By the way, this is important! Jabra has a list of smartphones and other devices on its website that are compatible with its hearing aids. Check and make sure your phone is on it! I have a new phone that’s not on it. Luckily, the phone is compatible with the app. It took a little while for Bluetooth to connect, but it eventually did.
Opening the Jabra App for the first time was very impressive. The layout was very organized. It has four settings or programs, each with its own custom equalizer built in.
Everything is at your fingertips, from tutorials to requesting a personal interview with an audiologist. There is also a quick chat feature and a direct email feature, and you can call their 800 number for help at any time.
Putting the Jabra Enhance Select 500 hearing aids through their paces
I started right away to put my hearing aids through all their paces. I registered a calendar date through the app for a consultation with one of Jabra's audiologists to go over my hearing test and make some tweaks. The dates were a little far out, but Jabra said they are hiring more audiologists. They’re also going to add more people to their chat platform for help.
It was about 3 weeks before I had my session with Jabra's audiologist through Zoom. She went over the hearing aids from top to bottom, talked about my hearing test results, and made some slight changes. After our meeting, she emailed me that the changes had been made. All I had to do was go into the app and download them to my hearing aids using Bluetooth.
The neat thing is if I didn’t like the changes, I could always roll them back to their state before the download.
My thoughts about the Jabra Enhance Select 500 hearing aids
I'm 74 years old and retired. One of my favorite hobbies is birdwatching, so being able to hear well in the high frequencies is pretty important to me. I've owned eight hearing aids in my lifetime, costing from $8,000 down to $700.
The Jabra Enhance Select 500 hearing aids at almost $2,000 are the smallest, lightest, and clearest hearing aids I've ever owned!
After wearing the hearing aids for a couple of weeks I was really impressed with the music mode. In the past, hearing aids I owned made music sound very tinny. The Jabra 500 is the only one that gives me a very realistic sound. I also play guitar. In the past I would have to take my hearing aids out to tune and play. Not anymore! With these little gems I can wear them all the time.
An overnight charge gives me an operating time from 7:00 am to 11:00 pm at night. The charging case holds 3 full charges on its own.
Jabra Enhance Select 500 can be controlled with an onboard button or the Jabra Enhance app. You can answer or end calls using tap controls, which can be a bit hard to master.
The only downside for me is because I have the latest Android operating system, the phone call answering and music streaming do not work! But I don’t have any problems downloading updates and tweaks to my hearing profile.
To tell you the truth, between all the adjustments you can make to these hearing aids, if I couldn’t download updates I would still keep these hearing aids—that’s how much I like them!
Final verdict
I have never owned hearing aids of this quality before. The Jabra Enhance Select 500s are the smallest and lightest behind-the-ear hearing aids I have ever experienced, hands down. The wireless technology and speech-in-noise processing found inside these devices appear to draw heavily from ReSound's flagship Nexia hearing aids.
The only thing I can complain about is how long it took to get an appointment with an audiologist. But Jabra said they’re working on that.
I still would give them 5 stars.
As noted above, the only real consideration is the price of Jabra Enhance Select 500 relative to other OTC and prescription hearing aids. With a price tag of about $2,000, it is actually slightly more expensive than the Jabra Enhance Pro hearing aids, which come with in-person care from a hearing aid specialist or audiologist at Costco. Similarly, you can generally buy a set of basic hearing aids from independent hearing care practices or clinics for around $2,000 if you insist on that price.
However, as a high-quality alternative, Jabra Enhance Select 500 remains far less expensive than most prescription hearing aids with comparable technology—devices that can cost between $4,500-$8,000.
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