Modern hearing aids can do remarkable things. Whether they deliver them in real life depends almost entirely on how they’re fitted — and that’s where most journeys go quiet.

Most people who walk into a hearing clinic for the second or third time have a story that sounds the same. The aids were technically working. The audiogram looked fine. But the world still sounded wrong — sharp where it should be soft, loud where it should be background, exhausting in a way that made the cinema, the dinner table, the grandchildren feel like work.

Closing the gap.

BestHear exists because that gap between what hearing aids can do and what most patients experience is fixable. Our founder, Armaj Ali, spent the better part of two decades inside the NHS, the private sector, and hospitals around the world trying to work out why the gap kept appearing — and what closed it.

Armaj qualified in Hearing and Balance Studies at the University of Bristol and went straight into the NHS, working across adult and paediatric audiology. His first overseas posting was joining Cork’s newborn hearing screening programme — the first of its kind in Ireland — where he worked with children across the autism spectrum and built a child-friendly assessment tool now used in clinics he’ll never see.

Credentialed twice over.

He’s HCPC and AHCS registered as both a clinical scientist and a hearing aid dispenser — a dual registration that’s rare in private practice and the reason BestHear can offer the diagnostic depth of a hospital clinic alongside private-sector responsiveness.

London brought roles across the NHS and a stint with the cochlear implant team at Great Ormond Street. The pattern Armaj kept noticing wasn’t about the technology — manufacturers had largely solved the engineering. It was about what happened in the fitting chair: the same aids producing wildly different real-world experiences depending on how they were set up and who was doing the listening.

In 2015 he moved to Medina to build the audiology service inside a newly opened National Guard hospital from scratch. Setting up a clinic from zero — choosing every protocol, every workflow, every way of measuring success — is the kind of constraint that makes you question things you previously took for granted.

The new clinic was missing the one tool standard fittings rely on most — Real Ear Measurement (REM), the objective check that confirms a hearing aid is delivering, at the eardrum, what the prescription asks for. He couldn’t wait for the equipment. The patients couldn’t either.

Without the screen to glance at, the only source of truth left was the wearer. Armaj used the goals of REM as the framework, but the verification came from the patient — full clinical attention on what they were actually hearing while the adjustments were being made.

He got good at this subjective fine-tuning over the years. But like REM on its own, it wasn’t consistent. Some appointments produced exceptional outcomes. Others didn’t. He could see both halves of the picture, and he was certain neither alone was the answer.

Armaj returned to the UK in 2019 with REM available again. The question wasn’t whether to go back to the old workflow. It was whether the two halves he’d been using separately — objective measurement and subjective fine-tuning — could work together inside a single appointment.

The first patient he tried this combined approach with was so moved by the result that she made an unsolicited donation to the NHS in thanks. That was the moment he knew the combination was producing something neither method could produce alone.

Patients now describe the experience in nearly the same words: I forgot I was wearing them. That point — when the hearing aid stops being a hearing aid and becomes hearing again — is what we now call the HEAREKA moment. Two clinics deliver it: Parkway in Swansea, and our Pontyclun clinic in the Vale of Glamorgan.

The Heareka Moment.

The HEAREKA Moment is where two truths happen at the same time. The wearer forgets they’re wearing hearing aids. They and those around them are no longer reminded hearing aids are needed. Why? Because it simply works well from day one. When hearing aids are setup with Heareka, nobody will have to convince you to keep wearing them. You wouldn’t want to be without them, because you’ll finally experience life as it should always have been — quality hearing without the effort.