Got my Marvels yesterday afternoon.
My audi seemed just as excited as I was. As he was working through the software, he kept saying things like “wow! Look at that!”, and “Oh, that’s neat!” He’s a Starkey guy, and at one point he said that these were better than Starkey, but then caught himself and walked it back. 
They came in two cases, one for each aid, which was interesting. Each case with a brush in the lid. I can see now what @Neville was saying about the wax guards. The wheel is kind of difficult to turn. Fortunately, I’m assuming this won’t be needed very often. They also came with two sticky backed wire holders. He had no idea what they were for, but gave them to me anyway. I said maybe your supposed to hang the aids on the wall at night. He said to display them over the mantle. 
He seemed really fascinated with the domes:
He gave me a set of smaller and larger domes just in case.
I’ve already removed the concha locks, they weren’t really working out, and the right one kept popping out of my ear. I’m assuming I’m going to need molds, but I wanted to give these a chance.
Bluetooth pairing was not entirely intuitive, but worked out okay. I did a standard bluetooth pairing procedure with the right aid, which worked perfectly. Then opened the app, and went into pairing mode and nothing happened. Then we opened and closed the battery, and that did the trick. There’s not a whole lot to the app. You can select programs, but for now all I have is Autosense, and you can adjust the volume. There is an option to adjust the volume for each aid individually, so you could turn one all the way up and the other all the way down.
My wife went out to the lobby and called me. I could hear her just fine, and she said she could hear me better than she could with the Siemens.
Then he told me to play some music. When I started my music app I kind of jumped and said “Ooh! That sounds horrible!” He was very disappointed to hear that. We didn’t have much time, but he wanted me to play with the equalizer in my music app, and he is going to do some research to see if we can improve that. It sounded like a 70’s transistor radio.
My wife and I then went to Walmart. She went over to the clothing department and I went to hardware. When she was ready to meet me she called me. On my end she was breaking up a lot, but I think that was the reception inside the store. She said she was surprised how much background noise she could hear. That doesn’t really surprise me, considering the microphones are now in my ears rather than under my shirt. But she did say that she could hear me fine.
The true test will come when I go back to work tomorrow. I work in a very noisy environment, surrounded by hundreds of machines with cooling fans in them, so I’m interested to see how the noise suppression works. I will be calling her at lunch break (quiet place), and then during my drive home. I am interested in how the phone call will go with the road noise.
In normal usage the aids seem fine. My wife is currently listening to The Logical Song by Supertramp through her phone’s speaker and I’m actually a little surprised at how well it sounds. We listened to Trans Siberian Orchestra on CD in the car last night, and while I don’t have @Mark_Chambers ear for music, I enjoyed how it sounded. I had trouble hearing the cashier at Whole Foods, but that may have been selective hearing.
I was getting notifications from my phone in my ears, and what a huge difference from the Siemens! With the Siemens, when I got a notification, they would beep four times to let me know they were in bluetooth mode, play the notification (which in many cases was already over, so there would be silence), then beep once to say it was in normal mode. That got so annoying that I turned off the media streaming. If I wanted to play music I would turn the streaming back on, then turn it off when I was done. I eventually got a smart watch and get my notifications that way.
With the Marvels, I suddenly notice a subtle mute to the world around me, hear the notification, then the real world gently turns back up again. There’s no shock factor to it, no annoying beeps, and the outside volume remains at a level where the notification doesn’t really interfere with whatever is going on. I like getting my notifications on my watch, but this was so pleasant that I’m tempted to leave it on.
Things sound a little brighter than they did before, but as far as I can tell everything sounds “normal.” My own voice is the biggest difference actually, probably because of those domes versus my old molds.
My wires are too long. He said he feels like Phonak’s wires run on the long side and will order me a new set. Once I decide If I’m keeping the aids, he’ll change them to black for me.
He implied that these cost more than the Starkey Muse that I trialed, but said he wasn’t going to charge me any more because this is a fantastic learning experience for him. I feel hearing aid pricing is a lot of flim flam anyway, like buying a car, so whatever.
Right now I’m mostly pleased. I’ll report more once I’ve worn them at work for a while.
