"Make Germany great again" "Germany first!" Ⓒ1933-1945My surgeon’s suggestion is crucial to my decision as well. So, I circle around and around but it’s probably going to be Med El for me. However, I haven’t heard about the less-than-adequate battery life. I don’t have a contact at Cochlear anymore or else I’d be considering them equally.
Medel is a great choice. But also Cochlear and . But streaming is an issue as long as you are (one side , the other side ). In my case I knew that I will be implanted on both sides. 6 months after my first implant I wanted my second and got it additional 4 months later.
As Raudrive already said my experiment with Medel’s Rondo 3 was not very good. The sound quality was excellent but you are stuck to rechargeables. In my case that lasted at most for 14hs but I needed at least 16hs (at the end of Rondo’s lifetime - probably after 5 years) that meens I needed 20hs in a fresh Rondo 3. In this scenario Rondo was a show stopper for me as I am highly dependent on hearing anything at any time. So I went for Sonnet 2.
But Sonnet 2 has a short dayly lifetime, too: the “larger” pack lasts “up to” 10hs - in my case at most 8hs. But in Sonnet the packs are easyly exchangeable. At least my disposables last more than 30 hours (i.e. approx. 2 days)
Would you say that you’ve become to live a more normal life?
Haha. I don’t compare to normal hearing folks. I will never hear as good as they do. I stay the rest of my life as I already was with HAs all my life. Instead I compare my hearing success with my own previous life: It is MUCH easier to listen and understand people talking.
If someone turns away from you mid-sentence, can you stay with them to know what they’ve said without looking at their face?
I can do this and I could do this even with my HAs in the past although I had profound hearing loss in both ears. It’s a matter of how trained your brain is and how much things you can do at the same time (I couldn’t do anything else). With CIs it is much easier and I even can listen to people talking through their masks - that was impossible with HAs.
But please don’t be too excited! Listening and understanding with CIs is very hard work! Some candidates are lucky and have very fast success with rehab. Others need 2 or even more years.
Listening to your favourite and very well known music again and again and again(!) is a great help during rehab. But keep in mind that music may sound totally different at the beginning of your rehab. Hearing with CI is different from hearing with HA - your brain needs to reconnect its synapses and after some time (weeks/months) music is slowly coming back the way it sounded to you in the past.
Music is helping your brain in differentiating pitches - this supports differentiating consonants in normal speach. Listening to music is a great rehab and should be done more often than listening to dumb conversations.
Btw phobos512 won’t chime in. He has left this forum and started being part of hearpeers (Medel) but also has left that forum soon after he was implanted. He is enjoying his life and family with their new kid. In my case I am enjoying my life, too, since my hearing is better than it ever has been the last few decades. But I am reading here at hearing tracker from time to time (and when @Raudrive or @Deaf_piper mention my name 
)
You’re ignoring this member’s posts.
Melbourne
Virginia, US
Scottish Highlands
