What is analog hearing aid?

Analog: "a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities," Webster. Analog is how the natural world works. We hear and see things in an analog manner. That is to say, in constantly changing, but always connected, waves. Sound appears continuous to our ears. The fact is during average speech there are many stops, starts, gaps and pauses. We only "hear" speech as a continuous sound; regardless of the tiny stops and starts. Additionally, the connected wave of sound that we hear is always changing in strength (volume). Analog hearing aids process sound in a continuous wave. This means quite simply that sound passes through an analog amplifier unbroken. It may get a little bent as it changes from sound waves to electrical waves and back again, but it retains the flow of the original sound wave. Hearing aids remained almost unchanged from 1940 until 1993. Sound quality got better and the parts got smaller, however, the way they worked was unchanged. Analog hearing aids are good at boosting volume but they do very little to help reshape and control sound in a way that provides needed flexibility by the hearing impaired. Analog hearing aids are simple devices. The have simple electronic parts. You could buy the parts to build an analog hearing aid at a Radio Shack. They've been available for decades. Most hearing aid manufactures are no longer making analog hearing aids. For good reason, it costs just as much to make an analog as it does to make an entry level digital. Digital hearing aids work just like computer music. Computerized music, CDs, mp3s, etc all take sound and break it up into little bites (bytes) of information stored as a mathematical equation. The digital computer in the hearing aid can then add or subtract values from those little equations. When the computer puts the numbers back together sound has been altered. Ideally, in a manner that improves your ability to understand speech. There is nothing magic about the term digital. It simply means the sound is handled like any computerized device. It can be very good; It can be very bad. Although digital hearing aids can provide a vastly better hearing experience, they have to be correctly programmed. Analog hearing aids were built at the factory and came "fixed" to the fitter. The fitter could not make many alterations to the output of the instrument. Digitals come as a blank sheet of paper. It's up to the hearing aid fitter to shape the output of the hearing aid. If the digital hearing instrument is well programmed you will have an awesome experience. If it is not, it can be as useless as sticking a rock in your ear.