Paul Jackson, HIS
Co-Owner
Charley Feeley, BC-HIS
Co-Owner
When we started Clear-tone back in 1984, we were on a mission to provide the best hearing care delivery solutions in the world.
Unfortunately, there were severe limitations in the hearing aid process at that time, the biggest being that hearing aids were custom made at a manufacturer’s lab in other states or countries.
Patients often had to wait weeks before they got their new hearing aids, only to discover some adjustment had to be made so the device had to be shipped back to the manufacturer’s lab. Whenever maintenance or repairs had to be done, it was the same story.
We knew if we could cut out the middleman and start manufacturing our own hearing aids here in Tulsa, we could serve our patients better. So that’s exactly what we did. We began engineering and manufacturing our own hearing aids, right here in Tulsa.
As our business grew, so did our reach. Soon we were seeing patients from out of state and overseas, coming to us to get their hearing aids the same day, instead of having to wait weeks.
Our decision to break the mold and manufacture our own hearing aids established us as Oklahoma’s largest and most trusted hearing aid provider.
And while manufacturing hearing aids on-site solved many problems for our patients, we realized that what we actually wanted for them didn’t begin and end simply with hearing aids.
We desired a better quality of life for each person walking through our doors. So we put our engineering team back to work, spending thousands of hours researching ear anatomy, physiology, and acoustical physics. We did thousands of trial fittings with our patients, then listened to what they said.
We soon realized that an overwhelming majority of complaints people had with hearing aids could be fixed if the hearing aid could fit better.
In fact, when we surveyed over a thousand hearing care professionals across the United States, over 90% of them said the way a hearing aid fits is the most important factor. With that realization, we committed to innovation and constantly testing and trying new ideas for hearing aid design, technology, and service for our patients.
What resulted was a hearing aid style unlike anything before. Right here in Tulsa, we developed and launched a disruptive hearing aid technology that flipped the hearing aid industry on its head!
In the late 2000s, our devices became the preferred and most trusted style worldwide. Today, they make up nearly 80% of all hearing aids sold.
We’ve trained hearing care professionals not just in Canada and Mexico, but around the world in places like Germany, Australia, The Netherlands, Argentina, Poland, South Africa, Austria, Israel, and Italy, to name a few.
While our international presence grew, we remained deeply committed to our Oklahoma roots. We brought back home best practices and still continue improving our processes and services to better care for the patients who walk through our doors every single day. This lets us serve our patients with the best hearing care consults, evaluations, fittings, continued care and maintenance in the world, right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Our device is smaller and more discrete.
By separating the speaker from the sound processor, we make the hearing aid less bulky and more lightweight, enabling it to virtually disappear when worn. At the same time, we improved the sound quality by placing the speaker in the ear canal closer to the eardrum. This also minimizes the risk of feedback or squealing while the device is in the ear.
Our device is more comfortable.
We know the ear canal can be extremely sensitive (it only takes ½ of a gram of pressure to create a pain response!), so whatever goes in there needs to be soft. After thousands of hours of research, we developed an ultra-soft tip in a variety of sizes to help us fit each individual ear as best as possible. Our design also prevents the plugged-up feeling (occlusion) and the “head in a barrel” experience (occlusion effect) that other hearing aids cause.
Our devices sound better.
Based on certain principles of physics, namely Boyle’s Law, we know that the closer we get to the source of a sound, the less volume is needed to hear that sound.
Following that concept, our hearing aids place the speaker closer to the eardrum than other hearing aids, thereby reducing the amount of amplification needed and keeping speech sounds crystal clear.
Our design helps position the sound processor in the proper position behind the ear, enabling the microphones to form a directional beam towards the front of the wearer.
Clear-tone hearing aids offer a much better opportunity for our wearers to engage and interact with their environments and loved ones.
Today our mission remains to provide the best hearing care delivery solutions in the world, but our vision is even greater. We recognize the ever-changing climate of hearing device availability.
Patients are no longer bound to brick-and-mortar locations and device options and technologies continue to expand.
But how the hearing aid fits remains the single most important factor in whether or not a person is successful with hearing aids. And nobody does that better than the company that invented it.
