The nice thing about this forum is you can just move on
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Iāve reread this thread a couple of times, and I honestly donāt perceive any serious attacks. Iām not siding with anyone - Iām posting this to ask you to please just reconsider your interpretation of what was said, bearing in mind Rickās (@Raudrive) comments:
Just donāt throw the baby out with the bath water, is all.
As Red Green would say : āKeep your stick on the ice - weāre all in this together!ā
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My first experience of Costco and the world of private HAs (UK and fitted with NHS Starkeyās and Phonak). Zero discussion of brands, plenty of discussion about my lifestyle, needs and expectations. In fact, I was the one asking for KS10s. Had I not mentioned it, I think it wouldāve been a very open conversation between us about what was the best solution based on a bunch of factors.
Equally, I was informed about accessories for the HAs but zero pressure to buy them. YMMV of course, but major shout out for Costco Glasgow here in Scotland.
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When I said lack of choice I meant for a particular hearing loss. So I stand corrected on that. But I still contend that they are limited as far as selection for a particular type of loss. Iām also not a big fan of testing with a one hour walk around the store. It tells me nothing other than everything is louder. Now if I lived in a Costco storeā¦ Itās a new day boys and girls. Let the fighting commence
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I will point out that costco has a 180 day return, whereas the privates tend to be 30-45. And the private one I went to didnāt ask for the entire cost up front, but what they did ask for was almost what costco costs full price, so basically the sameā¦
I guess the deal is good HAs at good prices but with conditions. Superlative HAs with less conditions probably have a superlative price tag. As they say in cycling: cheap, light, durable. You have any two but not a full houseā¦
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I canāt readily agree with your synopsis, Gareth.
I got my Oticon More HAs from an excellent private audiologist. Iām extremely happy with my audiologist, but to call him āsuperlativeā is too big a stretch for me. Similarly, my More1s are a Goldilocks fit for me. They have had a huge impact on my quality of life because they were appropriately prescribed and very well fitted - but not because Oticon More hearing instruments are āsuperlativeā. They just suit me, my loss, and my lifestyle very well.
[I will agree, however, that their cost is āsuperā high compared to Costco.]
Going through a private audiologist has imposed more, and not fewer constraints/ conditions:
- 90 vs 180 day exchange period
- No vendorās leverage with Oticon because of high sales volume
- Tendency to encounter more āquibblingā from front-of-house staff when reporting defects (however my audiologist has never pushed back against my complaints, and he instantly takes them up with Oticon). I attribute this to a smaller clinicās margin vulnerability.
So (and Iām not trying to pick you apart - Iām just adjusting perspective) āsuperlativeā is not an apt descriptor for my private audiologist experience.
Here are the adjectives that Iād choose, instead:
- personalized
- committed
- responsive to individual needs
I realize that āsuperlativeā may simply be a word that means ābetter than mostā in UK idiomatic usage, as opposed to its hyperbolic connotation in North America. Iām reacting to its use in this instance because itās absolute.
Iāve learned that there are few absolutes when it comes to hearing devices: it all boils down to whatās best for me.
Keep in mind that a lot of states have established refund periods although Costco has extended that. More power to them. I have never paid for hearing aids in advance. Thatās obviously an individuals policy and not a set policy overall. I am currently waiting for for a new pair of phonak naida paradise Up. My trial period with them was almost a month. Prior to that I was allowed to trial oticon and resound aids for 2 weeks each. O charge. Am I paying more. Sure. But Iām dealing one to one with a certified audiologist who will get me in almost immediately if thereās a problem and will provide me with a loaner if my aid malfunctions. I have a profound loss so I need someone whoās a little more qualified than a fitter. I also need an aid that functions in areas other than just amplification. None of this is a knock on Costco. But I know that Costco doesnāt provide the service or the variety of aids that I need to try to find what works for meā¦ This is why this forum is here. There are 8 million stories in the naked city. No two hearing losses are the same
LOL! Naked City, watch out! Ok ok itās true, Iām coming clean on this, itās just the chunky bits that I find hard to swallow!
Oh MY! 
! I should have known that Iād get as good as I gave, but THIS??? 
Youāre waxing descriptive tonight, but Iāll resist the temptation to follow you down Aliceās sinuous ear hole! āTāis a sticky wicket youāve opened up here!ā as our friend @kevels55 would say.
Best I stop here, lest I flush out any more stomach-curdling observations from you before I have my supper! Stracciatella soup it will NOT be!
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I was kinda happy when I saw the Naked City reference - great old B&W TV show.
But in only 2 postsā¦
My 2 cents.
I went to Costco for the first time this year. The main attraction was the more reasonable price. I was thinking of the Kirkland branded haās but the audi suggested the Philips because I wanted something that was good for music (I play in a band). Philips are made by Oticon and they have a good reputation for handling music. Especially considering the price, they are pretty good and they do handle music pretty well. Overall, happy with Costco, the Audi and the HAās.
Not sure if this is an assumption by Chrshea2, or if a Costco HIS or audi gave this impression, but itās not true that Philips are made by Oticon.
William Demant has 3 hearing aid companies under it, Oticon, Bernafon, and Sonic. Philips is not part of the William Demant group per se, nor was it a long-time HA mfg, although itās a giant company making many other products. It only recently licensed the HA technologies from William Demant and started making the HearLink HAs that Costco is selling.
Costco started selling the original Philips HearLink last year, and it was basically a rebranded version of the Sonic Enchant.
This year, Costco started selling the next generation Philips HearLink 9030. It doesnāt seem like itās a rebranded version of the latest generation Sonic Radiant, because the Philips 9030 has this AI DNN that cleans up speech in noise better, but the Sonic Radiant doesnāt have it.
BUT, this Philips 9030 DNN is NOT the same as the Oticon More DNN. The Philips 9030 DNN is more narrowly focused on removing noise from speech, while the Oticon More DNN is more broadly focused on capturing the whole sound scene and rebalancing it to the usersā preference.
Plus, the Oticon More continues with the āopenā paradigm that it started with the OPN and OPN S, while the Philips 9030 does NOT follow the āopenā paradigm. It still follows the traditional beam forming approach to block noise out and focus and clarify speech primarily.
Thatās not to say that the Philips 9030 is not a good HA. Itās very good at what it does. But I keep seeing this tendency to implicate that the Philips HAs are the same as the Oticon HAs, and a lot of this seems to be driven by the Costco HCPs themselves, to the point of oftentimes misleading the users to believe that theyāre something theyāre not (Oticon-like HAs). So I want to clarify here to avoid incorrect assumptions.
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This is not quite the case. The attached industry map was created by @AbramBaileyAuD, and appears in the main site, where HearingTracker has published guides and comparisons for all the major brands.
Your statement is off the mark because - although Phillips is owned by the same parent corporation (Demant) - the brand only shares a small fraction of Oticonās technology, and has a very different design philosophy than hearing aids bearing the Oticon brand. Thereās no mistaking that Phillips and Oticon are different, just by comparing their price tags.
Donāt get me wrong, the Phillips 9030 is, indeed, a capable hearing aid thatās giving excellent performance to many users, and costs thousands of dollars less than Oticon More (Oticonās current flagship), but itās not āmade by Oticonā. If you were led to believe this by the Costco HIS, then you were misled.
/f/45415/6830x4152/7953efdf25/hearing_technology_industry_map-large-low-res.jpg)
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Ha, yes language and I guess analogy sometimes doesnāt travel well. I guess going Indy is, as you note, a much more tailored experience. I think thatās what I was trying to get at.
Good to hear you were able to get what you needed.
@chrshea2: Iām doubling back on what @Volusiano has said, because Oticonās āOpenSoundConceptā, which is now about two decades old, offers a very different experience to the hearing aid user than the brands (ie. most) that rely on traditional beamforming to zero in on the source of speech to the exclusion of many other sounds. While the beamforming approach can definitely deliver good speech-in-noise comprehension, it does so by having the prosthetic device perform most of the filtering and speech prioritization āheavy liftingā, as opposed to relying on brain learning to perform those tasks.
The OpenSound concept, on the other hand, assumes that the brain is still capable of decoding and interpreting correctly even the corrupted neural signals being sent to it by damaged ears. It relies heavily on the brainās āneural plasticityā and ability to learn how to accommodate less-than-perfect auditory input. This places a much greater workload on the user, and also probably lengthens the learning curve for achieving optimum performance of the aids (although Iāve seen no white papers or other research to support this statement). Many hearing aid users find this experience to be overwhelming: they become lost in a deluge of peripheral sounds that their beamforming-habituated brains are neither able nor willing to sort out. And that is perfectly fine, if thatās the kind of performance that you want and expect from your hearing instruments.
Others (and I count myself as one of these) need and want to hear all the sounds that are being produced all about me, in a 360 degree arc. This is not the case for everyone. In order to achieve this more-inclusive soundscape, I am (as are others like member @cvkemp) willing to invest considerable time and effort into learning how to adopt this technology and get the most out of it. Think of us as the ones in the cycling community to opt to learn how to ride unicycles 
.
To allow the myth to propagate that āPhillips are like Oticonsā is to create a bunch of misplaced expectations that do nothing but create a large number of dissatisfied users, both on the Phillips side, and on the Oticon side of the equation. Thatās the spirit in which Iāve piped up to offer my rebuttal. Itās not to split hairs, or to show somebody to be wrong.
This is completely incorrect. Philips is not a company thatās owned by Demant. Itās simply a brand name that Demant licensed to place on their products. Itās the same thing apparel and clothing companies do when they license national football team names. And lower pricing does not necessarily mean youāre getting less functionality or quality.
Iām afraid youāre the one thatās been misled, especially by @Volusiano who fancies himself an expert on Demant hearing aids even though heās never worked at Demant or associated with anyone who has. His knowledge (which consists mainly of his own opinion) comes entirely from reading and self-interpreting Demantās various marketing white papers. He has no inside research and development or engineering expertise whatsoever.
Demant has made great efforts to distinguish their lines of hearing aids so they appear to be very different, but in reality theyāre much more similar than you can imagine.
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Funny- Volusiano is in fact, an electrical engineer. What, may I ask, are your credentials?
You seem to be of the opinion that @SpudGunner is misled and @Volusiano has pulled his opinions out of his own fertile imagination.
At least that is my interpretation of YOUR post.
Fine and good but if I (and others) are not to believe them (scurilous little rapscallions that they are), could you please enlighten us? Who does make the damn things, what in tarnation are the exact differences, and how, for the love of Mary, should I make an INFORMED choice.
Thank you
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