Hi Edma, After reading through most of these posts and your questions/responses, I just want to say that you are really on top of this, you clearly know what you are doing and what questions to ask. It is nice to have the experience in this group to draw upon. I have been told that I am a potential candidate for CI, but for me it would be the last resort and my situation would have to get quite a bit worse to convince myself to go that way.
I love that you have done/do DIY programming. I think this is the best way to get past the fact that many audiologist don’t seem to be good at programming, or maybe said a better way, good programming requires tweaking and that is hard to do (inconvenient, time consuming) even with the best audis. I have had one good Audi and now she isn’t available. The others have been pretty bad. I need to learn DIY, so I am not at the mercy of other peoples skill level.
Anyway, I want to tell you that from your writing here, I think you are very capable of evaluating the best move for you. Gather the facts from the audis and the excellent experience and advice here. Believe your instincts because I am confident they are very good. Best of Luck!
Thanks @pageskipro Audi did not recommend CI when I was recently evaluated (and that is what I expected). My single word accuracy is quite poor yet for 1 on 1 in fairly quiet environment or for Zoom when I have visual and other cues I do quite well. I am auditioning different HAs (Oticon and Philips) and it is a mixed bag of some improvement over current KS10s but worse as well.
I agree that DIY to make small tweaks to settings and evaluate them over time is best route to optimizing HAs, and most audis don’t have the time to invest in that for a client. I wish you clarity with your own hearing decision making.
A preview of my longer eventual write up for forum on Oticon: Initially they were setup with receivers that are one level less powerful than the highest receivers. This ended up smearing a lot of speech (especially female voice) and audi concluded from my description that receivers were distorting/peaking. Replacing with the highest power receivers has eliminated most but not all of that distortion/smearing.