For many people, the third largest material purchase after a home and car is a set of hearing aids. You can chalk that up to the decades of predatorily high prices kept in place by an intense Congressional lobbying operation that ensured hearing aids forever remained classified as regulated medical devices, available only with a prescription. That began to change in 2022 when hearing aids went over the counter. But even OTC aids still commonly cost $1,000 or more, putting them out of reach of millions of people who need them but simply can’t afford them.

In partnership with Walmart, a small, bootstrapped company called Audien Hearing has done the seemingly unthinkable: producing a hearing aid that is, by a wide margin, the lowest-cost Food and Drug Administration–compliant hearing aid on the market, priced at all of $98 per pair. Audien says the product was Walmart’s idea, with detailed product specifications laid out by the mega-retailer, gunning not just to enter the ultra-low-cost hearing aid market but to immediately dominate it. Audien executives further say it was the only company that was able (or willing, perhaps) to come through with a product that could meet those specs.

So color me intrigued. After a few years of testing high-end hearing aids for WIRED, I was excited to see how things would fare on the other side.

No Learning Curve

Hearing aids commonly have a significant learning curve as you master their apps and buttons. The Atom One has virtually no learning curve at all. You take them out of the charging case, pick from one of the three eartip sizes, stick them in your ears, and you’re pretty much done. The two units are even ambidextrous, so it doesn't matter which goes in which ear.

The aids are rechargeable via the case—so you don't need replaceable batteries—but do note the case does not carry a charge. You’ll need to plug it in via the included USB cable (and adapter) to top up the devices. To its credit, a single charge is good for 20 to 24 hours of running time.

The Atom One is further simplified because it does not include Bluetooth or a mobiles app. It doesn’t support audio streaming or let you take voice calls. There’s no testing or training system to fine-tune the aids’ frequency shaping, which is fine because there are no frequency-shaping features available anyway.

What the Atom One does do is make things louder—and by default, it makes all the things louder. Tuning is fairly blunt: A lone button on the back of each aid lets you cycle through five volume levels. Since the aids don’t talk to one another, each has to be controlled individually. The units also include three environmental modes that are designed respectively for conversation, noisy environments, and in-vehicle operation. To cycle through these—again, separately for each ear—you hold down the button on the back of each unit for a few seconds and wait for a lower frequency tone to alert you to which mode it has engaged.

If you’re prone to fiddling with hearing aids, you’ll probably accidentally hit the control button more than you’d like, inadvertently changing the volume and requiring you to cycle back through the five levels again to return to the volume you want. This is a bit of a pain, but a little hassle is perhaps to be expected at this price level.

As for performance, the amplification effect is, to put things plainly, rather blunt. Around the house, when at max volume, it sounded like everyone was screaming, and even the slightest sound was deafening. Typing this review with the aids in was nerve-racking, even at more moderate volumes, like tiny firecrackers popping beneath my fingers. My voice became an echoing boom from the heavens that drowned out everything else.

Eventually, I found better luck in more intimate environments at lower volume settings and was able to see some value in hearing television audio and one-on-one conversations with a modest amount of added clarity—but in busy, noisy environments, the Atom One couldn’t keep up. In a bowling alley test, the aids were effectively useless no matter how I configured them.

Ugly Hiss

In all mode settings and at all volumes, there’s ample background hiss that makes it feel a bit like you’re sitting on an airplane. I found it more difficult to concentrate with them in my ears even if I was in a silent room. Combined with the booming reports of keyboard taps, footsteps, and crinkling wrappers, I found the Atom One to be significantly more nerve-racking than I’d like. (Which is none at all.)

On aesthetics, I wouldn’t call the Atom One ugly—the mostly in-ear design is at least less obtrusive than behind-the-ear models—but the beige color palate doesn’t feel very modern. Perhaps this is something Walmart requested, but a more modern white or black earbud-like design would probably go over better with most wearers.

I guess I’m not painting a very positive picture of Audien's Atom One, but I think it’s fair. Anyone who has used a high-end hearing aid will immediately reject this model as too basic, its ham-fisted audio-boosting capabilities ultimately proving limited in value. At the same time, it’s not completely useless—far from it, as the sub-$100 price point puts it in reach of users who would never have a chance to experience a more sophisticated hearing aid.

In the world of hearing loss, something is certainly better than nothing, under the same premise that a pair of gas station reading glasses can be better than suffering with wholly uncorrected vision. Audien does have a slightly upmarket product called the Atom Pro 2 ($289), which the company says is smaller, fits better, sounds better, and includes a charging case with a battery.

Ultimately I expect Audien and Walmart to have less of an impact on the hearing aid market than they would probably like. The audio quality here simply isn’t good enough for them to shake things up much. However, as a gateway product that lets hearing aid newbies at least get a taste for what’s possible in the category—and what life might be like with slightly better hearing—the devices have some value. Best to think of them, perhaps, as training wheels for your ears.