John,

If they will pay for the custom molds, definitely go for that. Alot of times these days, they try to pawn off 'dome tips' which don't really seal all that well in the ear canal.

My company is one of the companies in N.A. that make custom molds. Been doing it for 51 years. The custom molds cost fraction of the cost of the hearing aids themselves; not even 1% of the cost, yet many audiologist offices don't want to bother with them because you have to come back to the office to be fit with them, rather than them shoving you out the door with a dome tip on the first day you arrive and pay them for the instrument (that's what they call the part that has the mics, DSP, and speaker).

That's quite a bit of hearing loss to try to make up for with EQ - 100 dB of gain isn't going to happen with just about any playback system. Of course give it a try. Use some hardware - got an old graphic EQ sitting around? Stick that in series before your speaker amplifier, set it flat, and boost the bands where you have loss. You'll get 12-15 dB of gain that way.

Then pull down all of the other bands and crank the big volume knob on your amp. That will get you 24-30 dB gain. It might be enough for you to notice the difference, but Mac has warned about individual band filters going into resonance - something I hadn't thought of, but is certainly possible.

In all of it, proceed with caution. Don't want to kill the rest of the frequency range that doesn't exhibit loss.

-Scott

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