The VA gave me Phonaks Naida S Ultra Power (UP) Wish I spoke to you before I went there.
? , those are the top of the line Phonaks? if you want the accessories just ask your AD to order them. It’s it’s been less then 6 months (Ithink) you can trial a different brand.
Thanks again. They did give me a box full of accessories, but I want to ask them for the Universal FM shoe, (the only thing they didn’t give me.) By he way, they are also trying to get me a Hamilton CapTel 800i phone. (I already have one that Hamilton gave me free, but can use a second one for a seperate line in the house.
glad they took care of you. the VA doesn’t get a lot of love around these parts. my Siemens are rechargeable so far I have 3 pairs of rechargeable batteries and a couple of cases of size 13 batteries. I’m trying to get them to stop sending me stuff from Denver. not sure where you are but you should be able to use their secure email and email the request to your AD and save yourself one trip.
Ilive in Staten Island, NY and the local VA in in Brooklyn, NY about 5 miles away. It is a very large facilty and easy for meto get to in person. Only problem is there are tens of thousands of vets in this neck of the woods so their calendar is always full and appoinyments are far betwen. Sentiment for the VA runs about the same around here, but I have to give even the devil his due. They attributed at least part of my hearing loss to my military service (I was a tank commander) I can still hear the roar of those damned 1,000HP Chrysler air cooled engines… LOL
Wow, I didn’t realize my hearing was so good. 
Nevertheless, what I hear with the analog crowd is that they are used to getting a new hearing aid, getting the volume about right, and that’s it. With digitals it is not unusual to have several adjustment sessions to get it dialed in just right.
Rigjt about several sessions. As forvolume, I am aout maxed out especially at the high frequency end where my hearing loss is most savere. But who kows what tomorrow holds. 
Hi,
I am new to these forums and late to the discussions.
I have been wearing hearing aids for fifty years! I started at age three with, of course, analog aids – that is all there were. My first hearing aids were Qualitone brand. That brand does not seem to exist any longer.
They were great. The amplified sound so that I could actually hear!
In 1988 I received my first pair of digital aids. They were not FULLY digital. They were “digitally programmable”. The sound was still basically analog. They were “ok”. I was not impressed. Over the years, I have tried many different hearing aids - Oticon, Phonak, Widex, Resound, to name a few. At one point in the past 15 year span, I reverted back to using analog aids. But then went back to digital.
Currently, I am using Oticon Agil Pro. These are ITE aids with a BTE processor. I LOVE them. For the first time, I am wearing hearing aids that have a truly reduced feedback, provide a really clear sound, and cut out all the white noise that I find so bothersome.
I hope that progress with the designing of digital hearing aids continues.
I have a severe to profound hearing loss – about 80% in one year and 90% in the other…
Rachel
I have a suggestion – in my experience the manufacturers fitting algorithms are not very good for profound losses and high powered hearing aids — the default fitting formula will be their own ---- I would suggest you ask the person dealing with you to change the fitting formula to provide more gain — NAL or NAL2 may help or you could even try the compression fittings - sometimes they bring surprising results.
Profound losses are always difficult to deal with but it is possible with correctly set up digital aids ---- analogue instruments are not the answer. They are old technology and whilst they may provide a lot of “noise” they perfrom terribly when it comes to speech discrimination… for all sorts of reasons.
Mike is correct. Analog aids do only ONE thing: they amplify sound – ALL of it. Yeah, with analog aids you go in, you get them, the audi diddles with the aid for a few minutes and then you go home. Done. Those days are gone. With a digital aid it may take several visits to your audi to “get it right”. Also, if you are first switching from analog to digital then you are in for a huge difference. What you hear will not sound at all like you are used to. And it takes time to get used to hearing through a digital aid. And over time, you will come to appreciate the differences. There are many.
With analog aids, I could not be in a car on the highway with the windows open. That was because those aids amplified the sound of the wind rushing by to to a ROAR. But now, with my digital aids, I have no problems with open windows in moving cars. With my analog aids I could not deal with social events in which there are many people, all talking at once. They amplified the sound of everyone speaking. With my digital aids, they use speech compression and directionality to cut out the sound of people further away from me, while amplifying the voices of those closest to me – allowing me to participate in the conversation. With my analog aids I would hear “white noise” – the sounds of air conditioners, or any machinery going in the background. It made me crazy. Now, I do not hear it. My digital aids cut out or down the “white noise”. Going digital is so worth it. It is worth the time it takes to get used to, and the large sums of money they cost.
Thanks again for the help. By coincidence I am going to the VA today to see my AD and I will bring thisup with her.
Not to be overly nit picky, but splitting an analog signal into multiple digital channels only to do nothing and combine them back into one analog signal to simulate linear amplification, is not going to be 100% the same as a non-processed analog signal and risks digital artifacting. And if you can’t modify the attack and release times (to be slow enough) in a multi-channel compression, there’s even less hope of even approximating a linear signal.
Of course, we could all debate endlessly whether or not a linear signal is the gold standard. It certainly may not be optimal for all situations.
MG
Do you too, believe the Agil’s put out a “natural sound”?
MG
Granted, but if you have a sampling rate of over 2.2x the bandwidth, only one true A-D stage and an ouput comparator that sorts out divergence from the input stage you aren’t going to be far off. Longer release times are one of the reasons why people like Widex ‘sound’. Applied judiciously they give a less clipped sound to lower pitched vowels.