Dick Loizeaux recently found himself meandering through a noisy New York nightclub. This was unusual; Mr. Loizeaux, a 65-year-old former pastor, began suffering hearing loss nearly a decade ago, and nightclubs are not really his scene. “They’re the absolute worst place to hear anybody talk,” he said.

But this time was different. Mr. Loizeaux had gone to the club to test out the GN ReSound Linx, one of two new models of advanced hearing aids that can be adjusted precisely through software built into Apple’s iPhone. When he entered the club, Mr. Loizeaux tapped on his phone to switch his hearing aids into “restaurant mode.” The setting amplified the sound coming from the hearing aids’ forward-facing microphones, reducing background noise. To play down the music, he turned down the hearing aids’ bass level and bumped up the treble. Then, as he began chatting with a person standing to his left, Mr. Loizeaux tapped his phone to favor the microphone in his left hearing aid, and to turn down the one in his right ear.

The results were striking. “After a few adjustments, I was having a comfortable conversation in a nightclub,” Mr. Loizeaux told me during a recent phone interview — a phone call he would have had difficulty making with his older hearing aids. “My wife was standing next to me in the club and she was having trouble having the same conversation, and she has perfect hearing.”

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the latest crop of advanced hearing aids are better than the ears most of us were born with. The devices can stream phone calls and music directly to your ears from your phone. They can tailor their acoustic systems to your location; when the phone detects that you have entered your favorite sports bar, it adjusts the hearing aids to that environment.