I can almost call it life changing
Hey everybody my name is Tom, I’m a professional engine builder, I build performance and racing engines up to about 5000 horsepower, and so as such I’m in some very loud dino cells and around some very loud cars obviously and my hearing was never good to begin with and despite the fact that I wear hearing protection it’s gotten worse you know due to age and like really noises. So anyhow, I have some pretty substantial hearing loss. It’s always made it very difficult for me to listen to other people, especially if there was any noise in the background at all, if somebody was speaking, and somebody else went [clears throat], I lost what was said, I was really having trouble following that. So anyhow, I have now, now I’m kinda happy, I’ve got Phonak, here it is, Phonak hearing aids, this is the charger and case, it’s really neat that, you can charge this thing up and it holds a charge long enough to charge I think four times or something like that, on the hearing aids, it’s got the LEDs on there so you can see what it’s like, I’ve charged my hearing aids 3 or 4 times and still had several bars but I go ahead and charge up the charging base, I’m really really pleased with this. I haven’t always been pleased with my hearing aids. This is the third set, I wish I got these first. My first set I went to a local place, saw a place here, ‘hearing aids’, I said eh, I’m a dumb engine builder, you know so I go in there and thinking that they’re gonna have my best interests at heart, you know when somebody comes to me to build an engine, I have their best interest at heart because the better they do, the better I look, and I like to see people setting records and winning races. So I go into this hearing aid place and I am fed a line of crap and I don’t know anything about hearing aids, my first experience, so they completely pulled the wool over my eyes and you know, they call me in like a year after I had the hearing aids for a “free cleaning” and I go in there and they do a quick hearing test where they basically talk to you and they try to convince me that I read lips too, that was a big ‘oh you read lips’ and so they put something in front of their mouth and [mumbling] and you hear that and then and then you look at them and okay, um ‘cat’, ‘dog’, it’s like give me a break, can you be so obvious? Anyhow, you have these $5800 hearing aids for a year, go in and they say ‘yeah, you know your hearing aids can’t be turned up anymore so you need a new pair. So left them, and went to a you know, got a little smarter this time but still not smart enough, went to a big name place, you know you see commercials for them on TV you know they’re supposed to be terrific and I bought their top of the line hearing aids and these top of the line hearing aids you could adjust from your phone but they don’t connect to your phone, so I can’t listen to my phone through my hearing aids unless I put the phone up to my ear, I can’t do phone calls with them, I couldn’t do any of that, but I could adjust the volume up or down and even when I adjusted it up all the way I didn’t really notice much, uh, you know I’d crank it up all the way, put it back to normal and, minor difference. Also these hearing aids were a little bit better than the first ones, first ones were adjustable on three levels, they had low tones, you know low frequency, mid frequency, high frequency, those are the three adjustments it had, so that was totally useless, I was lied to about that too, I was told they had noise canceling technology, etc, etc, they don’t have any of that. So these ones have 17 tone adjustments, so that was much better, but there was still a lot of things I couldn’t hear, our toaster oven, when it would go off with my toaster strudel, a special treat for weekends, it’d go off, you know ‘bing’, I’m sittin in the living room which is about 6 feet from the toaster oven in the kitchen and we have an open floor plan and I didn’t hear it but my wife on the other side of the living room could hear the thing, so I was like alright, I know my hearing loss is pretty severe so I guess I gotta just live with what I gotta live with. I was still able to hear conversations, not as well as I’d like, still had to have people repeat things, and I had some trouble with these hearing aids, you know I had them repaired under warranty, and um I got a drop of sweat in one, ‘oh god forbid you should get a drop of sweat in your hearing aid that you wear behind your ear.’ Anyhow, they said ‘yeah well you’re gonna have to send that in for repair, it’s gonna be $450.’ So okay, so I got it repaired and you know shortly after that, another hearing aid just decided, as a matter of fact it was the same one that they had repaired just decided to ‘bang’, decided to stop working, it was kinda hard to tell because they didn’t work that well to begin with, but I’m listening to that and I’m like man this thing isn’t working and I do some tests and no it’s not working, so I call this big national hearing aid place and they say ‘oh yeah well things have changed a little bit, it’s a minimum $575 so you just give us $575 and the hearing aid, and after it’s repaired we’ll tell you if and how much more you owe us.’ Yeah that didn’t fly real well with me, I don’t need to tell you what I told them, you can probably guess, so my wife and I start looking around, then there’s, you know, I say ‘look I’m done with these big name people and stuff’, you know it’s this is all BS I’m just tired of this crap, so my wife found a place and that’s where we got turned on to the Phonak, there you go now you can see it, Phonak hearing aids, so I go into an audiologist’s office, where an actual doctor examined me, not a hearing aid salesman, the big national place it’s all hearing aid salesman except for one test they give you where they have an audiologist come in but he doesn’t talk about the hearing aids or anything, he just gives the test, gives it to the hearing aid salesman people and you know they start selling you on this stuff. Oh by the way, right after I bought those $7,000 hearing aids, get that $7,000, I put $5,000 down on my house when I bought it okay, it was a while ago but still, right after I got that, not even a week later I’m getting notices in the mail, ‘hey trade in your hearing aids we’ll give you a great deal on some new ones.’ Really, give me a break I just bought the top of the line most expensive hearing aids you offer, and I don’t get a letter saying hey congratulations you know, we’re glad you got these hearing aids, we’re looking forward to a good relationship with you, no, I get a letter saying hey why don’t you trade in that old junk and we’ll see you some new stuff that’s really cool. So I was not pleased with them from the get go. Well, I when I got these Phonak hearing aids, excuse me I’m an engine builder not a speaker, when I got these Phonak hearing aids, wow, what a difference they made, I mean this is incredible, and the thing I like about it is one, it doesn’t have 17 points of adjustments, it’s got 21, it’s a little bit more than half the cost of what I paid for the inferior hearing aids, I wasn’t too sure how much I was gonna like these because they’re rechargeable, not by battery, you know you don’t put batteries in them. If you go online and buy batteries, I was getting like a year’s worth of batteries for $25, so the expense was not a consideration and quite often, I’ve worked some long hours I mean, you know you go in, an engine builder, you’re racing, you go in to work, if there’s a problem you stay there till it’s solved, you know you gotta race this weekend, or a customer’s got a race or whatever you gotta get stuff done there’s no you can’t just say well you know tomorrow’s another day, no you get this stuff done now. So there are days I work 10,12,14 hours and I wear the hearing aids constantly so I was a little concerned about how long they’d last but I have yet to have them die on me, you know, I’ve gotten the little warnings like I’ll just give you an idea, I put these things on at uh, about 6:45 or 7:00 in the morning and around 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning I’d get the warning that, eh, batteries really low you know you’re in danger of the hearing aid dying. So, they last a good long time. Another advantage to the rechargeable is it’s a sealed unit so there’s not sweat gonna wick in where the battery was, because I was always having to take you know the batteries out, take a q-tip in and clean the battery tray and you have to be real careful because the battery tray is very fragile and very important, so you know, and big national brand I’m sure if I broke that battery tray it’d be $575 to have it fixed, so that was my concern but it turned out to be a non issue really, so, been very pleased with that, and plus these have the advantage of I can now hear my phone through my hearing aids, so when I wanna call somebody, I just dial the number, put the phone back in my pocket, and I speak to them, I hear them and they hear me and when I first started using these, I was asking people on phone calls all the time, ‘how do I sound, can you hear me’ cuz you know sometimes on like cheap speakerphones it sounds almost like they’re in a hollow room or something, or some terrible sound, but everyone says I sound pretty good so I’m very pleased with that. For things I don’t like about these hearing aids, they’re not free, that’s the only thing I really don’t like about them, they’re not free, I wish they were free, but I am so glad that I spent the money to get these, when I turn these hearing aids up, turn the volume up, there is a noticeable difference, I mean a substantially noticeable difference which they never had that with the other big name brands, so I’m really pleased with that. I would definitely recommend these to anybody with heavy hearing loss like mine, they probably make some for people with lesser hearing loss, I dunno like I said I’m an engine builder you know, you wanna know about race engines I’ll be glad to talk to you, hearing aids I don’t know so much so I gotta trust somebody, and this Phonak, they’ve been fantastic I’ve been using them now for a couple of months, I’m no longer having, we have meetings at work you know meet with engineering team, or fabricators, and I’m no longer having to lean in you know, ‘what what what what’, I’m able to hear them, I no longer have to, on our zoom meetings I no longer have to put headphones on to listen to the computer, I can actually hear from the laptop speakers now, I couldn’t do that before if I didn’t have my headphones you know, everybody would be seeing the top of my head and I’ve got my ear down you know against the speaker so I could hear what’s going on in these meetings. So this has been, I can almost call it life changing, in that I’m able to hear so much better, I’m able to communicate with people and you know communication is kind of important in my job so I’m very pleased with that. My experience like I said with other hearing aids has been absolutely terrible, I shouldn’t say absolutely terrible but not good, this experience has been fantastic so far and I have no reason to believe it won’t be anything but continue to be terrific, these hearing aids work like a champ, like I said I’m able to hear, that’s a big deal, I am able to hear, so my advice to you anybody watching this would be, one, when you’re at an appointment, you’re seeing about getting hearing aids, who is the person you’re speaking to, are they an audiologist or are they a hearing aid salesman, because if they’re a hearing aid salesman, they’re gonna tell you everything you wanna hear, about how great these crap hearing aids are that they’re gonna sell you, they’re just looking to make a sale, an audiologist, atleast a good one, is going to look to find a solution for you. That’s a big deal, just like at work, we try to find solutions, you know, we overcome problems, we’re not salesman that are just like oh yeah we want to sell this new part yeah here, oh this is a great part man put this in your engine boom, no, we’re looking for specific problems and getting rid of the problems, solving them, overcoming them and making things better, and that’s how we earn our money, and that’s how a good audiologist earns their money too, by making your hearing actually better by getting you what you need, rather than just what they want to sell. A lot of the big name places you know they advertise, one of their big hooks is lifetime free cleanings, lifetime free visits, you never have to pay for anything, because they overcharge unbelievable amounts for the hearing aids to begin with, and then trust me, after a year or so, these free cleanings and whatever else they offer, are gonna turn into sales calls to sell you new hearing aids because that’s what they do, they sell hearing aids, they don’t solve hearing problems necessarily, sometimes they do I’m sure but their main goal is ‘let’s sell hearing aids.’ Their main goal is not let’s help these people with their hearing, it’s let’s sell these hearing aids, and that’s why I’m so glad I got Phonak, they are awesome, and here let’s see if you can see it behind my ear, I can’t tell or not, I’ll tell you what I’ll take one out, these wires are expensive, that the speaker is on, so I pull it out of my ear first and then I take by ear, here we go, this is it, excuse me while I look down here, here we go, the little ear cup thing was reversed because it was pulling it out of my ear, but yeah you don’t wanna be putting strain on that little wire because that little wire is $75, you know it’s a pain but if you handle these things correctly that little wire will last like forever, so it’s just real easy I just put that in there and in here a little bit, there we go, get em, get it situated in my ear where it feels comfortable and the hearing sounds most natural, that’s something else too, the hearing does sound very natural, which is real important to me because I do like my music, I love jazz, you know, big band, count basie, duke ellington, on up to modern jazz, I really love big band and you know there’s a lot of sound to hear and boy if it’s tinny or ringing at all it’s just horrible but this sounds fresh, crish, clean, it’s just absolutely beautiful, so I’ll tell you you can’t go wrong with a set of Phonak hearing aids. If you’re listening to this, if you have the Phonak hearing aids you’re probably listening just from the speakers, if you don’t you probably got headphones on like I used to have to, or if you have these other name brand hearing aids you might have to have headphones on to to listen to them, but I’ll tell you get some Phonak hearing aids, you will absolutely not regret it, okay, thank you very much, good luck, good hearing, and god bless.