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Is Widex still the best for music?

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I am to be tested and fitted for hearing aids next week. My choice of providers is limited as they will be supplied by Nation’s Hearing, which is what Aetna uses. The providers that I can use prefer Phonak as that is where their experience lies. However the tech/audiologist said if I went with Widex that she would be on the phone with them during the tuning. I am limited to $2000 per ear so not sure how good of a Widex product can be had for that price.

At least it won’t be Eargo.

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Well I applaud her honesty. She’s pretty much told you she doesn’t know how to tune widex… So now the question is how much does that matter to you

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this is a link to Association of adult musicians with hearing loss. Somewhere is posted a really excellent pdf link about tuning aids for musicians, and for live and recorded music. This is very helpful for an audi and for a tech. Often neither will really know how to do this, altho it’s different for musicians playing than for listening live etc. The main step is to turn off the feedback function entirely if you are having artifacts–i.e. ‘warble’.
my audi will connect with the Signia tech at our next meeting and try to do this. she has no experience with adjusting aids for musicians. It’s best to go in with good info and to be decisive.

edit: well the link didn’t work but if you go to facebook you can find them.

Are you performer, listener? To make your thread more useful perhaps you can change its title to provide correct context for your question. Also would love it if you could briefly summarize the highlights of what you find from the FB group.

I am a listener; live performance attendance went away long before Covid. Preferred music is classical (no opera), and jazz. I am slowly starting into self programming and tweaking existing music program is down the line, but nice to accumulate good strategic information. I hope things work out well for you.

My recently acquired are Costco KS10 (similar to Phonak Paradise); music program can be downright terrible especially on piano music but also violin and flute each of which has different overtone patterns.

In reply to @jvh24521

I finally found this document there and perhaps it is the one of which you were thinking. Maybe there is another but I admit I use Facebook most grudgingly so I am not a Fb power user.

Hopefully I will be given the audiologist’s manual so I can tweak it myself, after all I live here in this body. My Auto-PAP behaved a lot better after I tweaked it. Or maybe I just think it does because I am a nosy engineer.

Music-counselling-and-fitting-a-guide-for-audiologists-Version-1.0-24-Sept-2018.pdf (2.3 MB)

@tenkan said:

https://musicandhearingaids.org/

Thanks for posting. The pdf I loaded is the same as the 2nd link in the first link you provided: https://musicandhearingaids.org/ 8

So disregard the file I uploaded and go to musicandhearingaids.org21 and get all three. I saw all of these on the musician site but they were solo PDFs so the mother source that you provided is a better reference.

Thanks again,
John

Yes, that’s one of the ones that I had in mind, but it essentially has all the needed info as any others that I’ve seen. I thought that I posted it earlier on this site but I couldn’t find it, nor could I find it at AAMHA. so good sleuthing! The “quick start guide for audis” is good and direct. Simple.

Don’t know about all the other models available but I use Widex 440 Beyonds. At the time I started using these I’d been a Phonak user for years and demoed Starkey and Oticon as well. As a performing musician there Widex sound sound was far superior and more natural sounding.

Edited

Thanks for the confirmation. I had narrowed it down to Oticon OPN1, Widex Beyond, and Widex Dream. But now I see there is a Widex model called Moment. I went to the Widex site hoping to find some info comparing the various models but it was most disappointing. On top of that it seems some (all?) of their aids work with iphones but not android. That would be a deal breaker for sure.

I read a page written in June of this year on the Nano site

5 Best Hearing Aids for Musicians (Professional's Choice)32

A guideline that’ll change the path of the music industry for once and all. Get an in-depth overview of the best hearing aids for musicians and how they matter.

that 60% of musicians prefer Widex Dream.

Any ideas on preference of vs would be much appreciated. I suppose and RIC have the advantage of two mics.

BTW, any idea why for RIC the term receiver was chosen over speaker or emitter? Seems most illogical.

I cabn’t recall if I already mentioned that I just bought a pair of Signia AX7s. I’m a musician. These are very good! Worth trying for sure if you can. A bit finicky to tune however. Worth it!

Thanks for the post. It should be a close race as both are owned by the same parent company.

Widex seems to have slightly better Bluetooth sound. Their /Machine learning also seems to be the best available, maybe the only one with machine learning.

The biggest factor will probably be tinnitus. While Signia’s Notch Therapy seems like a good approach I wonder if it is possible to setup multiple notches. I have at least three tones and one drifts as I can detect it beating against another one. So I think masking will work better. In fact I have found that any stimulus helps. I have found while experimenting with tone generators to determine my tinnitus frequencies that they are elusive, they tend to diminish when playing even very low volume tones.

I have Widex Moment and I like them but I have an Android, so it’s still a no-go for Bluetooth. I was told that Widex expected to have Bluetooth capability for Android by the first quarter of 2021. Well, that deadline has come and gone. That option would be nice, but I don’t care enough about it to buy the necklace gadget.

From what I understand, this is a superior but I did not demo any of the others as I have tinnitus and Widex was recommended. The audi explained that the tinnitus program worked in about 60% of users. Did nothing for me.

I’m a first time HA user. I had no trouble adjusting to Widex Moment. Very comfortable.

That’s good news! However, I can’t figure out how to start streaming. I can’t find any explanation on online. My pixel 4A with Bluetooth 5.0 is compatible. The software appears to be updated. Can someone help?

Edited

Did you pair the device with your phone?

Settings > Connected devices > Pair new device.

On that screen should be a list of available Bluetooth devices.

Tap the one you want to connect.

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