The Siemens Primax 5px or Signia Primax 5px, depending on what you want to call it is the next-to-top hearing aid in the new range from Siemens (as of April 2016).
To explain the odd naming of these aids, Siemens Audiology Solutions was bought out by a company called Sivantos in January 2015. They can't keep calling themselves Siemens forever so they are rebranding as "Signia". For now all of their hearing aids will feature both the Siemens and Signia branding until Signia replaces it completely. This is in fact a good thing as it means a lot of money has now been invested into "Siemens" hearing which will no doubt translate to better hearing aids. The Primax is certainly a good start.
Primax replaces Binax as the premium hearing aid range from Siemens and appears to have ironed out many of the issues with the Binax aids, which were not particularly well regarded amongst many audiologists.
As the Primax 5 is the second to top model in the range, is mainly designed for people with an active lifestyle who need to hear well in most types of environments. When comparing to the Primax 7 you miss out on a number of features, including the three new HD Music settings. You only get one in the Primax 5 and it doesn't have the extended bandwidth up to 12 kHz for hi fidelity music processing. Also you don't get the useful new Echoshield feature or Spatial SpeechFocus and the background noise reduction isn't quite as clever as in the Primax 7. Channel wise, you get 32 channels in the Primax 5 as opposed to 48 in the Primax 7.
In conclusion, if you are a musician or spend a lot of time in noisy, echoey environments then the Primax 7 is likely to be better, if not you can save yourself some money by getting the Primax 5.
Here's a handy comparison chart with a breakdown of all the features. This aid is the "5px", the middle column in "performance levels"
New features
The Primax range has a number of new features that the previous Binax range didn't have.
For a full description of these features, please read more on our Primax 7 page where they are explained in full.
Model variants
Author: David Roberts