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Bernafon at Sam's

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I was interested to learn that Sam’s was starting to carry Bernafon Encanta. So I went to Sam’s in Houston, and the guy at the booth was just taking messages to relay back and forth to an audiologist (licensed fitter?) at another Sam’s location. The licensed person only comes to this location one day a week to do the actual support. I obviously already knew more about Bernafon features like Channelfree and bluetooth LE than the guy in the booth did. But he did say that Sams has plans to add other prescription brands of ’s as well, and their support for testing, providing replacement domes, etc would be similar to what I was familiar with at Costco.

As much as I would be interested in having a trial of Bernafon Encanta, it seems a bit early at Sam’s, at least in my area. I’ll be interested to see how they develop staffing and support.

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Bernafon hasn’t used channel free technology in their latest products in the 2020s and is common across all non-Sonova tech: so I’m not sure what you’d be informing them about.

The Encanta is a solid product, even if the software is particularly bland. Get some on trial to see if they help you.

I looked at the Sam’s Club near me and see that the hearing aid center is only open on Wednesday and Thursday. I am really interested in this model hearing aid but not sure that Sam’s is really committed to supporting the product.

I am concerned that the manufacturer may not roll out the Sound gear aids to Costco now that they have this partnership with Sam’s Club

@anytrams56 said:

I am concerned that the manufacturer may not roll out the Sound gear aids to Costco now that they have this partnership with Sam’s Club

Costco have them, but Sam’s is just a bit player in the market compared to Costco.

In reply to @Um_bongo

I made no inference about informing anyone about anything. I would be inquiring about features I was familiar with from owning hearing aids that used them. My point is that at this store at this time there was no one able to answer most basic questions about what Encarta has or does not have, at least without making a phone call. .

In reply to @Um_bongo

Talking to the Bernafon rep, channelfree is still being used in their latest products, it just isn’t marketed as such. The noise management has always been processed in discrete channels but the gain modelling is still using the same underlying channelfree processing. Bernafon produce decent products, but the marketing of their technical prowess has always been sub-par which is a real shame as I’ve long preferred their devices to Oticon ones.

@Hearing_Potential said:

The noise management has always been processed in discrete channels but the gain modelling is still using the same underlying channelfree processing.

I’d be interested to hear where this is published as it’s different than what we’ve been told here. Unless they’re just using an inter-channel averaging method to smooth the gain/output algorithm. The original channel free claim was that they basically sampled the original signal every single/couple of htz or so and modified each point discretely through their system.

It was the big claim of products like the ‘Swiss-Ear’ and others up to the Viron. My understanding was that when the product lines become homogeneous across the DeMant group around 2020, that this was one of the things that disappeared.

I too can’t find anything, including through Oasis, would be nice to clarifying and clear this up once and for all.

In reply to @Hearing_Potential

The most important question is : how do the multi-channel vs Channelfree perform when compared.

Thie paper below , from the J Am Acad Audiology, says that there are no significant differences between them when it comes to spectral resolution and speech understanding in noisy environments .

Many times companies elevate features, in their marketing packages, that are not as effective as they claim to be. After all, the main objective of marketing is to create value.

This is essentially the line we heard, they’d marketed heavily on it. It was unproven at the time and didn’t seem to produce anything World beating. Hence why they either don’t do it or just do it in the background.

If it was run as a comparator to dispel some of the canal resonance vs. Open/amplified output from the aids: then cool. Pitch it, but don’t claim you’re reinventing the wheel or getting rid of channel based processing.

Possibly with faster chips channel-free will be even better? It seems channel-free is not worse than multichannel so possibly that is a pro for the Bernafon versus the Philips at the same price.

@user490 said:

It seems channel-free is not worse than multichannel so possibly

I’m not following your reasoning. Why would something that isn’t worse—or, according to the paper I shared, not significantly different—be considered a pro feature of a product?
The real-life performance is what matters.

“no significant difference was found between multichannel and channel-free hearing aids for spectral resolution and speech understanding in noise”

On these aspects, Bernafon and Philips are a wash.

“In temporal resolution measurement, statistically significantly better performances were observed with channel-free hearing aids.”

On this aspect alone, Bernafon has better performance than Philips. For some users, they may prefer better temporal resolution measurement.

Is anything about the Bernafon Encanta worse than Philips 9050 other than that Demant brand locks its accessories so one would need to buy those again?

@user490 said:

“In temporal resolution measurement, statistically significantly better performances were observed with channel-free hearing aids.”

The paper says that’s for the random gap detection test which, based on what I’ve read, is used for . This is unknown land to me. Maybe the experts here can share how important is the random gap detection test for us and if that’s a significant pro for the general population or just for those with APD.

Edited

In reply to @OcramSagev

It’s interesting that this study used a Turkish-language test and measured the . In practical everyday terms a 50% SRT is well below the level where people would give up listening to a conversation, so I’m unsure why researchers use it so often. These findings may not generalise to English speakers. They shouldn’t have been measuring aided thresholds with warble tones in the soundfield. I’m not convinced by the methodology of this study overall.

One of the difficulties with studies like this is that they fail to take into account user preferences, because testing for which type of signal processing a user prefers is a very recent thing. We know that ~20% of users strongly prefer temporal-based processing like Bernafon & Widex, while ~20% strongly prefer spectral-based processing like Phonak & Signia. The remainder have no preference and can use either. These proportions means significant differences are likely to be obscured when scores are averaged out if they do exist.

It would be interesting to see whether there were significant differences with channelfree processing for the 20% of users who strongly prefer temporal-based processing vs spectral processing.

In reply to @OcramSagev

Being able to detect gaps between phonemes is essential for distinguishing between words and parts of words. The RGDT is being used for this purpose. Because channelfree hearing aids use temporal-based processing in theory they better preserve temporal-based cues such as fine gaps in the temporal domain.

I think the experimenters should have used speech-shaped stimuli rather than tones which are known to be altered significantly by hearing aid signal processing. I don’t think this is a particularly well constructed study because of the methods and materials used.

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