I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a listening to support that appears fairly like Linner’s Mars units. Relying in your viewpoint, that’s both an excellent or dangerous factor.
Let’s begin by getting the looks out of the way in which. The Mars listening to aids are in-ear units designed to appear and feel like an earbud, they usually make no effort making an attempt to be discreet. Every support is brilliant white with a strip of shade throughout the outward-facing facet—blue for left, orange for proper—and these strips embody a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing by way of Bluetooth. (The items are additionally out there in “cosmic blue.”)
Extra instantly noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the highest of every support. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps maintain the system in place, following the contour of the concha. Whereas the hook largely disappears when worn, the listening to support itself is bulbous and fairly seen (you possibly can take away the ear fin if it’s bothersome). At 5.52 grams every, they’re the second-heaviest listening to aids I’ve encountered.
{Photograph}: Christopher Null
Regardless of being a low-cost providing, the Linner Mars listening to aids include help for Linner’s cellular app and pull double responsibility as sturdy media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Once more, for a comparatively entry-level product, there’s rather a lot to discover right here, together with impartial quantity controls for every support, 4 operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and out of doors), and a “focus mode” that enables the aids to directionally deal with sound coming from in entrance of you.
An “superior settings” button offers you entry to an equalizer of kinds, although it’s slightly obtuse and takes a little bit of trial and error to determine what sounds greatest. Every ear could be tuned individually alongside 5 dimensions: general, thickness, fullness, readability, and transparency, with weightings of -3 to +3 for every. What do these settings imply? I haven’t had a lot luck figuring that out. Every modifications the audio expertise however in a manner that’s troublesome to completely clarify, both introducing or eradicating a slight stage of hiss at a special pitch. Person experimentation is clearly so as, however the influence isn’t vital sufficient to benefit investing lots of time.
You may really feel a way more highly effective affect by tweaking the three ranges of noise discount, although the upper ranges are likely to mute sounds you in all probability need to hear (specifically voices). The upper you go, nevertheless, the decrease the quantity of hiss you’ll expertise. There’s thankfully not lots of hiss to take care of all through the person expertise, but it surely did are usually current even at low volumes and in all kinds of settings.
