All of our 'new' digital hearing aids can do marvelous things for us including drown out outside noises and help us work to hear well. To best learn how to work with your hearing aids and CI's is to read about your specific hearing aid - the owners manual. After you have read it, then start writing down all of the different situations that the hearing aids help you and all of the situations that they don't help you. Having this as a guide (on paper) - you need to then take this to your audiologist and show them what needs to be altered on your hearing aids. (on the computer). They can add new programs for environments you are in to help you hear. They can suggest adding devices to augment your hearing aids. They can alter some of your programs to increase your ranges and tones so you are hearing around yourself instead of farther out. If something is not too your pleasing... then tell them - They can't know what is bothering you if you don't tell them that the aids aren't helping you hear well. They are a tool for you to hear just like any other tool will help your adjust to life. These are computers that need fine tuning. They have a motherboard that needs to be tweaked to your specifications based on your input which doesn't just happen once time. IT's a use and refine until such time as its what will help you in most every situation. My $6000 hearing aids (2 of them) are very specific to both of my ears and provide just what each ear needs. My audiologist helped me to get the right settings for at home, in the restaurants, in church, for my tinnitus and allowed me to adjust my aids if I need to on a spur of the moment. I am in command with her as a backup. No complaints here unless I forget to put in new batteries but then the beeps go off and then I have fresh ones ready to go!
I have been abiding by these rules for the last 6 years with my Resound HA/iPhone and have been doing well. Eloise