After a full day of using these new aids, a few observations:

In a restaurant where there’s conversation at my table that’s at a normal noise level with quiet background music, these aids seem to pick up best on the background music. Muting one aid appeared to fix this, at least in terms of its ability to create a headache.

Reaction speed seems a little slow — for instance, if Amanda starts talking (and she usually has a quieter voice), I usually have to ask her to repeat what she said. Then again, it was this way with the old aids as well, but these ones don’t seem to do as good a job as the old aids in the second program I had (see previous entry). At least in those, it felt like it was picking up the sound efficiently.

In terms of watching TV, I definitely have to have the volume lower than I used to, but I’ve never been good with picking up speech in a TV show if I don’t have captions enabled on the TV set. Thus, I almost always watch with captions, so this seems to me to be a non-issue.

My statement that this change in aids was less about sound quality than sound control continues to be true, for the most part. I do pick up softer sounds much better (the end of the consonant “S”, for instance), plus some smaller noises I might not have noticed before (my computer keyboards sound louder now). There is the return of a volume control on these aids, but it gives me a very small (about 3dB) range to adjust in. That’s not all that large, but it’s usable. The question is whether or not it’ll allow me to adapt well enough to noisy situations. I didn’t try the volume control in the restaurant today, so that might have actually made a difference. We’re going to Mount Vernon to take Amanda home tomorrow, and we’ll more than likely be having lunch with her father and her sister, so that’ll be another chance to test drive these aids in restaurant environments. Hopefully, my experiences in restaurants, cars, and other louder environments will give me some sort of clue as to what to expect when I return to work and classes in September.