Resound Preza from Costco

And I picked up my full molds yesterday. Nice and small for full molds, and silicon soft, love them.

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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.

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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!!

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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.

You may know this but I believe the charger is included in the per unit price of the Phillips HearLink. I find it incredible that a company would price their rechargeable hearing aids to not include the charger. Kind of like selling a car with no gas tank or battery. And, $270 for a charger is ridiculous. USB chargers are under $10 everywhere. In Canada at Costco you could buy nearly 1200 batteries for $270. That is about 9 years worth of batteries.

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That’s useful info–expensive, but not as bad as I was expecting. I plan to get the Preza when I get back from vacation (I live in BC). Can you tell me, does the app have a “Music” program setting, like the Quattro? I can’t find any info on this. Thanks

I don’t see a “music setting” per se in mine. But it does have a lot of personal settings that you can make, the tv/music program has a bass - mid - treble equalizer that lets you adjust all. Just watching tv my wife loves that I can adjust the aids to what I like and can keep the tv volume low enough that she’s yelling make the tv louder. Oh and you can save any changes you make as custom programs

Thanks for your input. The EQ sounds useful and may help. But I understand the Music setting on the Quattro flattens the frequency response that is normally shaped to boost those narrow specific speech bands. I do a bit of music production and that was one of the key features I was hoped the Preza would preserve.

Then I would suggest checking carefully before buying. I’m just an average guy not using special types of features. Being a total techie I do like playing with my tech toys, but other than the coolness of them I don’t get into the specifics that much. Too much specific overload at work building servers over the internet. Toys are for playing with

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If you go to the ReSound site for the Preza and look at the Smart 3D app brochure available under the Downloads tab, it shows a screenshot, presumably for a Preza, with a music program included on the program bar in the smartphone app, same as for the Quattro’s. http://future-resound.com/

Whatever HA you get, it’s a good idea to read/skim the user guide ahead of time and advise your provider what programs you want set up in the HA’s. The programs added to the HA may vary depending upon how the provider has their default fitting scheme adjusted in the fitting software. I recall at least one previous Quattro user whose provider had just installed the All-Around program and not much more to get the user started. It is hard to find in the Costco ReSound Preza literature any specific mention of the music program but an easy way to solve this is just to call your local Costco’s hearing aid center and ask - or visit that store area the next time you’re shopping at Costco (the HA center’s hours are more limited than the overall Costco store hours).

Thanks, Jim. Believe it or not I had skimmed though most of the material on that link but missed that image…duh! But that’s encouraging. On the US Costco website, there are a bunch of self-help videos on the Preza and the one on changing programs does NOT have the Music one. For sure, I have a Costco appointment in September, so I’ll grill them on that. Maybe it’s a paid-for upgrade. It would be helpful if HA companies listed every feature explicitly and in detail, like when you buy any complex technology such as a mirrorless camera, but they are vague in a lot of areas - intentionally I think. Sometimes makes comparisons difficult.

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You sound like me, a born tinkerer!

For the Quattro, the Music program is just a free option in the fitting software program and I naively presume that it’s the same for the Preza. No HA OEM would get very far charging for a music program. Since the Music program sounds different and usually does not aid speech recognition, I can see why a provider might want to leave it off initially especially for an older person just starting out with HA’s during a trial period where if they accidentally got switched into the Music program, the user might wonder why speech sounds different, not as good as it used to be, etc. Button presses of the wrong length can change programs instead of volume, etc.

That makes sense. I’ll update this thread once I find out for sure, should anyone have a similar question. Cheers.

If I knew how to upload screenshots from my iPhone to here I would do so from the app. But this is what I get …

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