After losing one of my old Widex behind-the-ear hearing aids, I finally got a new pair of super-powerful BTEs. After thorough research, I came right back where I’d started from, at Widex. I got the Widex Senso Diva SD-19 model, the most powerful hearing aid the company sells and a step up from my previous Senso Diva SD-9’s. (Yep, my hearing has degraded a little more). I had been sorely tempted by Oticon, Siemens, Phonak and several of the other major brands with great high-power BTEs. But at the end of the day I stuck with the brand I knew. There are several reasons why.
First, Widex is acknowledged as one of the world’s best hearing-aid brands. It’s the Mercedes or BMW, maybe even Rolls Royce, of hearing aids. Second, Widex was first to market nearly a decade ago with true digital hearing aids, and it has maintained its place at the leading edge of new technologies over the years. Third, whereas many manufacturers lavish their attention on the big middle market for people with mild or moderate hearing loss, Widex has a heritage of putting just as much care and investment into developing products to meet the needs of people like me with severe hearing loss.
TheSenso Diva SD-19’s are great — with three directional microphones, very effective telecoils that are more powerful than the ones in my previous aids, and excellent sound shaped by Widex’s signal processing algorithms. The Widex hearing aids doesn’t offer some of the bells and whistles other manufacturers provide, such as a wireless volume and program-switching controller you can put on your keychain. And yes, like other premium digital hearing aids, they are pricey, coming in at about $4,000 for the set. But for pure performance, functionality, durability and technical elegance, you can’t beat them.
My only problems are ones my audiologist, Nitza Avni, warned me about. Because my hearing has declined a little since my last fitting, she programmed the aids to provide more amplification than I’ve been accustomed to. The extra amplification is a great help hearing speech in noisy situations. But amping them up higher than I should starts to grate on me quickly and wears me out a lot faster. I’ve read about this problem, and people with powerful hearing aids need to take care lest they over-amplify and damage their hearing more. You really can have too much of a good thing. So I’ve had to be careful to adjust the volumes depending on what I absolutely need in certain situations more than in the past.
Nitza also warned me I might get some feedback in my bad left ear because she’s had to set the volume so high in that hearing aid. Sure enough, I’ve had some ringing — for the first time people in the same room can hear the whistling at the same time I hear it. So I’ll need to get some new impressions taken for new earmolds that will provide a better seal. I may also have to get a bigger and less attractive earmold that provides a better buffer between the microphone and speaker. I’ll write about my earmold adventures in a future post.