equally plainly.
Lyric is the world’s only extended-wear hearing device. It sits at the bony-cartilaginous junction of the ear canal, roughly four millimetres from the eardrum, and is worn continuously – sleep, shower, exercise, all of it. Its deep placement means it works with the natural acoustics of the outer ear rather than around them. Devices are replaced by the audiologist every two to four months. Canal geometry and hearing profile determine suitability, and there are medical and lifestyle contraindications – regular diving and skydiving among them.
The audiologist at hear. is Phonak-certified and spent two years as in-house Lyric clinical trainer at Triton Hearing, a role Phonak typically retains for their own faculty. If your ears are a candidate, a trial is the obvious next step.
Where a patient’s history or test results raise clinical concerns about balance, bedside vestibular testing can be carried out at hear. before a referral is written – not as a routine add-on, but where it’s genuinely useful. Bone-anchored hearing aid programming and ongoing BAHA care are also available, whether you’re already implanted or working through that pathway for the first time.
04.
Ongoing Care
A hearing aid fitting is the beginning of a relationship with your hearing, not the end of one. Life shifts, and hearing care needs to shift with it. Someone moving from an office to a construction site needs their aids programmed for that world. A teenager heading into the final stretch of high school needs to catch everything in the classroom – not approximately, but reliably. Someone stepping into retirement and into a fuller social life, weekend golf and the conversation that follows, needs aids tuned for those environments rather than the ones they’ve left behind. Hearing itself changes over time too, and devices need to reflect that.
Depending on your circumstances, hear. will recommend a full review every twelve to twenty-four months, covering a complete hearing assessment and verified reprogramming against your current thresholds.
There’s also the quieter kind of maintenance that matters more than most people realise.
Microphones and receivers gradually collect wax, skin cells, and dust. The aid appears to be working – it powers on, it sits in the ear – but intelligibility quietly deteriorates until following a conversation at work or catching the television feels like effort again.
Sometimes the problem is more overt: static, intermittent reboots, shortened battery life. All of it is fixable, and none of it should be tolerated. Hearing is too embedded in daily life to accept a device that isn’t doing its job.
05.
Ear Wax Removal
Ear wax is the most common reason people visit an audiologist outside of a formal hearing assessment, and it’s worth doing properly. At hear., microsuction is the preferred method – a dry, precise technique that uses gentle suction to clear the canal without water or irrigation.
It is the safest approach available in an audiology setting, particularly for wax sitting close to the eardrum, where anything more forceful would be inappropriate outside of a surgical environment. Where microsuction alone isn’t sufficient, manual retrieval with forceps or a curette may be used, always under magnification and always with the patient reclined for stability and comfort. hear. uses a reclining chair and a magnified head loupe so the clinician can see exactly where they’re working before they do anything.
It isn’t always wax.
Over the years the ear canal has offered up a grass beetle clinging to an eardrum, a moth, two hearing aid receiver domes embedded deeply enough in wax that they’d been mistaken – not unreasonably, on a quick look – for wax alone, and playdough, bilaterally, courtesy of a creative preschooler.
The point being that what’s in the ear canal isn’t always what it first appears to be, and a thorough look with proper equipment matters more than a quick in-and-out. Whatever is in there, the goal is the same: a clear, healthy canal and an ear that works the way it should.
Hearing aids are often assumed to be expensive, and without context that assumption is understandable. What most people don’t know is that the majority of New Zealanders qualify for some level of government funding toward the cost – and in some cases, that funding is substantial. Through the Disability Support Services Hearing Aid Subsidy Scheme, two hearing aids can be fitted for $209.10. That’s not a stripped-back option or a compromise – it’s a properly fitted, clinically verified solution for the right candidate. ACC and Veterans’ Affairs New Zealand provide separate funding pathways with their own eligibility criteria. The point is that the financial commitment, whatever shape it takes, rarely needs to come as a shock or at the expense of other priorities in life. If you’re unsure what you qualify for, that’s a conversation worth having before you assume anything.