I went to my Audiologist last week for my last check up with my minirite, she told me about the problem with getting the Zpower batteries and the lack of chargers. As a result Oticon has offered a program where you can get the newest version of the minirite if I bring back both 3 year old hearing aides with the charger for $460.00. Warranty would be for one year, renewable each year for same amount. This really is a great deal. Audiologist said some manufactures are not doing anything like this for Zpower battery users.
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That really is a decent deal. Though, in a way it still seems steep considering they sold a faulty product. It would be nice to have a no cost option, like maybe free for non rechargeable battery powered OPN 1 or pay the $460 for the newer rechargeable aid.
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Or you could use $460 to buy disposable batteries at Costco. $460 would buy you approximately 2500 batteries. Figuring 2 batteries every 4 days, that would power your aids for about 5000 days. 5000 days is about 13.7 years.
Not a hard decision for me but, to each, his own.
460 to get the difference between the OPN and the OPNS is a good deal in my book. For me the difference was the difference between not understanding speech to understanding speech almost 100% of the time.
From what I can tell, the OPN and the OPN S offers the same amount of noise reduction to help improve speech clarity. The only main difference between them is the new feedback prevention technology on the S, and it’d only make a big difference if you have lots of feedback issues if you’re on the original OPN. If feedback is not an issue for you, then the OPN S does not offer much advantage over the OPN, especially on the speech clarity front.
But if you just pay the $460 with the OPN trade-in to upgrade to the OPN S R with warranty for an additional year, then after that you keep the OPN S R forever, even if you choose not to keep paying an additional $460 each year to extend the warranty yearly, that is still a very good deal because you’re essential getting a brand new pair of hearing aids that hopefully will last longer than your already out-of-warranty 3-year-old OPN.
This is what I remember too. @cvkemp was dealing with feedback issues and not enough gain to hear well if I remember correctly with his OPN aids. The S aids enabled him to get stronger receivers and a better feedback system that turned out to really help his speech understanding. Win win with the S aids for him.
But the original was just out of the warranty period, Audiologist would extent office visits and repairs for one year for $425.00, which is not bad! This is good for both of use, as repair parts are not available to her, but she has good supply. I really think Oticon is really a good company, as they had some initial problems 3 years ago and Z power clamed it was their fault as the battery door had been misdesigned by them. They changed the door and provided new Z power batteries. So I am sticking with them as they have changed my life. Thank you for your response.