I am currently trialing the Oticon Intent and have a pair of generic domes fitted. Have been told my custom moulds have arrived and will have them fitted in 8 days on July 1st.
A thought occurred to me that I could drop by the audiologist office tomorrow (June 24th) to pick up the custom domes and just make the switch myself before getting real ear measurement etc on July 1st.
My thinking is that I can see if the custom moulds fit well (a constant challenge for me) saving another visit if I need to get another impression done on July 1st.
I know I won’t have a customized setup for the custom moulds for a week but figured the sound quality will likely be a tad better anyway with less leakage. Might be able to give better insights for July 1st check in appointment too.
Anything I’m missing? Good idea or not recommended?
While software changes need to be made, one might be able to get by for 8 days with suboptimal sound. Ask for a recever tool if you don’t have one and you can swap back to the receiver with domes if needed.
That’s what I was thinking. It’s a better fit but may be suboptimal programming (which may or may not be better than the real ear measured programming with the suboptimal generic domes)
I think you could possibly just pick up the custom molds to try wearing them ALL night long. That way, you won’t need to program them with the aids - just wear the MOLDS.
In fact, this is what I did when I was contemplating using my custom made soft acrylic molds on my aids. I’d had the molds just sitting in a box (having removed them a couple years ago). I wanted to see if they still caused an allergic reaction before having my audi swap the speakers into them.
Well. GOOD THING I tried wearing them for a night, cuz by GOLLY my ears were swollen and itchy the following morning. I could barely pull those suckers outta my ear canals. So I have to stick with the less-optimal silicone power domes for now.
This may not be the correct place to make this comment about molds but as a 15 year wearer of domes I am just trying custom molds. They fit well with no itching etc but I have to reduce the volume even more than the audi did after the first day remotely as everything is too loud. I also don’t like the sound of voices either. This is after a week so do you think that the sound will improve over time. They also do nothing for conversation over domes as at my age 84 I think that and aging auditory nerve may be the main factor in low word recognition and the added volume from molds does not help.
Maybe have your audi reduce the default (start-up) volume even more? If everything is too loud, you’ll get a blur of distortion, which makes speech comprehension worse.
I don’t think the aids will “improve” over time on their own, altho it’s possible that your brain + ear will begin to make more sense of the noise, but probably makes more sense to return to the audi and have noise lowered a bit.
I have been wearing aids for 20 years. I have either worn ITE aids are custom ear molds. I did have domes for about 3 months back when I first got my first set of MiniRite aids, I literally hated domes I told my audiologist to either get me custom ear molds or a set of ITE aids. I am 77 years old and I am doing great with my Oticon INTENT aids, I am enjoying music, and I enjoy being part of conversations again. I don’t have issues with speech in noise anymore.
My audiogram doesn’t come close to telling the truth about my hearing loss. My hearing loss is very complicated in that as my tone test says i have a severe hearing loss, my word recognition scores are in to profound hearing loss area. You see I have dead holes in my hearing that doesn’t show in a normal typical hearing tone test. But those holes causes me all sorts of issues understands speech.