Lexie’s B2 Plus Hearing Aids Add Small but Necessary Upgrades

The Bose-powered behind-the-ear Lexie B2 is a great value in the world of hearing aids, but Lexie discontinued them earlier this year to make room for the B2 Plus, a direct successor and, it must be said, about as small an upgrade as you could imagine to merit a new product name.
There’s a reason why the Lexie B2 Plus hearing aids aren’t billed as the B3: The amplification technology inside them hasn’t changed. I’ll get to that in more detail in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the two things that have been upgraded.
The first is the biggest: The revamped case actually holds a battery. One of the most common complaints of the original B2 is that the case didn’t hold a charge. To recharge your hearing aids, the case had to be plugged into a USB-C charger. If you were on the go and your batteries died, you were out of luck, because the B2 case was only good for storage if it wasn’t tethered to an electrical source. While the 18-hour charge of the aids meant they were good for the day and more, they weren’t a great solution for a weekend off the grid.
The new B2 Plus case—which doesn’t look noticeably different from the B2’s case and is still quite chunky—holds one extra charge, so you can get 36 hours of juice before having to plug in. That’s less than most competitors but a huge improvement over its predecessor.
Upgrade number two is the hearing test in the Lexie app. This test is a lot like other over-the-counter hearing aids, prompting you to listen for beeps of different pitch and volume in each ear, tapping a button when you hear the sound. For most aids, the results are used to tune the frequencies amplified by the aid, much like an equalizer. Lexie’s hearing test doesn’t quite go that far, because it can’t: The hearing aids have only two real tuning mechanisms: world volume (balanceable between the two ears), and a “bass/treble” slider that lets you dial one side up at the expense of the other.
I took Lexie’s integrated hearing test and was promptly given some suggested settings to try—a world volume setting of 30 (up from the default of 20) and a treble/bass setting of 10 on the bass side (out of 50). The test also shifted the audio balance 5 degrees (out of 50) to the left.
It’s not the same as getting a hearing aid experience fine-tuned to your audiogram, but it’s surprisingly close, and I found that things sounded good in a variety of environments, from watching media to conversations to being outdoors. And you can still set up to 10(!) environments to customize your sound situation—though that is about seven more than I typically ever use. Lexie’s directionality system—letting you listen to sound from “everywhere” or “focus” on what’s in front of you—also remains intact.
All of this is good news because, as I noted above, the underlying audio processing is no different from the previous model. I couldn’t tell you any difference in the audio experience between the two systems, and my same praise—solid but unobtrusive amplification—and complaints—a slight amount of hiss increasing as you pump up the volume—remain.
The B2 Plus ships with open and closed eartips in three sizes, and again I found the larger, closed eartips increasingly uncomfortable the longer I wore them. I’m even more accustomed to wearing hearing aids now than when I wrote my review of the B2 in 2023, but I still struggled with itchy ear canals setting in after an hour or so of wear time.
The industrial design of the B2 Plus hasn’t changed either. These are fairly stodgy behind-the-ear units available only in gray, and they weigh 3.1 grams each—on the hefty side against others on the market but not obscenely large. A rocker on the back of each aid lets you control the master volume without fiddling with the app. Bluetooth audio and call streaming are still supported; Android support for the latter was recently added via a firmware update.
Getting these aids set up took some work, in part because they were registered to another user before being sent to me (not Lexie’s fault) and in part because I had a previous Lexie hearing aid product registered in my app that I couldn’t get rid of (definitely Lexie’s fault). I had to work with tech support to fix the issue, which took about half an hour over a Zoom call and ultimately involved deleting and re-creating my account. I mention this mainly for users who may be upgrading from a different Lexie product, in case my experience isn’t out of the norm.
The Lexie B2 Plus aids were $999 at launch and now cost $899, a clear sign of price pressure in the over-the-counter hearing aid space. At less than half the price of the Jabra Enhance Select 500, these aids are a solid choice if you don’t have a complex audiogram and/or don’t need a lot of fine-tuning but still want a traditional behind-the-ear experience.