An honest review from an unbiased customer…
At 16 years old, Duane Zingale was the first child in the USA to have a post implanted in his scull to hold a Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA). He has bilateral hearing loss, but back then insurance and the FDA only approved one hearing device, so at least he can hear on one side of his head. Several years later BAHA was purchased by Cochlear, so Duane now wears a Cochlear Baha.
Duane and I met, fell in love, got married and had 2 children.
In 2015, our second daughter was born with bilateral conductive hearing loss, just like her dada. So she also needs a Bone Anchored Hearing Aid. I did a bunch of research and chose the Oticon Ponto, even though Duane wears Cochlear Baha. Several years ago I wrote a whole blog post about why Oticon Ponto is better than Cochlear BAHA. You can read that here.
Fast-forward to 2025. Ariasha has had multiple Oticon Pontos replaced under warranty. I over-night mail the broken one to Oticon and they over-night mail a new one to us. The first week of kindergarten, she broke the battery door, and even though the warranty had just ended, Oticon still replaced it with a brand new device for free! It’s so quick and easy, unless it’s really out of warranty, then I have to take her to the audiologist and jump through the hoops for insurance to cover replacing it.
Duane’s Cochlear Baha quit working.
Unlike Oticon, which replaces the device with new one, Cochlear repairs the device or sends a refurbished one. But Duane’s Cochlear Baha5 is no longer under warranty and it’s too old to be repaired. So he had to upgrade to a new Cochlear Baha6, which cost $6000-ish. Even though he was paying out of pocked for it, he still had to jump through a bajillion hoops: go see a doctor to write a referral/note verifying that he still has conductive hearing loss, and then get an appointment with an audiologist to verify that the BAHA is indeed broken. Then Cochlear sent the new Baha6, but it took another month to get back into the audiologist to get it programed.
A couple months later, his brand new Baha6 quit working for no reason whatsoever! So he had to jump through a bunch of hoops and deal with a slow process to get his brand new Baha6 replaced with a crappy re-furbished device. That device came with it’s own set of problems. So now he needs to jump through all the hoops again to get that re-furbished device replaced again, with a different re-furbished device that hopefully works better, but there’s no guarantee.
Did I mention that my husband has bilateral hearing loss, but only one hearing device? He also runs a business that involves a lot of zoom/phone calls, which is really hard to do when his one BAHA is not functioning properly, and he kind of need to be able to work to pay the bills.
The moral of the story is: Cochlear Baha sucks, so choose Oticon Ponto!
Unless you already had the Cochlear Baha post surgically implanted, then it’s too late to switch, without doing another expensive surgery. Thankfully Duane’s post was implanted back when it was a universal post, so he can jump through all the hoops to find the right doctor who can switch that to be compatible with Oticon Ponto. But that cost money too, so as long as his Baha6 is under warranty, he’s just going to have to deal with getting it replaced with yet another refurbished device every time it randomly quits working.
What sort of company sells a device for $6000, that doesn’t even last a couple months!! It seems like there should at least be a 90 day guarantee, because I would love our money back, so my husband can switch to Oticon Ponto. I am dreaming of the day that we can be free from Cochlear Baha forever.
