Hi All - My wife has been using BTE type hearing aids for a few years now ( PhonakAudeo) and is pretty satisfied with them - however - she has long hair and plays racket sports and because of her hair getting tangled up etc. now wants to look at ITC types. I thought I would start here regarding recco’s - she’s not asking for anything fancy - she’s 50/50 on BT to her iPhone etc and she;s pretty much a set-n-forget kind of person - so fancy options not that important - she’s just tired of the tangled in hair stuff.- so discreet and ITC seems to be her biggest priorities.
@Craig_L I’m not sure what type if info you are looking for. I did the opposite of what she is thinking - I wore ITC for 6 years and switched to RIC over a year ago. Personally I prefer the RIC by far.
My main reason for getting ITC in the first place was I was hoping they would be more discrete. My ITC were small enough that they had no buttons (and no bluetooth connectivity). What this meant was that if I wanted to change the program, volume, etc I needed a secondary device, which was annoying because I didn’t want to have to carry another device around and keep it charged - which meant in practice I had no choice but to put them in and forget them, I usually couldn’t change anything. So when I went to replace them, I was hoping to be able to connect to my phone. What I discovered was that the antennas were pretty noticeable on the couple that I looked at (at least one company knew it was an issue and was working on it, so maybe they are better now). The alternative was to add buttons to the HA itself to change program, volume, etc, but I also found then that the buttons made the HA more noticeable. I was going to settle for this (I’m not as concerned as I was about being discrete now that I am used to it) but my audi convinced me to try the ric, and because of the way I wear my hair they are actually less noticeable than the ITC.
I’m not sure how severe your wife’s loss is, but mine is mild/moderate. The ITC aids completely block your ears (obviously ) so to me they didn’t sound natural at all, and in some situations I found it made my difficulties worse. With the RIC I use domes and feel like my HAs are ‘aiding’ my hearing vs. replacing it. I also could not get rid of the feeling of occlusion no matter how they were adjusted.
Sorry - I know this likely is not helpful, its hard to know how they will feel until you get them. I just know that I won’t go back
Hi Chirp … Thanks for the info on your experience with ITC’s. I also passed the DeafMetal info on to my wife - she checked it out and has a set on order… I’ll let you know how they work out. If it’s a good sollution, it’s way better than spending more $$$ on something she might not like.
Hope you are well.
So it’s been a while - and my wife seems pretty used to the Deaf Metal clips … and the good news is that although it took her a bit to get used to putting them on - it seems to be doing the trick!
Thanks Craig, thats good to hear. I really like the fact that the Deaf Metal looks like jewelry vs. something cheap to hold your HA I will have to try it out myself!
) so to me they didn’t sound natural at all, and in some situations I found it made my difficulties worse. With the RIC I use domes and feel like my HAs are ‘aiding’ my hearing vs. replacing it. I also could not get rid of the feeling of occlusion no matter how they were adjusted.