Oticon launches Opn hearing aids and Velox platform

When a manufacturer does an upgrade like this I always wonder if the new ’s provide way better performance compared to the same manufacturer’s most recent models. It seems particularly hard to get that question answered since most users wearing the last most recent models are not ready for an (expensive!) upgrade yet. Someone who IS ready for an upgrade will have been using technology that is two or three upgrades ago. Of course the brand new technology will sound much better to them. Oh well. I guess you pay your money and take your chances. Thank you for posting this, Rasmus.

Um_bongoProvider

Wales, UK

What most of the big companies won’t admit is that they have hit the upper part of the tech curve in purely in terms of sound processing. More significant advance is costly/impractical/unreliable.

In order to retain ‘progress’ you move the goalposts. Placing hearing aids in the expanding ‘wearables’ market is one way of doing this.

KenP

NW Indiana

Programmable devices are known to be easily hackable most lacking any encryption. I wonder who will be the first Opn user that has to pay .5 bit coins to be able to hear again. :eek:

csga

Interesting news is that in noisy environments with multiple people speaking the new aid balances the speach sources and removes noise - even between words. My auspice : with two microphones/each aid.

Don

I think we are in a good spot right now, and one that will probably see benefits for a couple of more years.

Siemens sold their hearing aid business and the new company surely wants to get as much of a return as they can. Normally, the companies would measure and strategize on when to come out with the good stuff, and if the competition doesn’t push them they are free to roll things out gradually. The buyer of the Siemens business may have pushed out the good stuff earlier than the norm for the industry, so now what do the others do? They may feel forced to come out with their better stuff now, rather than later, so they don’t fall behind.

So Oticon jumps. Now I would expect Resound to go, then Phonak. If Starkey has anything up their sleeve, this is the time for them also, or they risk falling way back. Not sure about Widex.

I don’t know anything about the internal politics at Demant, but does Oticon now give the technology to Bernafon?

Um_bongoProvider

Wales, UK

When I was talking to the Bernafon engineers, albeit several years ago, they get the same hardware but they implement their own software interpretation based on it.

chmod777

In reply to @KenP

@KenP said:

Programmable devices are known to be easily hackable most lacking any encryption. I wonder who will be the first Opn user that has to pay .5 bit coins to be able to hear again. :eek:

Just think, someday we’ll have to manage the built-in firewall that’s included. Maybe even SSL encryption features too.
No thanks, not for me.

We will know about end user improvement within a month. I have about 100 test subjects that will have Opn on within a few days of availability. New product release timing has nothing to do with performance improvements of competitors. Oticon has the next 4 generations of technology already mapped out. I’m sure the other brands do as well. They release a new product or a new product line because sales on their existing product release slow down below a certain threshold, which may or may not be due to other brands product releases. When Oticon released Alta back at the beginning of 2013, then Nera in the Fall, and then Ria in early 2014, sales on Ria started to eclipse Nera too quickly, and their average selling price dropped too low, and didn’t start to bounce back as quickly as it had in the past. Which was a key factor in why they released the Inium Sense product line in its entirety all at once at the beginning of 2015. If that hadn’t happened, Inium Sense would not have been released. They would have waited until this year to begin the Velox platform release cycle.

End user feedback statistics already support that Inium Sense has a higher user satisfaction rate than any other platform currently on the market, including Primax, including Kirkland, including Synergy, including Unique, including Linx2, including Venture… And Oticon had the largest increase in market share out of any of the big 6 in 2015. But the one big thing that Oticon has never believed in, is shooting for niche markets. Thats why they don’t currently offer a wireless . Thats why they don’t put in ALL of their products. But with a user satisfaction rating in the high 90 percentile (When the next closest competing product is in the low 80 percentile - still good historically), and with integrated bluetooth connectivity growing in popularity and decision-making importance, it is time to give people what they want…

By the end of June I will be able to give some real-world end user feedback from people who have been wearing Alta2 Pros, Unique 440s, Muse i2400, Linx2 9, Audeo V90s, and Primax 7-series.

this should be good

New interesting document http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4C7PH1/0x0x885992/DC52F27A-740A-4FCD-AFEF-A91B49767881/WDH_AAA_investor_presentation_Final_mcm.pdf8 (also see ConnectClip on page 18)

KenP

NW Indiana

Apr 15, 2016

OMG, 64-bands. Doubledown will wet himself.

glucas

Apr 15, 2016Edited

But no narrow beam directionality ? This means that directivity index figures can’t be trumpeted !!!

I thought it was all about to signal to noise ratio !! (as a layman).

No. Its like the info sheet said, narrow directionality, as other brands implement it, is not always effective and in some cases it introduces its own challenges. And it is dependent on predictability of the situation. In other words, if you are in a narrow directionality program listening to the person in front of you, you are likely to completely miss what someone says off to the side as they walk in the door.

By the way, narrow directionality was first implemented by Oticon over 10 years ago with the Epoq product line. Granted, it has been improved over the years and narrowed further, but Oticon has had research for years that narrow directionality is not the end all and be all of understanding in noise.

Understanding speech in noise as a function of Signal to noise ratios is a VERY simplistic way of looking at the problem. It is only two dimensional. Signal… and… Noise. But in the real world, that “noise” could be made up of one signal itself, or it could be, as we say, “complex”, made up of many “signals”. Understanding those signals is more a function of being able to isolate and separate them, so your brain can deal with them each individually. Think about it. The purpose of narrow band directional mics is to isolate ONE signal from all of the others so that you can understand it. Same thing with . It is an attempt to isolate ONE signal from the rest. This CAN be useful. Just like a Roger Pen (Phonak) can be useful. But it is not natural. It is not how our brains work. Hence why nobody wants to carry around a Roger Pen pointing it at everybody… or a remote mic, passing it around the table from person to person. Also the same reason that completely occluding an ear canal and then processing and filtering ALL of the sounds in the environment is not comfortable for most people. It creates a cognitive dissonance. Your brain KNOWS that the environment should not be completely muffled like that. So it is uncomfortable. Thats why hearing devices were developed, and custom venting…

Anywho… I can guarantee the devices will still feature tri-mode directionality in their feature set (including narrow directionality). But as I have said before, its not what you do with the hardware. Its what your software does with the sound information it collects from the environment.

glucas

Apr 18, 2016Edited

Thanks for the heads up Justin. I have to say, I am seriously impressed by the (UK) NHS hearing aids - Oticon Spirit Zests that I have. Although they are I guess a mid range equivalent, they are just as good as my Phonak Venture aids. And I agree, narrow band directionality doesn’t really help if you are in a crowd surrounded by noise, especially circular, speaking alternately. The ventures are good, but that nut hasn’t been cracked unfortunately. Here’s hoping for a paradigm shift with the Oticon Opn.

Graham

It will be a big paradigm shift.

Hardware-wise, in one big swoop, they have put Widex, Siemens, Resound, and Starkey in their place.

113dB max input A2D converter - Takes away Widex’ one hardware advantage. It never translated into better real world performance for the vast majority of people anyway, but now they can’t even make the argument.

64 bands - Takes away Siemens “resolution” argument. Research has always shown that more channels and bands did not improve speech clarity, but now all the spec junkies out there will be satisfied.

2.4 Ghz streaming - Takes away the only feature that Resound and Starkey had over Oticon. And they did it much better. Minimal loss of battery life. No new programming interface. No new receiver, same physical size device (smaller and more attractive than Halo2 or Linx2). More reliable communication… Voice activated, internet connected…

jeffrey

Justin, you seem to be saying that Oticon is emphasizing features that don’t make a difference in the real world, but add lustre in term of tech hype.

I don’t care about connectivity or streaming. I do care about quality of sound, and prefer natural sound to processed sound as much as possible. does this new aid address any of that?

To clarify…

Features do not account for the majority of real world benefit. Benefit is in the results.

The reason I was mentioning features is because I see so many people, both in this forum and out, that focus so much attention on it. Even some of the manufacturers tout their features a lot. Siemens has been touting their beamforming narrow directionality feature for a couple years now. Resound and Starkey have been touting their wireless connectivity/streaming feature for a couple of years now. Every time Widex comes into my offices they won’t shut up about their analog to digital converter… Ultimately, none of these features have resulted in any of these brands outperforming Oticon hearing devices. But patients keep hearing these buzzwords at my competitors and inevitably they come into my office and ask me about them. “Why are you recommending Oticon with 16 channels when I was just over at the Miracle Ear store and their devices have 48 channels?” “I was just at Costco and their device doesn’t have to use a neckloop to stream from my iphone.” All of these buzzwords and technical features just serve to muddy the waters for consumers. The challenge is that I basically have to explain to people constantly, “The number of channels is just a bragging point. It doesn’t really make a difference in real world benefit” “Yes, with Oticon you have to have a neck loop. But on the plus side, your battery lasts a lot longer, your hearing aid is smaller, and it sounds much clearer when you’re trying to understand what people are saying.”

Oticon’s emphasis has always been on what you just said… sound quality. And by that, I mean, speech understanding. The ability of the wearer to UNDERSTAND the words they are hearing. To get the most accurate clarity possible from their hearing devices. Not features. If you read the marketing pages/product announcements that have been linked to earlier in this thread, you will notice that Oticon emphasizes (puts in larger, more colorful lettering) the PERCENTAGES of improvement. That is a BENEFIT. “20% easier to listen” is a benefit. “20% improvement in memory” is a benefit. “30% better speech understanding” is a benefit.

The specs I listed above are hardware (feature) improvements. Oticon didn’t emphasize these items - they simply listed them on a spec sheet for nerds like me (because they don’t mean much to most consumers). I emphasized them because I found it interesting that the hardware improvements they did make seem to target the specific features that other manufacturers preach about so much.

If you don’t care about connectivity or streaming, I applaud you. I don’t care about these things personally, either. Like you, I prefer natural sound; but even more than that, I prefer UNDERSTANDING what people are saying. Oticon devices have done this better than any others, and with this new platform, they will do it EVEN BETTER. I don’t know much about your specific situation, but I am looking at your use of the phrase “natural sound”… Just keep in mind that with a hearing loss like yours, unless it happened overnight, you probably don’t know what normal natural sound is. In your right ear, you are hearing things VERY DISTORTED. So remember that any time you put on a different hearing aid (The new Opn included) , it will sound different than you are accustomed to. Does that mean the new device doesn’t sound natural? Or does it mean your hearing was jacked up to begin with and what you are now hearing IS natural?

jeffrey