Why Amplified Speakerphones

Video Transcript For The Hard Of Hearing: This is a brief video to talk about an interesting area that we get a lot of questions about here at Hearing Direct. Before somebody starts to experience any degree of hearing loss we've all been very used to our lives using some form of telephone, be it a mobile telephone, a desk telephone like this one, or a cordless phone.

As hearing loss does start to develop or progress, as perfectly natural as it is as we age, you tend to find with standard phones for the home or mobile, they seem to have a better audio performance from a point of view of volume, when using speakerphone mode. So that’s true for mobile phones, for cordless phones and for corded desk phones like this one. The reality is quite interesting because as people start to become more dependent on the speakerphone and find it more and more difficult to use the phone in its traditional form through the handset. When we are contacted by people who eventually find even that insufficient for their needs, and start to look at a range of amplified telephones, again mobile, or cordless, or phones for the home. Now they tend to want to focus on speaker phone functionality and making sure that’s available, and indeed have the intention of using the speakerphone probably in the same way they have on their standard phone for many years.

Interestingly the role of amplified phones is different to standard phones because these phones, and this is a good example, this is a desk phone, have very much louder voice capability. Using a speakerphone function can actually result in some degree of distortion. They will have good speakerphone functions, but to get the maximum volume in clarity, out of all, almost all amplified phones as I said it be that cordless for the home, desk phones for the home or mobiles. To get the best performance out of them using the handset will actually result in better clarity and better volume than using the speakerphone function, and it’s contrary to the experience many people have had to date when using that standard phone.

So just a small piece of advice really from Hearing Direct is that whilst a lot of the phones that we provide the amplified phones do have a speaker phone functionality, it shouldn’t be and isn’t the most important factor when making a decision, about what phone might be right for you. You will certainly find as I said better clarity and better volume by using the handset as designed, and that is basically because the microphone which is here and the speaker or the output is here, there is a good distance between them that we can put more volume through here with less danger of it being picked up by the microphone, and then a feedback path or distortion starts to occur. Whereas with the speakerphone you have a microphone and speaker out which are much closer together and therefore it’s more difficult to get maximum volume from the phone when used in speakerphone mode.

Hopefully that’s a little bit clearer in terms of why you should or shouldn’t use a speakerphone and why you should make that part of your decision process, but we would be very happy to talk more and indeed explain in more detail to you if you would like to give us a call, one of our experts, the customer services team can talk to you more on 0800-032-1301 anytime during the working week 9 till 5, or alternatively you can contact us outside those times through email at customerservices@hearingdirect.com.