Went to my audiologist to turn on the t-coil for my hearing aid (AVR).  He asked me if I'd be willing to test drive one of the new Phonaks for him, for a couple of weeks.  I said sure.  There's two cool things about it: it has an automatic t-toil sensor: so if I pick up the phone and hold it up to my hearing aid, it's theoreticlally going to sense the magnet and switch automatically to the t-coil reception.  I've never been able to get the hang of the t-coil, so it'll be an interesting experiment.  The second feature is that it is water resistant.  The speech processing strategy is different: it's compression as opposed to transposition.
  So far despite all these features, I like my old hearing aid better.  But like he said, your brain has to get used to the hearing aid before you can really tell if it's better, and you have to wear it everyday for a couple of weeks to get there.  So it'll be fun.
  The difference between frequency transposition and compression is a little subtle.  In the transposition, there's like a stacking of sounds: the high ones are stacked on top of the lower ones.  With the compression, the high sounds are moved into the range that I can hear in, the sounds are squashed together, the high sounds don't stick out as much.  It's going to be interesting to see if I can hear the consonants better or not with the compression.  Transposition definitely brings out the high pitches, the downside is whether it sounds like people are hissing at me with their s's and t's.  With the compression, I'm not sure yet.  Interesting.
  Really just trying it out for fun.  
  Funny how this is my idea of a good time.