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Bose Hearphones

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Talked to Bose tech today and confirmed that volume control on device is just for streaming. (There’s also a “World Volume” that essentially acts as the volume control when not streaming) He also agreed with me that for conversation, the noise reduction is coming from the microphone focus. It seems like these should be thought of kind of a combo device. An personal sound amplifier (PSA) with directional microphones and a bass/treble control combined with earphones with a good noiser reduction system to be used with streaming. I will try them some more, but so far I’m not terribly impressed. The earpieces don’t seem to fit my ears real well (and seem like they’d need to be replaced not infrequenty at $10 a pair) Haven’t really tried them out in noise, but seems unlikely that it’s directional microphone is going to work any better than my hearing aids. I may get a pair of for my hearing aids to try out in noisy situations. Definitely curious about other’s experiences.

@MDB said:

Haven’t really tried them out in noise, but seems unlikely that it’s directional microphone is going to work any better than my hearing aids. I may get a pair of closed domes for my hearing aids to try out in noisy situations. Definitely curious about other’s experiences.

When there was another thread about and the Bose Hearphones were part of the discussion, that was my contention as well, about whether using a with no vent (power dome?) on your hearing aids would produce the same effectiveness as the Hearphones anyway, because it’s really just the same destination-based approach to block out surrounding noise and directing the mic to pick up the front speech only. The real challenge is to remove the diffused noise that’s still tainting the front speech, and it’s not sure if the Hearphones can really do anything about it any better than destination based hearing aids anyway.

As for noise cancellation when listening to a sound source from a device (phone or tablet or laptop), the Hearphones with its noise inversion for cancellation effect on top of a closed dome would probably fare a little better than a hearing aid streaming sound from a device with a closed dome because the Hearphones has the noise inversion for cancellation while the hearing doesn’t do any noise inversion.

I think for streaming music they’d be a lot better–combo of significantly larger speaker and good noise reduction capabilities.

Edited

True, but isn’t it true that they don’t have exact multiple band frequency matching to your hearing loss profile, but only very crude bass/mid/treble adjustment? So from this perspective it won’t be able to provide a good accurate compensation matching to your exact hearing loss? From this perspective, it’ll add coloration to the music and cause deviation from pure and accurate production based on your specific hearing loss, which is an undesirable thing when listening to music.

So for normal hearing people, it may sound great, but for hearing impaired people, while it may also sound great, it doesn’t necessarily sound accurate.

I think once one has hearing loss there’s no such thing as “accurate.” The Bose Earphones just have a Bass/Treble adjustment. The closest thing to “accurate” is and most of the forum seems to think what “sounds good” is much more important. But even with a precise REM fitting, the loudness relationships are way different than what somebody with normal hearing has. I still think they would sound pretty good with music–certainly much better bass.

Edited

Now you’re splitting hair over the terms “accurate” that I use. All I simply means is that the hearing aids can adjust for your differences in loss at frequency increments from 250 to 500 to 750 to 1K to 1.5K to 2K to 3K to 4K to 6K to 8K, that’s 10 data points and can possibly be more if the hearing test is finer than that, probably up to 16 frequency bands easily. Meanwhile, the Bose Hearphones can give you just Bass and Treble adjustments -> 2 frequency bands.

So relatively speaking, the hearing aid can give you much more accuracy than the Bose Hearphones in terms of adjusting to customize for your hearing loss.

Don’t mean to quibble but accuracy has a more limited meaning to me than how you’re using it. I fully concur that hearing aids allow much more granular frequency adjustments than the Bose Hearphones. To me hearing aids are like having a great equalizer and cheap speakers whereas the Hearphones have pretty decent speakers with a cheap tone control. If one likes a deep, rich sound, I suspect one would prefer the Hearphones for music.

I’ve had my new Bose HearPhones for a bit over a week now, and have used them in as many situations as I could, to put them to the test.
I’m afraid I may have set my expectations too high, and I have to blame part of that on wishful thinking and part on obvious advertising hype, which seems to be the norm for most everything these days. So, the end of the story first, I am not as pleased as I had hoped, but I won’t be sending them back, for reasons stated below.
The HearPhones are probably aimed more at people who need to hear, while the QC30 are aimed specifically toward people who don’t WANT to hear. I started my journey with a set of QC30 noise cancelling ear buds, which did an awesome job, but to my disappointment, the smart phone app won’t function with my Android Maxx, and I have no desire to change phones at this time. That was my ONLY disappointment with the QC30. However, immediately after purchasing the QC30, I found the HearPhone offering, which I was not aware of previously, and I felt I had cheated myself out of the benefits of service as a second duty of AMPLIFED hearing. I wasn’t too upset about it until I learned that the phone app for the HearPhones WILL work with my Android, so after reading all the advertisements and reviews, sold my brand new QC30 and bought the HearPhones, in hopes that I could add more useful situations to my headset use.
Here’s what I have learned about the HearPhones:
1.) They will function perfectly as noise cancelling ear buds. OR,
2.) They will function very well as sound amplifiers (much like the Bionic ear, Listen UP, and many other across the board personal amplifiers.
3.) In amplification mode (or slight cancel mode) they can increase high frequencies while decreasing low frequencies, or vice versa. This can help “sharpen up” voices while somewhat diminishing lower frequency background noise, but you need some degree of amplification going on to make this worth the effort. This can be painful when unexpected noises occur around you, such as a phone ringing, dog barking, someone wadding up paper, or setting a glass or plate down on hard surface, etc. I seems I have to tolerate a lot of very annoying high frequency ambient sounds in an effort to hear voices and TV. Hearing aids are much better at handling that kind of sound arena, through background reduction and personalized sound processing.
4.) The directional focusing is quite remarkable, but considering that it is part of the amplification settings, I’m not so sure it is very useful. In noisy situations, you’re going to focus the buds to the front, but it’s still going to magnify the noise in the room unless it’s a modest noise coming from behind you. In a restaurant with live entertainment, these may be useless, but I have yet to try them in that environment.

I’ve tried wearing them outside doing yard work and noisy stuff like mowing and chain saw work, and they function fine for seriously reducing the noise, but outside work brings on a lot of sweat and dirt, and I don’t think I’ll be using these for those tasks, simply because I can put much less expensive components to use and achieve the same effect, and won’t be so vulnerable to the elements.

I’ve tried wearing them in the truck, to reduce the cab noise and be able to converse with my wife. The issue there is, when I adjust the treble up enough to kill the cab noise, every squeak and rattle in the truck is now amplified. Just not what I was hoping for.

In the end, I will relegate them back to being primarily noise cancelling ear buds for my work, but for the $200 difference in cost (over the QC30), they actually WORK with my Android and if I ever need amplification, at least I have that option.

Thanks for the review. I plan on trying them out in a restaurant, but unless I’m surprised, I expect I’ll send them back

In reply to @moccasin

@moccasin said:

3.) In amplification mode (or slight cancel mode) they can increase high frequencies while decreasing low frequencies, or vice versa. This can help “sharpen up” voices while somewhat diminishing lower frequency background noise, but you need some degree of amplification going on to make this worth the effort. This can be painful when unexpected noises occur around you, such as a phone ringing, dog barking, someone wadding up paper, or setting a glass or plate down on hard surface, etc. I seems I have to tolerate a lot of very annoying high frequency ambient sounds in an effort to hear voices and TV. Hearing aids are much better at handling that kind of sound arena, through background reduction and personalized sound processing.

Yeah, on my hearing aids there’s a feature called Transient Noise Management that protects against loud sounds with fast recovery to preserve audibility. I suspect that most hearing aids have this as one of their basic features.

I’d like to post my own update after a month using the Bose Hearphones. First off if you check my , you can see my hearing loss is rare so my experience may be very different than others. What got me interested in trying them was I attended a HLAA chapter meeting where a guest speaker was discussing different technology he has tried to compensate for his hearing loss. He said he had a moderately severe loss and had great success with the Hearphones in noise. So I googled and read some reviews. One got me interest was a review by a woman with a low frequency hearing loss (as I have) and she was doing very well with the Hearphones so well that she started wearing them daily in lieu of her mid level aids.

So I went to the Bose store and tried them out. I was immediately impressed with their ability to cancel out noise. I bought them and have been using them in all the situations that I have had trouble with just my aids. I recently tried power domes on my aids and adjusted the fitting software for the new domes and I still have much trouble hearing in noise with my aids.

Here’s some of the situations I tried:

  • Ordering food at Qdoba. Successful
  • Returning an item at a store at the mall. Successful
  • At the grocery store - successful
  • Restaurant (busy) for dinner with wife and kids. Successful
  • Lunch meeting with 4 colleagues at a diner.
    Successful
    -Kids Halloween Party - successful
  • Noisy kids birthday party at one of those bounce/jump places. Successful

In each of the case above I took the Hearphones out for a minute and was quickly overwhelmed by noise. I mainly use the Hearphones in focused or front mode and they do a great job killing noise particularly other people’s conversations.

An added bonus is they are very in your face. Many might say that is a negative. At lunch with colleagues the other day, I was able to put on my Hearphones and say “guys, I’m not listening to music. As you all know, I have a hearing loss. These help me block out what I don’t want to hear so I can hear you all better.” I don’t like ever feeling ashamed of my hearing loss and these Hearphones have helped embolden me recently.

Like I said this is my own experience and YMMV.

Cool! I can see them being great for a low frequency loss and I think they offer greater focus than the OPNs can. I see from your review of the Siemens Binax that the narrow focus really helps you in noise. I was really hopeful they’d work for me, but I’m guessing they are better for people with low frequency losses than steep ski slope losses with normal low frequency hearing.

In reply to @Abarsanti

I’ve had mine for about 3 months now. My Starkey Halo I-90 ’s are sitting in a box. Every situation I have run across, the HearPhones outperform the Starkey’s hands down. In particular, I was able to DRASTICALLY reduce the low-frequency rumble of my car. I know that the wheel bearings were going out in the car. I couldn’t listen to the car radio at all while underway with the Starkey’s or without aids at all, but could hear the radio just fine with the HearPhones.

I’ve used the HearPhones in Amplification for conversation, but also in Noise REDUCTION with machinery. In all cases, I’ve been very pleased. I hear my WIFE much better with the HearPhones.

My $6,000 hearing aids will remain in a box, and I plan to get a second HearPhones to use while the other is charging. I find that I wear them all day, every day.

Jim

@UNIXman said:

My $6,000 hearing aids will remain in a box, and I plan to get a second HearPhones to use while the other is charging. I find that I wear them all day, every day.

Are your $6,000 hearing aids fitted with open domes? If yes, then you can’t really compare them to the Bose Hearphones unless you change to a close dome or custom mold fitting because the Hearphones is effective only because basically it’s a fitting.

If you still want a hearing aid solution and can return your Starkey, I’d recommend trying out the Sonic Enchant 100. I’ve reviewed it recently (you can search for it on this forum) and I find it VERY effective in removing background noise like road noise/engine noise/car fan noise. They even have an Automobile built-in program.

I just bought a pair over Christmas. Was using the Phonax Brio from Costco but had tremendous issues with them changing settings at the worst times on their own. So far so good with the Hearphones but they are a bit bulky and the mechanism around my neck tends to rotate on its own throughout the day. My question is about headaches and outer ear pain. Since I’ve started wearing them, I was using the medium inserts which fit well, but by the end of the day my outer ears felt like crap. Now I’ve had a headache behind my right ear for going on 5 days- not sure if the headache is from the hearphones or something else. I just changed to the small inserts and those definitely feel looser in my ears but aren’t uncomfortable. Other than that, they sound great, music sounds awesome and I love being able to have multiple custom settings. And at $500 vs. $2600 it’s a no brainer so far. I’m planning on returning the Phonaks if i adjust to these better over the next few weeks.

If you’re not getting a pretty snug fit I would think the noise blocking/reduction ability and sound quality (bass) would go down. Are you getting a good enough fit with the smalls to make the device think they’ve got a good enough seal? I’d suggest starting off with wearing them a few hours a day and gradually working up. Glad you like them. They didn’t do much for me.

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