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For the curious - photos from breaking my old Phonak cShell with SDS 5.0 P receiver inside

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Edited

As in the title. I know that some users would be interested to see that. Red M SDS 6.0 receiver for comparison.

As was mentioned:

@user490 said:

Has anyone disassembled a cShell? Could it be rebuilt from a regular receiver for domes to reuse the titanium mold?

@tenkan said:

I’ve had a few broken ones over the years, obviously it’s not just the std receiver as such that you use for domes, it’s basically disassembled in the shell with the wire’s soldered, so it’s not like they just mold around the receiver or anything like that

P receiver for embedding in cShells
P SDS 5.0 for cShells vs. M SDS 6.0 receiver
20250330_231731(2)
20250330_231941(1)

20250330_232154(1)
20250330_232226(1)

4 people in this conversation2 min readJump to latest

Great pix, many thanks!

Does anybody know why these balanced armature drivers have 3 wires?

I opened up a ReSound receiver a while ago and it only had two wires. (Cat had chewed on it, Costco was nice enough to replace it for free :slight_smile: )

Edited

,

Phonak called and said you couldn’t have any more c-shells due to abusive behavior toward inanimate objects. They asked if I thought you were talking to it while you were dismantling it. I said probably, but you couldn’t hear anything it said.

Are you going to repair it?

In reply to @wtolkien

Phonak used to use two wires. One for the sound processor signal and one to complete the power loop. They changed to 3 wires around the Marvel chip intro. Two wires for the sound processor and one to the onboard memory for data storage. Three weak wires! Lots of failures.

Now Phonak uses 8 wires in the 6.0 receiver. It’s still two wires for the sound processing chip, 3 wires for the 2 microphones and their 2 extra ports and 3 wires for the data processing instructions for hearing aid function changes in real time. Much stronger, but more possible points of failure.

@Elderly said:

Two wires for the sound processor and one to the onboard memory for data storage.

Umm, sorry, but I don’t think that’s true. Phonak has no ID chip on their receivers. ReSound has, but it sits on the connector that attaches to the hearing aid.

The three wires all go to the balanced armature driver. I assume that’s what you call the sound processor?

In reply to @Bimodal_user

Interesting. For the titanium cShells, there must be some way a similar receiver is attached at the side and then that plastic square on the opposite side allows the wires to come out as shown here and snaps or glues into the cShell.

Phonak uses an entirely different approach from the uniric collar used by Hoerluchs. With a collar, the mold is in theory reusable indefinitely but the plastic collar may need to be replaced over time.

In reply to @Elderly

@Elderly said:

Phonak called and said you couldn’t have any more c-shells due to abusive behavior toward inanimate objects.

Now I have titaniums. They’re “a bit” harder to break :sweat_smile:

@Elderly said:

They asked if I thought you were talking to it while you were dismantling it. I said probably, but you couldn’t hear anything it said

:joy::sweat_smile:

@Elderly said:

Are you going to repair it?

No. It was already broken, so I decided to take it apart to satisfy curiosity.

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