Actually there are many materials, but unless one has behind the ear HA’s with a tube, you are kind of stuck with what the manufacturer provides as they have to make the molds to fit the receiver. Tubes are kind of universal. Here is a link to a company that makes for the tube type and for just hearing protection. This page describes the materials they have. I would have liked the medium grade silicone with the soft silicone tips, but Rexton does not provide that option. I just have the medium grade medical silicone. I don’t think the material is my problem, it is the impression method that is not giving me a good fit for both mouth open and closed. She told me to talk normally when the impression material was setting up. This next time I am going to ask her if I can keep my mouth open the whole time it is setting up.
Exactly.
Lloyd’s said the same thing when I asked them what I should do.
My high frequency profound and moderate low frequency losses drove me to soft silicone molds.
My experiment with the Audeo aids and my high frequency dead zones might enable me to try a smaller hard mold of some sort.
We’ll see.
My first molds came from Westone. They don’t make hearing aids, but specialize in ear molds of all kinds, including for hearing aids. They are world renowned for ear molds for musicians. If Costco can’t work around the molds because Resound has a hair up their where the sun don’t shine then I’ll have to reconsider my options. I have a 180!day trial via Costco with return full refund for any reason. I like these aids but they’re useless to me if I can’t get decent molds
Hi Neil, what made you choose Preza over updated KS? I am debating both right now myself
I have what I would say are hard silicone molds from ReSound and I’m very happy with them. No sensation that I’m wearing them and they stay put all day long, perhaps because my ear canals have slight undulations and the outer top of each mold has a slight protrusion perhaps designed to catch on the crus helicis arch just above each canal. No problems eating, talking, etc.
SayAgainPls, I asked for the KS and the fitter told me these Resound Preza would be much better for me. Now bear in mind that the people working Costco get no extra money, no commission, and it matters not what they sell or don’t sell. My HIS was excellent when I bought the KS6’s. They’ve been acting up of late and would have had to go in for repair. I spend a good part of the day on the phone doing tech support so can’t live without my aids, so decided to upgrade. Plus I had Phonak’s in the past that spent more time in repair than in my ears. I didn’t want to repeat that so an upgrade was in order. Phonak has me leery on repairs as they seemed to ignore the customer and sent them back too many times untouched, or so it seemed. These Preza’s are great so far. My wife is impressed that I can actually hear her and carry on a conversation with her which I haven’t been able to do in a while. I love the remote program on my iPhone X and also on my Apple Watch. I can control them from the Watch, love it. Being a techie, things like that tickle the cockles of my heart. But the amount of tweaking that you can do on them is fantastic … treble, bass and mid!! Noise reduction and voice enhancement. Adjustable Wind noise reduction on its own. Streaming from iPhone and iPad with no additional hardware. I do have the Phone Clip from my previous pair which I use with my office phone at work and leave in my office. And so far they have yielded to my Subaru radio when in the car letting everything work as desired … car speakers and car mic. No having to shut off Bluetooth on the phone to accomplish this as I had to do in the past when the car and phone fought over who was king.
From what I’m seeing on the web, Resound will make them from various materials. I’m surprised that they made them hard when my audi specified NOT hard. Now I have to wait on a second set of molds. I’m making due with my old molds which are dried out and cracked after many years of use. No amount of tweaking would stop the feedback on over the counter domes.
I’d tag your provider with the main responsibility. If you both agreed NOT HARD and the right box was checked when the impressions were sent off, the provider should have sent them back to ReSound immediately on receiving the wrong ones and said, “This won’t do!” rather than waste your time with what you did not want. Probably not worth trying to determine if the provider checked the right box sending them off but no excuse for accepting wrong thing, however that happened, from ReSound, IMHO.
My provider did check when they came in and sent them right back. He is quite good at what he does. I’d have no reason to suspect that he didn’t order them properly as he is quite good at his job. And he is not a newbie at his job either. My past experience is that the hearing aid manufacturers are not quite on top of things
Ok. So Preza with case & MultiMic is about $3k. The top Marvels are like $2300 per ear. So this mysterious August rumor about Marvel 2.0 update won’t be avail at Costco anyway… it’s all making sense now.
And I picked up my full molds yesterday. Nice and small for full molds, and silicon soft, love them.
My pleasure, Adam. When I am a happy customer I’ll give credit to those who made me happy and how they did so. When dissatisfied I’ll be sure to make that known so others can maybe avoid the same. Doing customer support/technical support I know that the reps like to be recognized when they do a great job … and can only be pushed to excel if not so by it being made known.
I guess you mean the Preza has those features disabled? So in other regards the Costco version is more or less the same, with all of the adaptive technology? I’m an amateur musician and read that the Quattro is popular in the music community as it can recognize music vs speech and automatically adjust things like frequency response and pick-up pattern. I’m hoping if I go with the Preza those types of features are preserved.
Thanks.
Maybe I don’t have the right settings but I have the Quattro 961’s - the premium rechargeable ones - and they don’t automatically switch between the general purpose hearing settings and music. I have to manually switch and there are a number of ways that I could do that - with a hearing aid button press, with remote functionality available through accessories like the Phone Clip+ or the Remote or by a program change in the Smart 3D phone app. The Music program changes from some of the features designed to aid speech recognition in a general purpose program like the All-Around program to be able to hear notes in a purer form.
Maybe there are other hearing aids that can reliably do this. I think there is a bit gray area of overlap between music, speech, and noise, e.g., where are you with RAP that has musical accompaniment or with HEAVY METAL (I’ve liked some heavy metal in my day but is that music or noise?).
If anyone knows if there is a way to have an automatic switch with the Quattro’s, let me know. I’d love to give it a try myself.
Hi Jim - thanks for the response.
I think I can live with doing that manually via the phone app. It’s a great feature to have. Just hoping Costco haven’t disabled things like the Music program option in the Preza version. It’s difficult to get specific information.
I’m mainly a folk guitar player and do a bit of home recording, so need half decent ears for both.
I went to costco in Canada last Saturday. The Preza for both ears is $3300 plus charger $270 while Philips hearlink is $3200. Are they the same price in USA costco?
Is that in CAD dollars? 3300 CAD = 2478.7615 USD
My pair, no charger as I went battery, purchased on 7/9/19 at Costco in Yorba Linda CA were $2,698 for the pair plus $39 USD each for two molds. So it sounds like you’ve got a good price
Oh, and Welcome to the forum!!
Thank you. It’s 3300 CAD for the pair. I thought that Preza is 2500 USD for the pair, which is the same price as Philips hearlink.