Bluetooth streaming is a top priority - what do I buy?

If money isn’t an issue, the Roger On can be plugged into a laptop and the streaming is pretty easy on the hearing aid battery.

Thanks for the reference.

I’ll have to look that gadget up since it isn’t clear to me how it can affect the HA battery.

I just listened to this guy explain what the Roger on does and now I understand how that device can improve battery life in the HAs. It does preprocessing of the signal and sends that already digested information to the HAs so they don’t have to waste their battery energy on the task. The Roger On is a preprocessor for the HAs. A pretty slick idea.

Several brands, including Phonak, support remote programming. So if your Hawaiian audiologist supports this he/she can still help you with the tweaking while you are at home.

@RoatanBill There’s lots of great advice above. Please allow me to share some non-technical advice.

There are some great audiologists and some awful ones. When it comes to fitting your device in Miami or wherever, pick your vendor carefully. Someone here from that region may be able to give you some recommendations.

My personal experience was the the initial fitting was good. Follow-up visits were simply cleaning and advice.

As @PeterOo said, a good audiologist can update/tweak/reprogram aids over the internet. They can also offer support if you mail the aids to them. Unfortunately, hearing aids are not produced or engineered in the high volume of cell phones and aren’t quite as bulletproof as we would like. Things probably will go wrong and need mechanical repair every few years. In my case, one of the transducers/receivers/speakers malfunctioned intermittently after two years and needed warranty replacement.

There’s some folk wisdom about moisture leading to premature hearing aid failure and drying hearing aids in cheap or expensive specialized hearing-aid dryers being valuable. Every time I visit my audiologist, she puts my aids in their expensive dryer. Yet others have used hearing aids for years and never put them in dryers, so we don’t have good data to know if it really matters. I assume you live in a humid climate, so you might want to investigate hearing aid dryers. If nothing else, they might give you some peace of mind.

As you get closer to making the purchase, feel free to ask more specific questions here.

From the numerous videos I’ve watched, Phonak’s latest and greatest does have 2 radios but only the standard Bluetooth is operational. Those videos hinted/stated that in the future the LE will be activated.

Once LE becomes the overwhelming standard, as an EE, I suspect their future products will drop the older tech to free up space in the hardware and because everything draws power even if it’s not fully active.

@RoatanBill said:

From the numerous videos I’ve watched, Phonak’s latest and greatest does have 2 radios but only the standard Bluetooth is operational.

You are incorrect about this. The LE radio has been used as I stated for many years.

The LE Audio is different. As mentioned it is in a Ready state with the newest Phonak aids waiting to becactivated.

I agree on your priority. However, communications via wireless across the internet is also a must in my case.

Battery life while using whatever communications protocol to eventually become TCP/IP packets becomes the underlying issue. I’ve not found out what battery life is when using Bluetooth classic or Bluetooth LE in a 100% streaming environment. The videos I’ve watched are all over the place on this issue. Most claim 3 hours in some fabricated ‘normal’ use case for some mythical average person. That type of nonsense information is of no value at all.

I want to know how long the battery lasts from fully charged to drop out in a 100% streaming test of voice communications over the internet. I’ve not found any reliable information.

It maybe due to battery size, but i an seeing less of an overall battery load streaming with my Phonak Spheres than I do with my Oticon INTENT.

@RoatanBill said:

I’m a professional software developer that uses Linux computers all day long…

Software developer: Check. Linux: Check. Hours of Zoom meetings: Check, although my organization is trending more towards Teams.

Three observations:

0. If you can convince people that you’re crazy, you may manage to be invited to fewer meetings. Sadly, when it’s a conflict between crazy and essential, essential wins out and you have to be in meetings instead of getting any actual work done.

1. I’ve got Phonak Spheres, and battery life even with long meetings/phone calls does not appear to be a problem. Maybe if you spend all your time in between meetings in a noisy bar (triggering Spheric Speech in Hell mode) you’d brush against battery limits; but in most realistic scenarios you can expect to finish the day with a solid 60% or more of your battery left. (How true this will be after the aids have been running for a couple of years, I don’t know.)

2. Another classic conflict for the hearing-impaired Linux developer: Hearing aids make you more socially capable, but being socially dysfunctional improves the battery life of your hearing aids.

I’d write at more length, but I’ve got a migration to Production in a few hours.

We software developers fully recognize that the public thinks we’re a bit off to put it mildly. Then add the Linux sub category and normies start to back away from us so as not to catch what has obviously infected us.

Ah, real world experience from a kindred spirit. Good information!

‘Production’ - the last year of testing with unpaid testers.

I am a retired IT professional/software engineer/electronics technician/engineer. I have been around since before the PC. At retirement I was Microsoft Certified System Engineer Master level, before Microsoft i as a Unix person. I have worked with, Unix, Linux, CPM, Microsoft DOS, Windows from the first release. And Apple MACOS. In retirement i only need and use Android. At my retirement I retired and gave away everything Microsoft. I was burned out. I don’t even recognize what Microsoft calls Windowx now.

Here’s something for you to consider and research. I just received a new set of Resound Vivia hearing aids. They have the ability to use auracast. My phone an is older entry level Samsung Galaxy A13 which is not compatible (can’t stream too) my new hearing aids. I bought a Voyager HA dongle from Avantree which has the ability to stream Auracast. To connect to a device, it uses a 3.5 mm audio plug. I simply plug it in to any device I want to listen to, computer, TV, etc., that has a headphone jack and the Voyager broadcasts excellent quality sound with low latency to my HA’s. My phone has a head phone jack, so I can also stream audio and calls from it in the same way. This could be of particular interest to you since it sounds as if you might have to buy mail order hearing aids. Jabra has a good reputation, IMO, for mail order hearing aids and fitting. Jabra is made by Gn which makes Resound. Some say the top tier Jabras are exactly the same as the Resounds. In any event, I think they should be able to receive Auracast, but I leave that to you to research.
BTW, I am extremely pleased with my Resound aids after transitioning from Signia C&G Pure AX’s.
Best of luck to you

I can practically cut and paste your background for mine. I’m an EE & CS by education (1972, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now part of NYU). I was a Novell Gold reseller and was grandfathered into their program because I was there before the program started. Also did 3COM EtherShare. First Linux was Caldera when Ray Noorda of Novell started it.

I wrote software starting on an IBM 1130 in 1966 @ Brooklyn Tech High School. I walked past a room making a rhythmic noise and curiosity caused me to peek inside and found my electricity teacher working on some strange machines. When I asked him what they were he replied ‘a computer’ and I had to further query him what a computer was. The rhythmic noise was coming out of a line printer that appeared to be printing gibberish. He said to stare at it a while and then suddenly it became the Playboy centerfold sitting on a bar stool all done with the gradations of the letters of the alphabet. I was hooked as a 15 year old.

I’ve written code for Texas Instruments, Rockwell International, etc and then went out on my own as an independent developer. I retired to Roatan Island in 2004 and kept writing code primarily for myself.