A good Custom Earmold will greatly enhance your listening experience. Custom Earmolds are used with Behind-The-Ear hearing aids and Body Aids. They are the solution for many common hearing aid problems. In order to have a custom earmold made, we need to have impressions of a person's ears. We send out impression kit materials at no charge to our clients. We only bill for the finished product. Lloyds sends enough material for a person to do two separate impressions of each ear - that way a person can practice with the first one to see how it all comes together and how fast you need to work with the two-part silicone material.

Making impressions of your ears is a very simple and safe process. Tens of thousands of our customers have done this over the past 40 years with no problems. It's good to have a helper - an extra set of hands - to do this, but it's not 100% necessary.

A Custom Earmold will: 1) reduce the possibility of feedback since a form-fitting Custom Earmold provides a better airtight seal in the ear vs. a generic ear piece (the 'mushroom' insert), 2) keep the hearing aid more secure in the ear since it will take advantage of all the curves and contours of the user's ear to lock it all in place, and 3) help reduce the occlusion effect. Occlusion is where a person's ears feel 'stuffy.' People describe occlusion as if they are talking in a barrel, an echo effect, or similar to having water in their ears. It's the same effect you have when you talk if your ears are all plugged up.

We reduce the occlusion effect by having the custom earmold vented. A 'breathing hole' or 'channel' is drilled through the shell. This allows the chamber that's created between the end tip of the earmold and a person's eardrum to 'breathe' - it's connected to the outside world. Sometimes too much of the volume of the hearing aid escapes out through the vent hole causing the aid to feedback/whistle/squeal. That's why we include a series of small vent plugs (they look like tiny little bushings and have different sized inner didiameterholes in them) so a person can find the size vent plug that allows for 'breathing', but at the same time constricts that outward flow of volume to a reduced point so the aid does not feedback.

Every new Custom Earmold has the plastic tubing already installed in it (for Behind-The-Ear aids). The plastic tubing is what attaches to the aid by slipping it over the earhook ('elbow') of the BTE instrument. This plastic tubing should be replaced at least once a year. It is called Curved Tubing and is specially molded for hearing aid and Custom Earmold applications. If you try to use straight tubing, it will crimp as it makes its right angle into the Custom Earmold and will block off sound from passing through.

If you are ordering a Custom Earmold for a Body Aid instrument, be sure to let us know (via email) because it is a slightly differently end product from a BTE mold.

For body aids we suggest standard molds as they are more durable. Custom Earmolds for Body Aids have a special snap-ring embedded into the mold; the Custom Earmold snaps directly onto the Receiver of the Body Aid.