What hearing aid is best at Costco?

The nice thing about this forum is you can just move on

@mrprez said:

I posted my findings and was attacked.

I’ve reread this thread a couple of times, and I honestly don’t perceive any serious attacks. I’m not siding with anyone - I’m posting this to ask you to please just reconsider your interpretation of what was said, bearing in mind Rick’s (@Raudrive) comments:

@Raudrive said:

As mentioned, please don’t take everything too seriously.
Many cultures on this forum with different personalities. Lots of different senses of humor.
For the most part a great bunch of people just trying to help each other.

@mrprez said:

I guess this isn’t my kind of place where personal attacks are accepted. Might have to look elsewhere.

Just don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, is all.

As Red Green would say : “Keep your stick on the ice - we’re all in this together!”

@hass5744 said:

But I’ll be honest with you. You can’t let things people say on this forum bother you.

My first experience of Costco and the world of private HAs (UK and fitted with NHS Starkey’s 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 would’ve 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.

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. I’m 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 store… It’s a new day boys and girls. Let the fighting commence

@garethjwells said:

I guess the deal is good HAs at good prices but with conditions. Superlative HAs with less conditions probably have a superlative price tag.

I can’t readily agree with your synopsis, Gareth.

I got my Oticon More HAs from an excellent private audiologist. I’m extremely happy with my audiologist, but to call him “superlative” 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 “superlative”. They just suit me, my loss, and my lifestyle very well.

[I will agree, however, that their cost is “super” high compared to Costco.]

Going through a private audiologist has imposed more, and not fewer constraints/ conditions:

1. 90 vs 180 day exchange period
2. No vendor’s leverage with Oticon because of high sales volume
3. Tendency to encounter more “quibbling” 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 clinic’s margin vulnerability.

So (and I’m not trying to pick you apart - I’m just adjusting perspective) “superlative” is not an apt descriptor for my private audiologist experience.

Here are the adjectives that I’d choose, instead:

• personalized
• committed
• responsive to individual needs

I realize that “superlative” may simply be a word that means “better than most” in UK idiomatic usage, as opposed to its hyperbolic connotation in North America. I’m reacting to its use in this instance because it’s absolute.

I’ve learned that there are few absolutes when it comes to hearing devices: it all boils down to what’s 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. That’s 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 I’m dealing one to one with a certified audiologist who will get me in almost immediately if there’s a problem and will provide me with a loaner if my aid malfunctions. I have a profound loss so I need someone who’s 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 doesn’t provide the service or the variety of aids that I need to try to find what works for me… This is why this forum is here. There are 8 million stories in the naked city. No two hearing losses are the same

@hass5744 said:

There are 8 million stories in the naked city. No two hearing losses are the same

[ LOL! Naked City, watch out! @tenkan likes peeping at ear canal openings, tragi, and lobules! ]

I was kinda happy when I saw the Naked City reference - great old B&W TV show.
But in only 2 posts…

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 ha’s 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 HA’s.

@chrshea2 said:

Philips are made by Oticon and they have a good reputation for handling music.

Not sure if this is an assumption by Chrshea2, or if a Costco HIS or audi gave this impression, but it’s 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 it’s 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 doesn’t seem like it’s 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 doesn’t 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 users’ preference.

Plus, the Oticon More continues with the “open” paradigm that it started with the OPN and OPN S, while the Philips 9030 does NOT follow the “open” paradigm. It still follows the traditional beam forming approach to block noise out and focus and clarify speech primarily.

That’s not to say that the Philips 9030 is not a good HA. It’s 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 they’re something they’re not (Oticon-like HAs). So I want to clarify here to avoid incorrect assumptions.

@Volusiano said:

the Oticon More continues with the “open” paradigm that it started with the OPN and OPN S, while the Philips 9030 does NOT follow the “open” paradigm. It still follows the traditional beam forming approach to block noise out and focus and clarify speech primarily.

That’s not to say that the Philips 9030 is not a good HA. It’s 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 they’re something they’re not (Oticon-like HAs). So I want to clarify here to avoid incorrect assumptions.

@chrshea2: I’m doubling back on what @Volusiano has said, because Oticon’s “OpenSoundConcept”, 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 “heavy lifting”, 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 brain’s “neural plasticity” 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 I’ve 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 that’s 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 “Phillips are like Oticons” 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. That’s the spirit in which I’ve piped up to offer my rebuttal. It’s not to split hairs, or to show somebody to be wrong.

@SpudGunner said:

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 Oticon’s technology, and has a very different design philosophy than hearing aids bearing the Oticon brand. There’s no mistaking that Phillips and Oticon are different, just by comparing their price tags.

This is completely incorrect. Philips is not a company that’s owned by Demant. It’s simply a brand name that Demant licensed to place on their products. It’s the same thing apparel and clothing companies do when they license national football team names. And lower pricing does not necessarily mean you’re getting less functionality or quality.

@SpudGunner said:

Don’t get me wrong, the Phillips 9030 is, indeed, a capable hearing aid that’s giving excellent performance to many users, and costs thousands of dollars less than Oticon More (Oticon’s current flagship), but it’s not “made by Oticon”. If you were led to believe this by the Costco HIS, then you were misled.

I’m afraid you’re the one that’s been misled, especially by @Volusiano who fancies himself an expert on Demant hearing aids even though he’s 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 Demant’s 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 they’re much more similar than you can imagine.

@nqq98392 said:

He has no inside research and development or engineering expertise whatsoever.

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