Was fitted yesterday with the KS9 devices in Watford in the UK. Just to let the international audience here know, Watford is a town about 10 to 15 miles north of London and is the location of one of the 4 Costco Warehouses in the UK. I won’t go into the distractions that I had yesterday - Levis 501s for £35 and a whole aisle of Xmas goodies including Lindor chocolate and Ferrero Rocher at knocked down prices
Anyway, the audiologist was efficient and quickly did a REM and set me up on NAL-NL2. It didn’t sound loud enough at first, so she set it to 110% prescriptive target. I have clear custom cshell moulds, which disappear into my ear - apparently not very noticeable from the side, and the aids themselves are remarkably small - about half the size of my previous Venture V90 aids. Did a quick check outside in the main warehouse area, the audiologist talking behind me. Went through the Easy Line Remote App and the basic settings. Did not add any manual programs - so just had the automatic program.
Observations so far:
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The high frequency pick up is something to behold. I could hear the rustling of food wrappers and other sounds - not obtrusively with very good clarity
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The transitioning between automatic programs is unnoticeable. I couldn’t tell if any switches were made. This to a large extent is true of the previous Phonaks - the Venture.
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The connection to my phone - Samsung 8, was very good and the streaming was good.
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Plugged in the TV connector. Found that for some reason it would not connect to the usual Audio out socket with the Optical cable - no green light - but I had to plug it into the Satellite Audio out socket instead. This is a slight disadvantage as it means that for digital non-satellite programs, I won’t be able to use the connector.
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Tried then to connect to my laptop. This is when the fun started and I discovered the one device pairing limitation of the KS9s. If you are going between the phone and the laptop (I am sure this is a known fact now in this forum), it’s ok pairing at first to the laptop, but when you go back to the phone, you have to forget (disconnect) the current device (in this case the laptop) and re-pair the phone (which has to be removed from the device list before you do this), and you also must turn the hearing aid on and off (before you remove and re-pair). This is not a deal breaker for me, but it is slightly inconvenient. Hopefully the KS9 will get a firmware update to fix this at some point, and I will ask the fitter to ask Phonak/Sonova about this.
Overall, it’s pretty impressive for a 1st fit straight out of the box. I will get Noahlink Wireless and change to the Phonak adaptive prescription formula and do some tinkering soon.
Need to check their performance in noise.
There is a follow up appointment in a month.