I would go the online route through buyhear.com to get the OPN1 for $3,800 and keep the Alta Pro as a back up pair if I were you, Nibbles. Once you’re all settled in with the OPN, you can sell the Alta Pro on eBay. Or you can ask BuyHear if they take trade-ins. They’re listing Alta Pro Ti on their site for $3800, so maybe they can give you half of that price for your used pair.
Hi again Volusiano,
Is it fairly easy to get the opn 1 programed through buy.hear?
When was the opn1 available, do you know?
I have said for two years that the alta pro was shriek-y and only now was offered the opn1 after I related that I HATED the alta pros… I asked the audi…is this the best we can do?
I live 230 miles from a Costco…so you can see I’m pretty remotely located. I was considering trying their Sig. 7.
I can’t believe $5000.00 for opn1 and turn the old ones in. Now I have trust issues with my audi.
I use the Alta Pro’s. No matter which path you choose I would give some thought to the efficacy of your audiologist. I am considering the Opn’s. My brain’s resiliency is the question for me. I guess a trial of some kind in unavoidable and reasonable since I am totally out of pocket on this. It will be an interesting experiment.
The nice thing about the OPN is that it’s supposed to have very simple programming. In fact, Oticon say that you only need 1 default program for the OPN, although they do have options for up to 3 or 4 settings if you want (for the Opn1 at least, the Opn2 and 3 may have less setting options). So there’s good chance that after the initial programming by BuyHear.com before they mail you the HAs, you’d be happy with it and don’t need any further programming. I’m sure you’ll have to try out different domes, etc, but I think they’ll send you enough dome samples to try out. In fact, they claim that only 2 out of 10 of their clients need further programming after the initial one. But in case you do, I think they mail you the programming kit to your home, then set up a phone call/internet session with you where they will do the programming online via the internet for you.
If you read through some of the posts on this forum, you’ll find some people very happy with buying the OPN from BuyHear. There are some that didn’t need further adjustment after the initial programming. And there are a few that needed further adjustments and they had positive experience with this remote programming model.
If you live 230 miles from Costco then I don’t think buying from Costco would be a viable option for you. They don’t carry the Oticon OPN anyway.
The Opn1 was available in the late summer early fall of 2016, I think. Back then it was just a single top of the line model. Very recently now they came out with the 3 levels like you know. So you shouldn’t hate your audi for not introducing the OPN to you sooner because it’s only available recently in the last few months. But $5K with the Alta Pro trade in is not a good deal. I’d rather keep it for backup or sell it on eBay myself. I always keep at least one pair of backup HAs in case I lose my current pair or have to send it in for repair. Most audis charge around $6K for a pair of Opn1 new. But some audis may go as low as around $4K. If you check out audiologywny.com for example, they’re a local dispenser (not online) in west New York, and they advertise the Opn1 online for around $4K. My audi, after all said and done between my co-pay and my insurance payment, was compensated around $4K for my pair of Opn1 as well. So you can maybe float the audiologywny.com pricing (local) and buyhear.com pricing (online) to your audi to see if he would budge on the price.
If your Alta Pro has been shrieky for 2 years due to feedback and your audi wasn’t able to resolve this issue then maybe it’s time to consider a new audi. The OPN has very good feedback control by the way. I wear headphones at work all day and feedback is not an issue for me. You’d have to wear the right dome and all, though. If you have very strong amplification and insist on wearing open domes then no aids can contain the feedback for you. Not saying that you do this though, just an example.
Thank you so much. You have given me a lot to think about.
I will wait until my first pair comes back from Oticon and then compare.
From everything I have read, people with a lot of HA experience are very pleased with the open s.
Is their technology the best for speech? Are they advanced from other brands?
The opn1 s I am wearing are amazing…like hearing before hearing loss…forget I have them on…
Thanks for your opinions…
FYI Hearing Care Solutions is selling the Opn for rock bottom prices WITH an audiologist fitting in your area. Here’s what they quoted me:
$1995 each for Opn 1
$1750 each for Opn 2
$1400 each for Opn 3
This compares favorably to Buyhear.com since you get fitted and adjustments by a local audiologist for a couple hundred bucks more (they have them all over the country) plus a 3 year warranty
The drawback with HCS is the limited local support. After that you are going to pay for adjustments. Buy Hear is said to continue making future adjustments. Beyond price is the full support which is expensive except with Costco who limits the selection somewhat.
I think maybe with BuyHear.com during your 60 days trial the remote adjustment is free, but maybe after that if you need further adjustment, I heard somebody said you pay them $50 to ship the programming equipment to your house for further adjustment? That’s still worth it compared to the time and effort it takes to drive to a local appointment.
But I do like the HCS model a lot as well since you get a local audi for a couple of hundred bucks more. If you live in a major metropolitan area, availability of a nearby audi is probably pretty good. Thanks for sharing this, Erica.
I do think that the OPN technology is best for speech because they do actually remove the noise from the speech every 10ms interval (or 100 times per second). The older technology using directional noise reduction is more like removing the sounds around you to let you focus on the sound in front of you. But the speech sound in front of you is still polluted with the noise. It’s up to you to make sense of this noise polluted speech in front of you.
This is one key way the OPN is different from the traditional HAs, and this is why I consider it more advanced.
I needed further adjustments from BuyHear after my 60 day trial. I had already sent them the programming kit back. They did not charge me for the additional programming nor the shipping for the kit again.
Nice! I assume that you paid for the postage to send the kit back to them, but that’s perfectly reasonable I would think. Was this further adjustment because of a warranty-related issue you ran into, or just adjustment due to your personal preference change of mind? Just trying to understand if they didn’t charge you maybe because it’s warranty related or not.
By the way, did you get your OPNs back from them for the warranty repair of the static noise while streaming issue yet? Just curious how that went and whether they’ve been able to determine what went wrong.
The additional adjustment was due to preference. They also sent me a return shipping label actually. I think they didn’t charge me because this still was fairly close to the end of my 60 day trial at the time. I haven’t sent my OPNs back yet. They didn’t have the Resound demos that they thought they did. So I’m actually waiting for a demo pair of the OPNs today so I can ship back mine for repair.
Yes…I have always disliked them…but it they were my first pair…had no idea what to expect.
Wow…thanks…
Thank you again…
I’ve been testing several new devices lately (ReSound and Oticon) and have settled on Oticon OPN. I tried the OPN 3’s for a week and just picked up the OPN 1’s and will demo them for next week. My Audi is local and has great service and quoted me ~$3200 for the OPN 3’s and ~$4600 for the OPN 1’s which backed by their service after the sale and seems like a fair price.
As a data point, I was previously quoted a firm “take it or leave it” price of $6995 by a biggest and most well known local Audiologist so in that context I guess saving ~$2400 by shopping around was worth the extra time and effort.
Thought’s?
Key is that you think “My Audi is local and has great service”
I hope you will share your opinion between the OPN 3 and the OPN 1 after you’ve had a chance to try them out both. There haven’t been enough people on this forum who’ve had a chance to try them out both, so your input will be greatly valued here for sure.
As for $4600, I think it’s a fair price as long as you’re happy with your audi’s services.
I like the service they provide but appears he may still be mastering the Oticon OPN programming and how to optimize their capabilities.
Initial feedback OPN 1 vs OPN 3 is (as you suggested) more defined and I’m hearing sounds like the refrigerator running and a wall clock ticking across the room that I was oblivious to before. Speech recognition has improve to the point where I have my TV turned down to level 7 or 8 vs previously keeping it around level 20. Also noise from adjoining rooms and activity within the house are more pronounced and dare I say annoying since I work from a home office.
I also have 4 programs set up (normal, restaurant, quiet setting, music) and find them all useful and will be putting the restaurant setting to the test this weekend.
On the down side I’m using power domes and still getting what I feel is too much feedback especially out of the right hear and when connected stream music I find a small amount of clicking from the right device that comes and goes regardless of volume or music being played. I think that’s in the BT connection. I’ll see if my Audi can tweaked these a little more to help dial them in better.
I think while the Genie 2 software does allow a lot of fine-tuning, the programming should be fairly simple and Oticon actually can just work for all situations out of 1 default program only, because it’s supposed to have the smart to transition between simple and complex environments and auto-adjust the settings to adapt to the various listening environments automatically. I’m surprised that you have 4 programs set up for it. I assume that if your audi knows how to set up 4 different programs on the OPN, they’re probably not a novice at it anymore.
I actually have 3 (default, noisy environment, and directional), but that’s only to see if they are of any further help or not, and most of the times I can’t notice much differences. So now I just stick with my default program 100% of the time.
By the way, I thought that the Opn3 can only support 1 program (they call it configuration). So I assume that the 4 programs you have is only possible on the Opn1.
The improvements you described sound great. But can you clarify whether these are improvements of the OPN1 over the OPN3 specifically, or these are just improvements between either of the OPN (1 or 3) compared to your old HAs overall. For example, when you said you can watch the TV turned down to 7 or 8 instead of 20, are you saying that with the Opn1 you only need volume 7 or 8 and with the Opn3 you need volume 20? Or are you saying that you need volume 20 with you old HAs, but 7 or 8 with either the Opn1 or Opn3?
What I’m looking for is whether you can tell any significant differences between the Opn3 and the Opn1 themselves, not between the Opn1 or 3 compared to your old HAs. And if you find the Opn1 better than the Opn3, in what ways is the Opn1 better?
On the clicking sound on your right HA, ask your audi if they have the new firmware (available late last year) installed already. It’s supposed to fix a lot of connection/streaming issues.
On the power dome still giving you too much feedback on the right ear, it may help if you can post your audiogram in your signature so at least we can tell what kind of hearing loss you have. I’m using the bass dome with a single vent hole and I don’t have any feedback issue. I think the power dome doesn’t have any vent hole, but if you’re using a dome size not big enough for your ear canal, then the seal may not be tight enough, resulting in feedback. I also assume that your audi already ran the feedback analyzer on your OPNs to set and turn on feedback control.