Question - Phonak Nadia Q50-UP vs Q90

My hearing is very profound and worse than your audiogram. I had the Siemens Triano aids too. Due to my hearing loss, l wouldn’t be able to detect the differences of the Phonak Naida B50 and B90. I wanted the B70s for more fitting and better wind in noise program. If you want additional fine tuning then you are better off with the Naida V70 UP aids. The extra gain power will be available if your hearing gets worse due to age related hearing loss. The Naida V70 is much cheaper than the newer Naida B90 UP aids.

Thanks for the response, really appreciate it! Did it take you a while to adapt from the Trianos to the Naida?

I will have to stick with the Phonak because l have the icube ll programmer/software and plan to try out different versions like brie 3, naida and unitron max 20 E aids. Also plan to take HIS courses and get a license so l can try various brands without audiologist/HIS cost markups.

Even if Phonak sounds worse than Oticon for you? Programmer and software cannot be a stopper when choosing best sound. Noahlink (wired, not wireless) and Hi-Pro are best and most universal programmers.

My hearing is so profound that l don’t think l can tell the difference between muffled and regular sounds. I will have to wait until l trialed the Phonak aids. There are no such thing as perfect hearing aids for my hearing loss. The best aid would have to be customized for my loss, size of ear canal, etc.

Maybe Phonak is muffled for me because of I had only Oticons for all my life. So changing to other manufacturer is really bad idea.

Well, the Trianos finally kicked the bucket on me. Bummed!

Now that I’ve been forced to use the Naidas as primaries, I spent more time fiddling with the programming.One thing that seemed to help marginally was setting the algorithm to NAL-NL1 (rather than Phonak Adaptive Digital) and recalculating in the Phonak Target software. I also set it to Linear. This brought me a bit closer to the way the Siemens Trianos sounded, but it’s still not perfect.

Here’s a question — does anyone know if the Trianos are omnidirectional? I know they had TriMic, but they might have just been directional. The reason I ask is, in the Phonak software I can set programs up as either omnidirectional or fixed/directional. That might be something for me to tinker with further.

Phonaks do also sound muffled to me in comparison to the Trianos — lacking “sharpness” in sounds.

Got an appointment with an audiologist on Wednesday to review my setup (bring my laptop, iCube, and Phonak Target software). Maybe I’m overlooking something.

Joshua

My Phonaks are crystal clear. I don’t know why yours are not, unless they are just not turned up enough.

The settings are stored on the hearing aids so you wouldn’t need to take anything, if that was the reason. They can load all the settings from the hearing aids.

I have the Phonak Brio which is the Q90. I do use Sound Recover but I don’t use bass boost.

The Trianos used some clever 2nd/3rd order directional patterns to create both a near field and far field response. They were actually quite revolutionary when they came out, but the idea was a Siemens patent so it didn’t get taken up on a wider basis. The beam-forming they use is still one of the best signal to noise standards in the industry.

Newer aids use less hardware (mics) and try to achieve a similar result through more bilateral processing of the combined signal of both sides.

I’d suggest that the nearest match to your old aids would be to put the
Phonak into a Directional pattern and then tweak around he response so they actually sound OK to you.

Bear in mind that an adjustment like this can take a few months to fully habituate in your hearing system.

Thanks for the response — greatly appreciate it! Saw the audiologist today and they took a look at the programs I set up and they looked “good”. Audiologist did suggest switching from NAL-NL1 to DSL 5.1a Pediatric and switched it over. They also reduced the MPO for lower freqs to fix some of the boomy distortion I was having.

Did take your suggestion and switched from omnidirectional. After getting home, I changed the calculation to Phonak Adaptive again since I didn’t like DSL 5.1a…

Will see if I can hold out with these configured as they are for a few weeks to try to acclimate further. Ugh.

Hey um_bongo (or anyone else that has insight) – currently, I tend to gravitate towards my adjusted “music” program on the Phonak Naidas. Is there a good “general use” program I should be using instead? My Triano UPs had a single program that encapsulated all sounds, so there was never the need to switch between programs.

This adjustment has been painful so far, my kingdom for a fresh set of Trianos!

Maybe these will help – I must be missing something?

Audiogram8
Naida Global9
Naida Music5
Naid Music Fine Tuning5
Naida Calm2
Naida Calm Fine Tuning5

If anyone looks at this, a billion thank-yous for looking. Going nuts here.

Joshua