I’m about 96.4% ready to pull the trigger on getting set up to self program my aids.
My question is roughly how much does it cost to get set-up?
And does every brand or type of aid require it’s own software for programming… or is there a universal thing that will work weather I have Phonak or Oticon or whatever…
I’ve always been a very hands-on kind of guy, and one of my biggest frustrations these few years of wearing hearing aids is the feeling that they aren’t set quite to their optimum. I have felt like the Audiologist’s experience certainly helped in a big way to speed me along through those initial months getting them dialed in and getting my brain trained for the new input
But at the same time I’ve never really felt like she’s taken the time and effort needed to drill down… it’s a good-enough thing. Especially now that they are long out of “contract”
- I’ve always had doubts because she’s never done any of the technical configuration stuff that I’ve read about such as real ear measurement or doing anything with a test box, etc… The most technical thing I’ve seen done is a stethoscope placed onto the receiver so that she can hear what the are doing…and then after some major adjustment, I get the question how is that? while sitting in a relatively quiet office with just the two of us. So my answer is and always has been, hard to say…it’s so quiet in here… It really seems like she’d at least have something set up to simulate common situations to allow for a test run in the office.
I asked her once about , and her answer seemed plausible to me, and still does (it was a conversation but to summarize, it had to do with the goal of hearing aids being speech and understanding, and that being more critical than ‘the numbers’. Basically, my takeaway was that REM is more useful with kids who can’t understand or verbalize nuances of understanding and perception. Still, I’m an engineer by schooling and by nature, and I value precision and consistency in the baseline configuration.
I certainly don’t want to get in the weeds of it, but I would like to be able to tweak LITTLE things without having to go through the drama of appointments and delays. (my audi doesn’t use the virtual visit feature in phonak, which I’m sure would reduce this drama significantly!)
I’m also aware that I need to avoid my tendency of getting caught up in analysis paralysis. I don’t really have a desire to do baseline programming and spending loads of time re-programming…and I know it’s not realistic for me to get into DIY REM, etc…
My thought at this point is that since my Marvels have had issues lately and they are getting long in the tooth, I know I’ll need to get a new set fairly soon…so I’ll wait till I know for sure which brand and model I’ll go with next
and I figure that I’ll most likely go to a different audiologist to get them (hopefully one that doesn’t sell under the package business model)
I’m tempted to cut to the chase and buy from direct hearing or similar but I’d prefer to start with a professional baseline set-up
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Washington State
Surrey, UK
Kent, England
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