My Day to Day Experience With Widex Moment Rechargeable Hearing Aids
I have tried many hearing aids over the last few years but funnily enough, even though I worked for Widex for Several years up to 2014, I have never worn a Widex hearing aid. The new Moment from Widex is billed as a dramatic breakthrough in hearing aid sound. A paradigm shift which signals hearing aid sound before, and after. So they had a lot to live up to. Widex as a company don't generally make what we delicately call marketing claims, or what you and I know as fluffy bullshit. So I was looking forward to trying the hearing aids out to understand what they were so excited about. So I got them, programmed them and put them on. It was the most bizarre experience I have ever had with hearing aids. Read on to find out why.
Natural Sound
Widex have been renowned for many years as providing some of the most natural-sounding hearing aids available. Having fitted many of them to different patients over the years I got used to people saying that they were pretty natural-sounding, or close to natural hearing. Widex say that there new Puresound technology sounds like natural hearing and they are so not wrong. Wearing them is the most bizarre experience I have ever had, I knew they were helping me hear clearly in all of the situations I found myself in, but I had to keep checking they were actually on. They are that natural sounding, it feels like all of the benefits of wearing a hearing aid, without wearing a hearing aid.
It sounds like getting all of the benefits of hearing aids without wearing hearing aids
Bizarre
I keep saying bizarre, I spent the first week going around telling everyone how bizarre it was, because genuinely, for a long term user of hearing aids, it's a bizarre experience. These are genuinely astonishing hearing aids, they delivered real clarity in every sound setting I put them to the test in. They offer crisp speech even in tougher sound environments, all while pretending they aren't there. It's like some sort of bizarre sourcery.
What Was I Wearing?
I was wearing the Widex Moment 440 rechargeable Receiver In Canal hearing aids. The hearing aids are very discrete, they are close to the size of the famous Widex Passion but they are fatter near the bottom to enclose the rechargeable cell. They are light and sit well on the ear and the new receiver wires that Widex is using seem to hold them in place very well. I often have issues with the left-hand side receiver of any hearing aids I wear slipping out and having to be pushed back in regularly. Definitely not so much with the Moment, in fact as I think about it, it was a whole lot less.
The Charger
Widex have gone with a desktop charger, it is a pretty enough piece of kit and simple to use. While it does what it does well, I have a complaint, I always do. It's a desktop charger, not a charging case with extra charges onboard like the one for the Resound Quattro or the Signia Styletto. I really think this is a missed opportunity for Widex, the charger cases make life so much easier for hearing aid users. It means you have a simple case that you can slip in your pocket and that you can charge on the go if you need to.
I really like those systems and I think they are the way forward for all of the manufacturers. Anyway, pet peeve over. The hearing aids are fully charged with a three-hour session and they will deliver blissful and almost transparent hearing help for around sixteen hours of use.
Android, No Streaming
Unfortunately, while the Moment rechargeable is a Made For iPhone hearing aid, it isn't a Made For Android hearing aid. So no audio streaming of calls or audio to the aids from an Android phone. I think that will change over the course of the next year. While I don't think any of the manufacturers will work to use the system invented by Resound and used by Starkey, I think the advent of Bluetooth 5 will ensure that all Bluetooth enabled hearing aids will be able to stream from new Android phones with a Bluetooth 5 system.
The Moment app does work on Android and it works very well. The app is newly designed to work with the Moment hearing aids and it offers real power over your hearing aids. You can change the amplification produced on the go to give yourself a boost in clarity and you can change the focus of the directional mics in the hearing aids as well.
Soundsense Learn
The app also offers the Soundsense Learn machine learning system. The system is really excellent and allows you to further customise the sound of your hearing aids for different sound environments in an intuitive and simple way. Simply pick A or B, based on what sounds better, go through it until you are really happy with the sound and save it. Voila, every time you enter a similar sound environment the aids automatically change how they work.
In Finishing
These are really impressive hearing aids, genuinely natural sounding. They worked well for me in all of the sound environments I found myself in. I didn't get to test them down the pub, unfortunately, no-one is really getting to test anything down the pub at the minute. However, I was in some noisy situations while out and about and more often than not, people who were speaking to me were wearing a mask. I still did pretty well for a man who felt like I wasn't wearing hearing aids. These really are a paradigm shift in hearing aids and that isn't fluffy bullshit.
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