I thought I’d add an update on my experience with the Philips 9030, Costco and iPhone. It’s now 12 days since I got the aids and 4 days after my first fitting tweaking session. At that session impressions were made for custom ear molds. It’ll be at least a month before those are ready and I’m really looking forward to seeing what difference it’ll make. I’ve always worn vented custom molds and I’m hoping they’ll help with some of the missing and mistaking words and sounds issues that I’m having with the Philips. I thought the Open Bass domes might be helpful, but @Neville thought otherwise as did my Costco fitter. So, I bow to the experts on this one! 
Yesterday my new iPhone arrived and I’ve spent many hours with it getting it set up and figuring out how things work on it since I’m an Android user. For me, this is a huge test of the Philips aids. Because, phone call streaming is essential. Music and video too are so much easier to enjoy when it comes directly to my hearing aids. That all works well. On phone calls the sound is very clear. Recorded music and video too. And the hands free is terrific! Leaving the phone in my living room with music streaming into my aids, I’ve walked into the kitchen and on to the pantry—which is outside an interior door and on the other side of a wall. The music continued. It started fading out by the time I neared the top of the stairs to our second floor.
I’m so glad that’s all working because for the last few days I’ve been on the verge of being disgusted with these aids. Because of the degree of SIN hearing loss I have, I’ve given up on the aids helping with that. They won’t (as has been confirmed by experts on this forum). So, I asked the Costco fitter to delete the SIN program and replace it with the Music program—which he did. He also increased the gain in low frequencies a bit. In the General program, he set Noise Reduction to High and Sound Map Noise Control Transition to Very High. This was primarily in response to these concerns: when the water faucet is running in the kitchen I can’t hear the garbage disposal running even though it’s in the same sink and I’m standing right over it, I can’t hear the bathroom fan from 10 feet away when my spouse can hear it upstairs, I couldn’t hear the pump running while I was gassing up my car though my spouse could hear it from the passenger seat with the window rolled up. With my convertible car top down, it sometimes sounds like staccato screeches, scratches and Wizard of Oz munchkin conversations behind my seats, and the “s”s in my own speech sound very sharp with a mild hiss—similar to a lisp but sharper. I find the default volume too loud and had been routinely turning it down a notch. But I left the default there and since then have been trying to live with it being louder than I like to see if I’ll get used to it. It’s hard for me not to perceive voices as aggressive though under this condition. I have to hold back my instinct to respond in kind and tell myself—this is just loud, not an attack. The person’s actually speaking in a normal tone of voice it just doesn’t sound like it.
Did the adjustments help? I don’t experience the s, hiss as much, but if I need to turn the volume up I hear it again with even a one notch increase. I also hear it in others’ s’s at that volume. What needs to be adjusted to remedy this? I still have to be right outside the bathroom door to hear the fan and the water running still masks the sound of the garbage disposal. In fact, I accidentally left it on this morning because I didn’t hear it and caused a mild fury here—safety concern. I’m hoping the custom molds will help with this. I asked about distorted wind noise in a separate post and was told it’s not a wind distortion but the sound of turbulence when the wind hits the aid’s mic when I’m driving my car with its top down. I’ll be paying more attention to this to see what differences it makes with the direction my car is moving in relation to the wind
My major concern and what’s got me really questioning these aids is missing and mistaking words even when there’s little or no background noise and being able to hear someone speaking from a distance but not hearing enough of the words to be sure about what’s being said. For example, I can still be standing right beside a male friend who has a soft voice and miss some of the words he’s saying. Yesterday I walked around my yard with a forester (female—normal voice, neither high or low or soft) and several times had to ask her to repeat though we were within arm’s reach of each other most of the time. Once, I didn’t even get the name of a tree after 2 repeats so I still don’t know what kind of tree it is. We went into a furniture store and the salesman greeted us from about 30 feet away. I don’t know what he said specifically. But, even when he was about 10 feet from us (he also was soft-spoken), I missed enough of his words that I tried not to look at him so he wouldn’t expect a response from me and left it to my spouse to ask and answer questions. This is totally unacceptable!! And I think it’s the aids, not my brain…
because when I trialed the Phonak P70s, speech in these kind of situations was crystal clear immediately and I understood every word. Never asked for a repeat. Never made those silly mistakes that have us answering questions that weren’t asked or going down a path that diverged quite some time ago from the gist of the topic being discussed. My spouse noticed this too. My confidence soared! Someone on this forum asked if we’d want to rent hearing aids for trialing. Right now, I’d love the chance to do that so I could be simultaneously trialing the Phonak Paradise. There were other problems (connectivity and potentially a defective pair) that made me give the Phonak’s back after a couple of weeks (cost too), so I don’t know how they would have done in the long run and I don’t want to idealize them (which is why I’d like to be hearing them alongside the Philips instead of in memory). Although I now feel I know what sounding so “alive” means when I compare the Paradise and the Philips. I much prefer the Phonak’s sound—to me it’s more natural, clearer, and feels like more movement—more alive, where the Philips feels flatter, a little dull. Less so when streaming though. Also, I was streaming with the Music program rather than the General program.
The HiFi Music program in the Philips basically has all the massaging and manipulating of sound turned off. And given my limited experience with it so far, it makes me wonder if this might actually be the best option for me. Today, while streaming music, I made espresso (so machine noise), turned on the water faucet in the sink and simultaneously the garbage disposal. I not only distinctly heard all of these sounds simultaneously, the combination didn’t send me running for the hills. Often, with this many different sounds coming at me at once that’s what it feels like—they’re coming “at” me, a barrage. It can make me tense, perspire and if the cacophony continues—irritable. Continuing to listen to the music as I was setting up things on my phone and doing some other work, I also noticed I was hearing a lot of distinct sounds in the instrumentals. Mostly it was piano music I was listening to. Unless this is some sort of distortion, I think a couple of the pieces were sloppily recorded because I was hearing little scratches at times as if someone was rustling paper in the background or moving around furniture. I was listening on Spotify, if that makes any difference. There are so many musicians on this forum, I don’t know if this was my brain mistaking some sound that was actually part of the music or what.
Sound distortion is another issue I’m experiencing at times. Sitting in the living room last night, the window across the room was open. I was hearing high pitch sounds and asked my spouse if she heard birds. First she said no, then yes. This sound would have been coming from at least 50 feet away, probably more. It didn’t sound like birds to me, I just guessed maybe that’s what it was. She said it sounds beautiful. To me it sounded like elongated shrills—visually I saw it as a tiny floating wavy string slowly being stretched out. So I can hear faint, high pitches but not always the way they sound to others and I may not be able to identify what it is. Not sure if that can be fixed by the aid or that part is my brain’s work to do itself. I also wonder if musicians have more issues with how sounds sound like those @fbacher1 brings up. Seems reasonable that they would, having been so attentive to sound quality for so long.
So far battery life is good—but I’m not real hard on them either—don’t stream many hours a day, for instance. The charger works well. I’m keeping my old 312 battery Oticons though as backup and in case I’m ever in any of those situations some here have made me aware of where needing a charger could be a problem.
The Costco fitter I worked with on my second trip is inquisitive and willing to experiment. He was thrilled to be working with an experienced hearing aid wearer who pays attention to nuance and knows enough about hearing and hearing aids to be able to report my experiences fairly precisely and talk things through with him. I don’t know enough yet though—as you see from some of my questions, but I’m so happy to know I’m going to be working with this guy going forward. I even showed him an audiogram I had done earlier this year because there were some differences that I figured were significant from the one Costco did and he was open to seeing it. In the highest frequencies, the Costco audiogram shows my loss 10 dBs higher than a prior audio gram done this year and as some have said on this forum when I asked—that’s enough to make a real difference if aids are fitted 10 dBs off of my real need (whether higher or lower). So I’m going to bring that up with him next time. I think the prior audiogram more closely reflects my hearing in those frequencies (so the current settings in those frequencies may be too high).
Anyone else with observations/experiences with the Philips 9030, please post them here. I find it very helpful to have this all in one thread.
Ridiculous to need to do this much work to get devices to work well for us.