It is in the More aids. I will stay with Oticon because I like the sound and they work for my hearing issues and to me the connectivity is pretty much at the bottom of my list of needs when it comes to hearing aids. Yes I do need to stream my calls to my aids. But personally I don’t care if it is Bluetooth, MFI or what ever so long as it works.
If they spend the necessary effort to create hearing aids to allow everyone to truly hear then the connectivity would not be necessary.
I don’t trust any company’s marketing department. I do trust what I am hearing, and my Oticon hearing aids are best for my needs. I have been wearing Oticon aids for 11 years but have tried may other brands of aids and always return to Oticon.
And I have the advantage of going to the my Audiologist doesn’t sale hearing aids, and all of the aids there are the top of the line regardless of the brand. I have a service disability and my Audiologist is there to truly help me hear. I have used 4 different clinics in 2 different states and 4 cities and the one I have now in this small community is the best I have ever had.
I don’t get it. Must be more to the story. Why is Costco doing this? Why is Phonak?
There is no question that it’s a great deal on a great hearing aid at a great price. But one thing to keep in mind is that Bluetooth Low-Energy Audio is coming along in the next year or two. According to the folks, this is going to revolutionize BT communication. And what is Phonak going to do about it?
Perhaps that Phonak is willing to offer such a great deal on a knock-off of the Paradise is just a sign that something even much better from Phonak, perhaps to answer or accommodate BT , is coming along in the not too distant future.
I think that I personally will wait a while to see if there is another shoe to drop from Phonak but if not, the affordability of the KS10’s would certainly help finance a Roger device or two!
You know me and my obsession with . I’m considering this deal. We don’t know for sure that LE-Audio enabled aids are going to be here this year. Plus we haven’t heard anything from Google or Apple about roadmaps for enabling their phones for LE Audio. So it could be a long wait before everything is in place. And if you want to be super-optimistic, I believe the Phonak Paradise has Bluetooth 5.2 so a future upgrade to Bluetooth LE Audio isn’t out of the question (but I wouldn’t bank on it).
Look at the battery life without and with streaming that ReSound aids get versus Phonak. You get a lot more usage of ReSound for the LE that’s already here. The range and strength of connectivity is great, too, compared to BT Classic. I can still have a decent BT connection with BT 4.x from 80 ft away or through several sheet rocks walls inside my house.
So if Phonak came out with a BT LE solution (that also allowed BT Classic connectivity, too), I’d be willing to give that a try over the KS 10’s, even if it cost a bunch more. Besides improved BT features, just as the Oticon More’s demonstrate, I think greater features are going to be incorporated into ’s all the time. So more AI could be something in a future premium Phonak that’s not going to be in the KS10’s.
I don’t know if I would have gotten the Marvels over my ReSound Quattro’s but having just gotten the Quattro’s a few weeks before the Marvels were released, on my next set of hearing aids, I think I’m going to wait until Phonak has just released their latest and greatest premium HA’s to see what there is to be had there before I go with anything else. And the fact that Costco now has the KS10’s, probably means Phonak’s latest and greatest is not going to be launched years from now.
Of course because new stuff makes the industry more money than old stuff, all BT future prognosticators are going to show BT taking over and Classic BT fading away. And I think no one should imagine hearing aids alone shaping the “hearing industry.” What’s going to shape the “hearing industry” the most in the future is earbuds. The multichannel listening features and sharing out what you’re listening to in BT LE Audio are killer features for earbuds. And young 'uns who grow up with earbuds in their ears all the time when they migrate to hearing aids will want those features in their HA’s as well. So maybe on the time span this is going to take to transpire, none of us will be around any more. But I don’t think LE Audio is anyone’s “wet dream.” It’s the future and classic BT is the past but I hope the best devices will find a way to combine the two. Maybe Phonak will?
Sorry, Jim, but with the greatest respect, my selectors for a hearing aid are not based on battery consumption of bluetooth. It’s based on comprehension efficacy and clinical outcomes. I don’t want to sound pompous or even discerning, but I could not give a hoot about whether one hearing aid is slightly more efficient that the other in terms of transmission over a short distance. As for waiting to see whether one hearing aid has this technology and switching to it, that would mean I have more invested in the technology than whether my hearing is actually improved. If you want to do that, then good luck.
Earbuds may shape newcomers and may sway some thinking, but seriously? This is a forum that features people with a predominant moderate to profound loss. Nobody is going take any notice of the form factor over the efficacy of the total hearing solution.
I didn’t say connectivity is the only criteria. Everyone wants a hearing aid that can deal with their loss. But most premium hearing aids can do that. Why didn’t Phonak just keep trudging along with then? No need to mess around with BT. But people do want the good hearing plus the ability to deal with phone calls, connect to their computer and other devices directly, etc. - most people agree that TV streaming via BT is FAR superior in voice understanding to just listening via speakers in the room. BT are important, too, in difficult hearing situations and thus how well BT works and how long the batteries last can be a factor in what you buy.
ReSound was the first to use BT to communicate with ’s - now everyone’s doing it. So I don’t think you can say BT isn’t important. It’s driven the industry in the last 10 years or so. Was it the Marvels were so much better HA’s than anything else, including previous Phonaks, or was it the BT connectivity they offered that made all Phonak users have wet dreams (to continue the analogy you started!)?
ReSound itself provides data as to how important BT connectivity is in HEARING decisions. I read (maybe several years ago) that ReSound says 3/4 of its users are iPhone users, only 1/4 Android. Many audiologists, I think even Dr. Cliff formerly, used to tell their patients you’d get a better cell phone BT experience with aids that were MFI capable if you switched from Android to iPhone and a lot of HA wearers did just for that reason. That’s most likely because up until recently Apple provided the best phone/streaming solution as compared to Android - and you got a remote microphone built into your iPhone. So BT does make a difference to hearing capabilities. With the same HA available, people buying ReSound preferentially opted for iPhone over Android whereas the general market share has been about equal or in Android’s favor.
I think saying hearing is most important is a bit illusory. If Phonak came out with a HA next week that was better than the Paradise, most people would still buy any deal like the KS10’s at Costco because it’s a great hearing aid, good enough to deal with most hearing loss (the average is mild to moderate), and the price is INCREDIBLE.
Since HT members are a very decided minority (and if skewed to severe and profound loss, different than most people suffering hearing loss who could benefit from a hearing aid), I don’t think one can say that what HT members want on average is what’s going to drive the industry, especially when the future, as for so many industries, may lie outside North American and Europe. People want good hearing first - but many brands offer that, they want a good price, and they want, (and as the past 10 years or so have shown) even demand good connectivity. NFMI is dead. If BT offers greater connectivity advantages, HA’s that offer only BT Classic will be just as dead as the NFMI ones are now.
You make a lot of good points. This is not a debating forum. There are some I agree with - yes, certainly Bluetooth is important. I didn’t say it wasn’t important, I just said for me, it wasn’t a differentiator. You did say however, that if Phonak goes down the route, you would consider them, which makes them a differentiator for you. You may be right in pointing to factors like , which gives credence to the importance of bluetooth, you are probably also right in pointing to factors swaying hearing aid selection - in the case of the incredible deal of the KS10, outweighing any objective assessments elsewhere.
What I would say though, is that from my standpoint, I think it’s important not to follow the herd, and pay attention to the clinicians. This is not a product like a camera or a new electric car. Yes, you can point to the benefits of bluetooth, but if they do not outweigh the benefits of other features elsewhere, then it would seem indulgent in selecting an aid on that basis. And this is not a personal thing, but when I look at your hearing loss, which is normal to moderate, you would have a massively different perspective I think, if your hearing loss was moderate to severe. Honestly, I have been in many difficult situations over the years, with analog hearing aids in the day, and believe me, you get a sense of what you want in the future
Btw - not splitting hairs, but Resound was not the first bluetooth hearing aid - it was Starkey. I would be surprised even if Resound came out with bluetooth before Oticon or Phonak.
@glucas: Yes, you’re both making some great points in a friendly but heated discussion. Nothing silly about it … just an outside observation on energy level.
No offense was intended.
BTW: IMO, one of the points most interesting to reflect on is how jim’s evaluative criteria for and his overall perspective would differ, were his hearing loss more severe.
He’s fortunate, in that any number of products might have the ability to provide him satisfaction.
I think that - as we become harder to fit - the ancillary features become much less important than the central issue of understanding speech.
Yeah, I think it’s an exciting vision - earbuds and the future of bluetooth. But for people with a more severe loss, they are looking for (which Jim did mention) and other developments.
But if the mild/moderate earbud market grows, then we all benefit in a way, as the money recouped gets ploughed back eventually into R&D, so there are reasons for optimism.
@glucas. So you don’t see the clinical value (for example) in manufacturer-agnostic microphones on the dinner table or clipped to shirt collars? Think Roger devices for everyone? Anyway, major derailing of topic in progress, so maybe we could take this elsewhere?
I hadn’t considered that before it was pointed out, so of course, yes, that has tremendous value. Not least because it may remove the need for intermediate devices to be charged and would provide a seamless solution.
I’ll take your word for it that Starkey was the first to come out with for hearing aids, but Resound definitely beat Phonak. Phonak was very late to the game. I believe Oticon’s first BT was OPN.
Initially I held a similar feeling to you, I wondered what all the fuss was about, but having watched the video, I think there might be some revolutionary things happening here. First the new LE audio I think will create a new universal standard for usage of wireless in hearing aids, practically this is likely to mean hearing aids in the future will be able to connect to most devices and receive their sound output, currently there are lots of different proprietary methods and it’s a minefield getting devices to work. Secondly the new BT LE audio has a broadcast feature that means sound direct to your hearing aids will become more accessible to you in more places. While I agree that the primary importance is the hearing aids themselves, being able to use BT wireless to access sound means you can improve your , which is the holy grail in what you are going to be able to comprehend from speech, so not the be all end all, but potentially it can improve hearing aid technology a great deal I think.
Hot Springs Village, Arkansas
Oticonian/Disposablyte
England, UK