I don’t know what the NHS is fitting these days, but if you think you’d be happy with a pair of repaired Audeo Yes RICs, you’ll probably be happy with whatever the NHS can give you for free which is likely newer. So long as it’s properly fit.
There’s a lot of marketting with hearing aids. Differences between brands aren’t as big as it might seem.
“Roger” Brec! 
Good point thanks Raudrive
Me neither Neville but I might give it a try… “properly fit” though like you say… hmmm…
I have appt. at Specsavers coming up so gotta decide if I want to treat the ‘sale or return’ thing as a trial, as they don’t offer any official try-before-you-buy option… (actually, does anyone?)
I’m more excited about the Costco option I must say so gotta say a BIG thanks to ‘Sierra’ again for the heads-up on them. Having done a fair bit of Google searching I never saw them come up here in the UK. So, at the moment, unless I get serious advice to the contrary, I cant see past the offer they have on the KS9… at £1200 that’s about £1k less (!) than I can see equivalent devices elsewhere here?
Anyway, be interesting to see… with luck I’ll try em and like em…
Assuming Costco have all the same aids in the UK as they have here, I would rate them based on best buy value in this order:
KS9 - Marvel M90 based
Rexton Adore Li - Very similar to Signia 7Nx and may be currently on sale for about 1800 $US. Charger may be extra.
Phillips HearLink - May be similar to Bernafon models, Charger may be included.
ReSound Preza - still very good, but may be a bit more expensive than the rest
what device do you use for Bluetooth from your tv
I think you are asking what device I use for TV streaming.
The Phonak TVLink 2 is used with Phonak Venture and Belong aids.
My wife has Costco KS9 aids and she uses the Phonak TV Connector.
There are similar devices for most modern hearing aids.
I would go for NHS aids as the first option.
I went to my doctor and said I thought I had problem with my hearing. Two weeks later I was wearing NHS supplied hearing aids. The downsides of these aids is that they are larger than more up to date aids and they need an intermediate device for streaming. I don’t know if the most up to date aids would enable me to hear better?
Hi I am UK too and I have NHS supplied hearing aids, I currently have just been given the Oticon Synergy Sense which I’m really loving. I am in Devon so I don’t know if the aids given vary depending on area but I’ve always been really happy with the NHS aids. I also bought from E-bay a practically new (still with the plastic on) streamer pro to use with my Android phone for streaming and it’s made a huge difference to me. I no longer miss calls when my phone is in my bag and can stream You Tube, Twitch, Apple music right to my ears.
Thanks everyone for your replies. NHS sounds like an option but I guess, as we say here, what device you get is a bit of a postcode lottery. In the end I’ve NOT done a huge amount of research as I planned to do and have ordered KS9’s from Costco. I get fitted next weekend… By the way the money back period here in the UK with them is 60 or 90 days (I can’t remember what she said, will check next week…doh!) certainly not the 6 months you guys in US get!
I must admit I’m quite nervous about the results I’m going to get with new devices… With my current ones I’ve just resigned myself to having increasingly limited hearing with them! As obvious as this might be, it’s conversations, speech etc where I have the biggest problem. Certain female voices (but not exclusively, some softly spoken blokes at work I can’t understand a darn word they’re saying!). I can never have a conversation with, with out multiple requests to “sorry, say that again…” (which gets very boring for both of us very quickly…) For sure I avoid a lot of 1-2-1 interactions for this reason. We’ve had some group meetings (thankfully a rare thing for me) this week (‘C’ shape tables set up, about 15 people sat down) at work and it actually wasn’t that bad, I’d say I could hear about 70-80% of whats going on but, with certain individuals talking, pretty much zero… My concern is word recognition (There’s a test for that I guess from the audiograms some of you post? I’ve never had a test for that, that I know of, so kinda curious…) it feels to me that, with certain speakers, I really struggle with, just more volume aint gonna help much! Wrong attitude approaching it I suppose but we’ll see I guess, fingers crossed.
Anyway, babbling on a bit… thanks again for all your inputs folks!
Would just like to add to the conversation. I have NHS Resound BTE aids. They were the first aids I ever had, for around 3 years now. During that period I have also trialed Phonak Audeo B90, Resound Quattro and Unitron Moxi, with mixed results. The NHS supplied aids have no bells and whistles, although I can use a tv streamer them. But for clarity of speech, I have found them to be as good if not better than the premium aids. Maybe that could be due to the original fitting.
Thanks hindhaugh90. Yes ‘the fitting’ etc. you might be onto something there. Perhaps I need to search/post elsewhere on the subject of clarity of speech but when it comes to the tech on these things I’m as confused as heck about it already. All the big players make such great sounding claims about their specific secret sauce… very hard to know the bullcrap from the reality. Anyway, I guess I’m just hoping I’ll get a good fitting, not sure what else to do at this stage. I did ask the Costco Audi if they did REM and they said “yes, of course!” It’s kinda crazy that you can get the NHS Resound, which I presume is a ‘lesser’ spec than the Quattro/Moxi etc. that you trialed and get clarity that is just as good. Experiences like that only go to increase my already cynical view of the tech claims and costs of the ‘best’ (read ‘most expensive’) products.
I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with new hearing aids. A fairly typical breakdown for a pair of 10 year old Audeo YES hearing aids is a loss of high frequency gain, which is where a lot of clarity comes from.
(Another fairly typical breakdown is that all of the tone indicators in the hearing aid will work fine but the hearing aids are no longer doing anything at all. People come in all the time wearing hearing aids that are essentially dead, but they don’t realize that because they can hear the start-up melody.)
How high? The high end of the “speech banana” is below 5 kHz. Would gains in the 6-8 kHz region affect speech understanding?
I mean, there is useful speech information out to 10 kHz, but for a lot of people with hearing loss that very high end isn’t going to be accessible anyway. However, with 10 year old hearing aids I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t actually getting sufficient gain much past 2 kHz.
I hope so Neville! Fingers crossed!
Thanks for the input
My current hearing aids are only 9 days old! --I hopped on dodster’s topic because you mentioned loss of high frequency gain, which hurts speech clarity, and I’ve been wondering how high is high in that context. The reason I’ve been wondering is, as I mentioned, speech bananas show “th” and “s” sounds as being at the upper end, but they’re shown as below 5k Hz. And, largely above that, feedback limits my gain. (Although that may change soon when my custom molds arrive.)
You are probably still doing pretty well fine if you are getting sufficient gain out to 5 kHz.
We know from pediatric research (Pittman, 2008) that kids with access out to 10 kHz have better language outcomes than kids without. But kids haven’t learned language yet and can’t fill-in-the-gaps with top-down information the way adults can, so they need it more.
I’m sure there is useful information out to 20 khz (28 kHz in some listeners), far beyond what hearing aids are capable of replacing, or else I would expect evolutionary pressure to have dropped those highest frequencies out over time. 
(That’s a bad argument. The brain is still able to respond to certain auditory stimuli that doesn’t even occur in nature for modern humans, although on the other hand you can cause a down-regulation in cortical representation of non-behaviourally relevant sounds if they are presented continuously, and this is getting too tangential.) My quick-and-dirty iterations of “functional effects of ultra-high frequency hearing loss” have failed to bring many results in this moment, but I’m sure I’m just missing the appropriate keywords. I doubt there’s much speech information up at that very high-high end. I’d guess that the information that we glean from way up at the top is going to be spatial information and scene-analysis stuff. And that je-ne-sais-quois of listening to live music versus recorded music.