Aloha WCH & all interested,
I have been using a pair of the Costco Premium HA’s that were introduced the summer of 2010 since late July. Performance has been good, although one of them died a couple of weeks ago. Costco provided a loaner (demo) unit with my program in it until a new replacement arrived.
I had been using a set of Costco/Rexton Insite BTE before that but had some reliability problems with them in that they would sometimes change programs, or turn themselves off randomly. Costco took them back, put me in the new Premium HA’s and gave me some cash back as the new ones were cheaper than the old ones! Another case of technology getting cheaper as time goes on.
In scanning the web I came to the conclusion that the new Costco aids are very closely related to the Siemens Pure 701. I think that the Costco aids may not have the Sound Learning 2.0 function, but most of the other features seem to track, although the marketing words have been changed here and there. Looks like they have the Siemens “S” receiver, rated at 45 dB.
Plus points on the new aids compared to the Rexton Insite from my viewpoint are: much better feedback damping, smaller size, rechargeable batteries/charger.
Minus: in very low ambient noise situations (quiet room) I get some white noise (microphone noise) and am still working with the audi to reduce the gain to minimize it, but in doing so am not getting as much gain as I had before. Overall perception of the sound is pretty comparable and the white noise is usually not noticeable as normal there is enough background noises to cause the gain to be suppressed some anyway.
Keep us posted if you can find some software/adapting cables or whatever!
Chuck