Telephone Ringer Amplifiers Compared

Video Transcript For The Hard Of Hearing: At Hearing Direct we get a very common question with regards to phones for those with hearing loss, and the options that are available to people in terms of what they can do to hear better on the telephone or hear the telephone ring better. There are a number of different approaches, some of which you can see here, as to how to go about dealing with this difficult issue, whether it's for you or for someone that you know, so I thought of taking time to point out some of the different types of solutions that are out there, what they are designed to do and perhaps give you an indication as to what might be suitable for different circumstances and people in different situations. So looking at what we have here on the table, at the back here, we have from two different manufacturers, this is from Amplicomms, this is called the RingFlash 200, this is from Geemarc, this model is called Geemarc CL2. These two are designed to notify you in several different ways that your telephone is ringing. So these would be ideally or primarily be used to provide both an audible and a visual alert to the fact that telephone is ringing. So in addition to these two models here, another smaller more portable model is the CL11 from Geemarc which is as you can see a smaller version of the CL2 here. It's not as quite as loud, and it is not quite as bright in terms of its alerting methods. But it's a good, cheap, portable solution that is worth a try although generally speaking we do tend to find people get a better result with either one of these two models. So these three here, which is the RingFlash 200 from Amplicomms, the Geemarc CL2 and the Geemarc CL11 are all designed to improve ringing notification of an incoming call. This model here which is the Amplicomms TA10, this is designed to work with an existing phone to increase the voice volume rather than the ringing volume which is what these are designed to do. So this is used more if you have problems hearing people on the telephone, rather than hearing the telephone ring and this could be used with most existing telephones in your home. In addition to that, you can see here, this is just an example but we do a big range of amplified phones that are designed to be or to replace your existing phone and come with the elements that this contains and these contain all built into the one piece into the phone itself, so in the case of this one, this is the Doro Syntiro 915, this has a visual call indicator here and has a much louder ring which you will be able to pick up from here and also has an amplification to the incoming voice which is greater than the ability of the phone like this or an item like this, the Amplicomms TA10, its greater in its ability to provide amplification to the voice than this can apply to an existing phone. But, all of these solutions have a role to play. These three sit between the telephone and a wall socket, so if this was to be used in conjunction with this and this was your existing phone, you would plug the back of the phone into this unit and this unit will then plug into the telephone socket into the wall and it will either ring loudly, flash only, or ring and flash at the same time, hence the name ring flash, and then similar principle, but from Geemarc, the CL2, designed to do exactly the same thing, sits between the telephone and the wall socket and it's designed to ring or flash or ring and flash when the phone rings, and similarly same principle with this, you would plug into in between the phone and the wall socket and it would also ring and flash to let you know the phone was ringing. This obviously doesn’t change anything with regard to the ringing of the phone. It's really just about trying to increase the volume on the handset, but again it does plug in between the wall and the telephone socket, so that all viable options, all of these four units here are designed to be used in conjunction with an existing phone and clearly the other option is to take all of the principles of what these do and combine it into a new phone. When you start looking at the prices of these two in particular, they do come quite close to the price of replacing your phone with an amplified version, so from our perspective here at Hearing Direct, we would suggest that if you are looking for something where someone is really resistant to changing their own phone, then these maybe the right solutions to look at purely so that they can carry on trying to use their existing phone but when as is more likely to be the case, when they eventually realise that they cannot hear even with some of these devices as well as they would like on the phone itself rather than hearing the phone ring, then we would definitely recommend moving over to an amplified phone where almost certainly hey will get a better result in terms of listening to people calling. So a relatively complicated subject but hopefully some clarity with regards to what one can buy for different facets of improving either hearing the phone ring or using the phone and talking to people but if you would like some more detailed advice, we got a great customer services team here, very knowledgeable. They will be very happy to talk to you about any of these options and more. So do give us a call on 0800-032-1301 9 to 5, five days a week, or if it's outside of those hours you can email us at customerservices@hearingdirect.com