The room was loud. Not nightclub loud, but that particular Sydney launch-party loud – 150 people, clinking glasses, and the acoustic nightmare of a high-ceilinged warehouse space where every conversation bounces off the concrete and lands in your ear as mush.
Normally this is the point where I start nodding and smiling and hoping the person in front of me isn’t asking a question. Instead, I tapped the arm of my glasses, and the woman I was talking to snapped into focus. Not visually – I could already see her. I could suddenly hear her. The chatter behind me dropped away like someone had turned down a dial, and her voice came through clean and close.
That was my first real-world test of Nuance Audio Glasses, and it’s the moment I thought of my friend.
The meeting she couldn’t hear
A close girlfriend of mine – sharp, stylish, in her 40s, the kind of woman who can run a room – lost her job in advertising earlier this year. Not because she wasn’t good at it. Because she couldn’t hear properly.
It crept up on her. In boardroom meetings with a dozen people, the person at the far end of the table became a murmur. Open-plan offices were worse. She started missing the crucial detail – a date, a number, a decision – and then having to ask people to repeat themselves. Again. And again. Colleagues got impatient. She got embarrassed and stopped asking. And once you stop asking, you start guessing, and once you start guessing, you start getting things wrong.
By the time it came to a head, the story her employer told was about performance. The real story was about hearing.
Here’s the thing: she knew. She’d suspected for a while. But the idea of wearing a hearing aid to work – of being “the woman with the hearing aid” in a fashion-conscious industry at 45 – was something she simply wasn’t prepared to do. I understand that hesitation completely. It’s not vanity. It’s about how you want to be seen, and the assumptions people make.
She is far from alone. There are an estimated 5.86 million Australians living with mild to moderate hearing loss, and the research is clear that stigma, discomfort and cost are the main reasons people don’t do anything about it. Untreated, it’s linked to social withdrawal, increased cognitive load and a higher risk of depression. That’s a lot of women quietly nodding and smiling in meetings.
Osher’s ten lost years
At the Australian launch of Nuance Audio, Osher Günsberg told the room he’d had hearing issues for ten years before he did anything about it. Ten years. This is a man who talks for a living, on television and on a podcast with millions of downloads, and even he sat on it for a decade. The room went quiet in the way it does when a lot of people are silently recognising themselves.
That admission reframed the product for me before I’d even tried it. The engineering is impressive, but the real problem Nuance Audio is trying to solve isn’t a hearing problem. It’s a pride problem. And you don’t solve a pride problem with better microphones. You solve it with a device that nobody knows you’re wearing.
What they actually are
Nuance Audio Glasses are made by EssilorLuxottica – the company behind Ray-Ban, Oakley and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses – and they are a TGA-registered medical device for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. That TGA registration matters: this isn’t a gadget with a wellness claim, it’s a regulated hearing solution.
Directional microphones, noise reduction and open-ear speakers are built into the frames themselves. There is nothing in your ear. Nothing behind your ear. From the outside, they are a pair of good-looking glasses, and that’s it.
The directional part is the clever bit. The microphones focus on what’s in front of you – the person you’re looking at – and suppress what’s behind and around you. In practice, it means the glasses follow your attention. Turn your head to the person on your left, and they become the one you hear.
There’s a companion app (iOS 16 or Android 12 and later) that you’ll need for the initial audio calibration, firmware updates and fine-tuning. You can toggle between a focused “frontal” mode for one-on-one conversations and an “all-around” mode for general listening. Once it’s set up, though, you mostly leave the phone in your bag – volume and modes are controlled by tapping the temple.
They come with a wireless charging pad and a USB-C cable, and they’re compatible with prescription lenses, so if you already wear glasses this genuinely can be a two-in-one.
Living with them
I wore them on and off for over a month: a launch, a couple of restaurant dinners, a long lunch in a very echoey Surry Hills room, and a handful of back-to-back meetings.
Restaurants are where they earned their keep. That familiar experience of straining to follow a conversation across a table while a bottle of wine disappears untasted – gone. In meetings, the frontal mode did exactly what my friend needed and never had: it picked out the person speaking and let the room fall back.
They’re not perfect. Open-ear audio has a ceiling – in the very loudest environments you’ll still get some spill, and this is a device for mild to moderate loss, not severe. The frames are a fraction heavier than my regular glasses, though not enough to bother me over a full day. And you do need to charge them, which is one more thing on the bedside table.
My one real gripe? The pair I was sent was Shiny Black. Perfectly handsome, but the last colour I’d choose given the range also comes in a rich Shiny Burgundy and a Deep Blue. For a product whose entire proposition is style, I’d have loved to test the burgundy. My friend, I suspect, would too.
The price
Nuance Audio Glasses retail for $1,220, or from $1,425 with prescription lenses. They’re sold over the counter – no hearing test required – at OPSM, Laubman & Pank and EyeQ stores across Australia, as well as through independent optometrists and audiology clinics.
That’s not cheap. But it’s a fraction of the cost of many traditional prescription hearing aids, and if you’d be buying a decent pair of frames anyway, the maths starts to look very different. Some private health funds may offer partial reimbursement, so it’s worth asking.
The antidote
I keep coming back to my friend. A pair of these on her face in that boardroom – frames people would have complimented, not questioned – and the story of last year might have been a very different one.
If you’ve been nodding and smiling your way through meetings, this is the first hearing device I’ve tried that I’d actually recommend to a woman who cares about how she looks and would never, ever wear a hearing aid to work. Get your hearing checked. Then go and try the burgundy.
Nuance Audio Glasses, RRP $1,220 (from $1,425 with prescription lenses). More at nuanceaudio.com or find a stockist at nuanceaudio.com/store-locator.
