Hi there… I’m struggling with digital aids. I m currently wearing phonak superfront pp-c-2-ds. They are brilliant for all sounds especially music. I play the piano and all digital aids I’ve tried sound awful., nothing like a piano should sound like. Have been wearing analogs for 50 yrs! Yes I need to adjust I know but the sounds are so electronic even in linear mode. Even normal hearing people have had a listen and agree with me. So tell me anyone out there what is the best match please? Getting a bit desperate on the super power front! If anyone has any superfront of the model I’m wearing … happy to buy them too!! Need spares badly! Many thanks Julia
I used to wear Superfronts.
Since going digital, the better hearing aid has been Phonak Naida S III UP.
Since upgrading, they’ve never been quite as good. I can still hear but not as good as my Naida S III.
Another thing to consider is that actually how the audiologist programs them. It can vary hugely between audiologists.
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I have moderate to profound hearing loss in my right, and profound loss in my left. I’ve been an analogue hearing aid user most of my life and have always had a certain disdain for digitals since I switched to them in 2012. But, I never outright HATED digital hearing aids like I hated my Phonak NAIDA B90 + CROS. No matter how many adjustments or volume increases we did, it didn’t help.
We finally found out why, and 2 critical adjustments were made:
Turning off the soundrelax feature (unbeknownst to me and my audiologist, we found that my hearing aid was set to soundrelax by default since I got the hearing aid). No wonder I always hated it: this soundrelax feature kept critical sound from coming through. This feature caused the hearing aid to sound muffled and I had to go through that for three years before finding a solution thanks to the amazing people on this discussion forum.
The other adjustment: switching to full linear processing. I did this one myself as part of my at-home hearing aid tweaks.
These changes in settings have fixed just about everything I ever hated about digitals. Sadly, being forced to open the battery door to turn off the hearing aid is the last thing I will never be happy with. I miss just turning off my hearing aid at the switch when I felt like it.
Anyway. Just sharing my experience in case it helps someone else hear better and be able to better tolerate digitals.
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I had a patient that played accordion in in bars and had trouble when he switched to digital. I had him bring the accordion into the office and we literally “played” around for about a half hour to get the programming right. When he left, the three or four people in the reception area broke into applause for the free concert. Unfortunately you can’t take your piano to the office. If your provider had a laptop he could come to you, but not many professionals have that much sympathy for their patients or that much dedication now days. In the past I made many trips to patients home to solve unique problems.
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May I ask you what you changed in the fitting in the case of the accordion player?
Maybe turning off fancy properties, noise reductions , lowering compression ratios, increasing mpo values etc
Probably all of that. Features on hearing aids are supposed to enhance speech, but that typically comes at the cost of everything else.
Unfortunately, I really don’t remember what I did. We tried many different avenues and this was some years back.
Hi!! Could you send me pic of your analog hearing aid. Thanks
Phonak Lyric analog hearing aids with digital programming.