New KS9’s 4 months ago, and am pretty satisfied with all aspects of these aids. The first impressions were similar to the OP. I realized after a couple weeks that I hadn’t heard my own voice in such an audible way. I had problems with the Music program causing a volume increase of at least 10db, I wasn’t believed by my fitter at first, but by being diplomatic, not raising my voice in irritation, and complimenting her about how much better everything else was , she did more research and got them turned down. I blame my loss for this as it isn’t something many others note.
My last visit included a Phonak consultant that asked if there was anything else, and I told her the volume was great, but sometimes word recognition was hard. She enlisted a high frequency feature where these incoming high frequencies are lowered to a lower frequency. At first it sounded like everybody, live, or TV, radio were all lisping, but now I really don’t hear it and my word recognition is noticeably better. After all we are exhaling when speaking and there is an s-s-s-s-s sound is a natural result.
We’ve lost our hearing over a long time and suddenly getting a significant amount of it back through these HA’s can be disturbing at first.
RDB