Oticon introduces Oticon More

I agree with both of you I didn’t get the WOW from the More 1 niether and I wore them for 2 weeks. My OPN 1 are just as good, so until I have to upgrade I am not spending the money on somehting that an improvement to OPN 1.

I guess the good news in this is that it goes to show how the OPN and OPN S are very good products already to begin with. It also goes to show how Oticon marketing is good at hyping up their products, but that’s already common knowledge.

It’s also consistent with the fact that they only claim a 15% improvement in speech understanding over the OPN. That’s very marginal and definitely is not a wow factor. They also claim a 30% more sound delivered to the brain in the More, but the OPN is quite opened up to plenty of sounds already, so unless you’re in a significantly noisy environment, it probably wouldn’t be a very noticeable improvement.

I’m following the suggestion to stick with my OPN 1 for a bit longer until I need to get replacement before I would consider the More.

For what it is worth, I also have the OPN 1 and did not feel there was enough difference to justify changing. I wore the More’s for 2 weeks.

I will add that I am an Android user and one of the main reasons I wanted to try the More’s was their support for ASHA on Android. Here are my thoughts on the bluetooth in general (in random order)

• The sound quality was good. I have never streamed with my aids before so I was not able to compare this to anything else except my Bose noise suppressing earbuds, but the sound was very clear.
• Music however has no bass at all. This was not unexpected.
• Calls were very clear. I loved this until I realized that the bluetooth added a noticeable delay when talking. This is also not surprising in retrospect. Normal bluetooth (when not using Aptx LL) adds 100-300 milliseconds each way, so I assume the delay was similar here. It made phone calls awkward and disjointed. I had several calls where I and the caller would wait to talk the appropriate amount of time and then start talking, only to end up talking over the other person. It turns out that humans instinctively wait several hundred milliseconds for a pause by the other person to indicate that they want you to talk. If you don’t talk in that timeframe then they start talking again. Well, what happens when using the aids for calls is that it adds just enough delay to cause the other person to stat talking again, tripping up the conversation. I may get used to this, but random callers will not.
• There is no way to tell the phone that you want bluetooth connected for the Oticon On app and phone calls, but not notifications. This is surely old news for iPhone users, but this is a problem that the phone manufactures need to figure out. When I am tucking my child in for the night I do not want to get every notification on my phone dinging in my ear. Turning off notifications altogether is a non-starter as well as I need to hear them from my phone at times. This is not an Oticon problem, but it is a problem none-the-less.

Given all of this I made the decision that I don’t, in fact, want to have connected hearing aids. This was a bitter pill for me as I have been waiting for it for many years. I guess you do have to be careful what you wish for.

With the iPhone, notifications (like from text messaging) does not go into the OPN. If you have sound enabled on the iPhone, the notification chime comes from the iPhone, and you just hear it through the OPN mics. If you have silent mode set on the iPhone, then you don’t hear any notification chime at all, not from the iPhone and not from the OPN.

Which Android phone do you have that you were able to get to stream directly into the More without the ConnectClip? It looks like the iPhone does it right, but your Android phone needs to give you some better notification options through Bluetooth ASHA support.

Hi. I’ve had my Widex Evoke 440 hearing aids for a while. In September, 2020, I retired and am now focused on music (playing piano, composing music, etc.). I.e. my needs have changed and I’m no longer satisfied with my Evokes. Voice quality is becoming poorer, music quality is not great, and they squeal badly under headphones. Since I spend 8-10 hours a day wearing headphones, listening to or creating music, this has become a major issue.

I’m working with my audiologist to see if she can resolve the issues with the Evokes. But I’m looking for alternatives. Reviews I’ve read recommend 5 HAs for musicians - three Resound, one Phonak, and the Oticon Opn. Apparently, the Oticon More is the new replacement for the Opn.

My primary needs are: excellent speech recognition, very good music quality, and minimal or no feedback with headphones. Lower cost and replaceable batteries are nice to have. So…

Does anyone have experience with the More HA’s? Especially when listening to music? And especially with headphones?

I’d like to move fairly quickly so I’d love to hear your experience the More.

Thanks and regards,

Dan.

Does anyone have experience with the More HA?

Based on the comments, it looks like there’s a Bluetooth latency when using ASHA.
Has anyone tried with an iPhone? Is the the Bluetooth latency significant when using MFi?

@dan_public said:

My primary needs are: excellent speech recognition, very good music quality, and minimal or no feedback with headphones. Lower cost and replaceable batteries are nice to have.

I thought Widex hearing aids are touted for their excellence in music listening, so it’s interesting to hear that you find the music quality no so great with your Evoke 440.

Does your Widex have telecoil? I think for headphones listening, telecoil equipped hearing aids have an advantage because the telecoil will pick up the electromagnetic field from the headphones’ speakers so you don’t have to rely on the HA’s mics picking up sounds from the headphones, which can be more prone to feedback due to wearing headphones. So if your Evoke has telecoil, have you tried to use it for headphones? If not, telecoil would be something you want in your next HA.

The Oticon More has telecoil built-in so it should be good for headphones listening with no feedback. It also has the new feedback prevention technology (on top of the traditional feedback control technology) introduced from the OPN S line and carried over to the More, so it should help a lot with feedback when listening live through the mics (instead of streaming or through the telecoil).

I have the OPN 1 and it’s very good for music so I’d expect the More to perform the same way. Speech recognition is also very good. The More is supposed to be 15% better on this compared to the OPN S.

The More is too new for people to have extensive experience with it like you’re looking for. Most folks have only worn it for a few weeks. Their reports seem to be no ground breaking improvement compared to the OPN/S, more like only minor incremental improvement.

@markoo355 said:

Is there an audiologist who could record a video, How to change the battery to “Oticon more”
I am curious and I think there are others. I can’t find anything on youtube.

Didn’t you see the video posted about a dozen posts above for the OPN BTE PP? I’d imagine that it’d be just the same for the More. Seems very simple.

thank you. I didn’t notice that the battery changed either. I thought it was just changing that FM add-on.

@dan_public said:

First, there is no “T” program in my HAs. Second and more importantly, the sound is coming from my headphones and NOT the iPhone.

I understand that you’re not talking about streaming (sound coming from the iPhone), but you’re talking about sound coming from the speakers inside your headphones.

Perhaps you’re not familiar with how the Tcoil in hearing aids work. What you’re doing in your case sounds like you just let the speakers inside your headphones generate sound waves through the air, reaching and picked up by the mics of your hearing aids. That’s the conventional way of listening, but not the tcoil way. It can cause feedback because the headphones cover up the ears and hearing aids, creating a feedback loop.

But what you don’t realize is that the speakers inside your headphones, beside pushing out pressures into the air to create soundwaves picked up by your HAs’ mics, the magnets that’s part of the speakers inside your headphones also generate the equivalent electromagnetic waves in parallel to the sound waves in the air. So in full-timeTcoil mode, the HA uses only the Tcoil to pick up the electromagnetic waves and not use the mics to pick up the sound waves. This solves the feedback issue caused by the headphones covering up your ears and HAs.

Apparently, @a2wheelerte said that the Oticon OPN S1 also has a mixed mode that uses both the tcoil and the mics together so you can hear sound from the electromagnetic waves from the headphones AND still pick up surrounding environmental sounds using the mics (in case your headphones are the open-back or on-the-ear type that lets in external sounds).

Volusiano,

Hi. I just got back from an appointment with my Audi. There are two different issues with two different solutions and no crossover. How does this related to the Oticon More? Hopefully I can find a better solution with the More.

The first issue is between the Widex HAs, and the iPhone and iPad. Although it’s a bit of a hack, my HAs now connect to my iPad or iPhone. No headphones involved.

The solution to this issue works, but it’s not great. It appears that the iPhone X (10) and iPad don’t play that well with Widex HAs. The HAs can not connect to both Apple devices at the same time. After working on a solution for over an hour, we discovered that the only stable solution was to turn on Bluetooth on one and turn off Bluetooth on the other. Turning on Bluetooth on both devices caused the configuration to go corrupt. It’s a bit of a hack, but it works (I hope).

The second issue is between headphones and HAs. In this solution, HAs are just standalone with no connection between the HAs and the music workstations. The only sound comes from the headphones. The headphones are required because the Widex HAs simply can not provide the sound quality necessary, especially in the low midrange and base notes.

The problem has been feedback. My Audi created a new program that hopefully with eliminate the feedback. I’ll test this tomorrow morning.

I’m hoping that Oticon More HA scan provide a simpler, better solution that eliminates the feedback squeal.

Thanks for the information.

Dan.

@dan_public The issue with not being able to connect to multiple Apple devices at the same time is not isolated to the Widex only. It’s the same with Oticon HAs. I suspect it’s the same with most other hearing aid brands/models that provide MFI support. You can “pair” the HA to multiple Apple devices but you cannot “connect” to them at the same time. You can only connect to one at a time and that’s why you need to turn BT off on the other one. Technically the Apple devices are supposed to be smart enough to hand-off the connection from one device to another, but I’ve only seen it work a couple of times randomly, and most of the times it doesn’t do it. I think this is an Apple MFI issue, not an HA issue.

But you’re right that streaming will not give you the ability to hear low frequency sounds decently enough. You want to use headphones to get this kind of sound quality. But headphones present the issue with feedback (depending on how badly the hearing loss is). That is why I kept trying to explain to you that the telecoil option is the ultimate solution to eliminate feedback when using headphones. But having said that, it’s possible to listen with HAs that don’t have telecoil through headphones without feedback if you have the right feedback prevention technology to tackle the issue. Like currently I can use the OPN 1 with headphones with minimal feedback. Or I can use the OPN 1 built-in mini coil with headphones without any feedback at all.

The OPN S and the More does have a new feedback prevention technology that nobody else has (and not available in the original OPN which I have either) that can potentially solve this issue for you without needing a telecoil for headphones use. So it’s worth trying it out. But the More also has telecoil built-in, so that should give you many options, either using telecoil with headphones, or use the new feedback prevention technology for headphones use without resorting to the telecoil mode. You really should give it a try.

I currently have OPN 1 and I have started a trial of the OPN More 1 yesterday, so it’s been about 24 hours with them.

I’m pretty impressed with these so far, but agree it’s not a “wow” factor as compared to when I went from my old Stark Xino to the Oticon OPN 1 originally. Things do sound clearer compared to my OPN 1 including speech/dialog, including what I’m watching on TV.

Here is my audiogram in case that’s helpful for people to know:

I can understand why people are saying the dfifference isn’t night and day dramatic. For me, due to my insurance, the More 1 will probably only cost me about $1300 out of pocket, which would include new ear molds and meeting a $500 insurance deductible which I haven’t met yet due to it being so early in the year.

So for me, the ROI evaluation is really about whether these are worth $1300 or not, and not whether they are worth the full selling price. For me, it’s $5495 through my audiologist which is unbundled pricing (includes all adjustments within 45 days).

One thing I noticed is that when streaming is that the Oticon iOS app lets me adj the EQ for low/mid/high, which I don’t recall ever having with my OPN 1. Perhaps it’s a new app feature that i just didn’t notice before now. Listening to music isn’t great through the streaming, but I find that feature invaluable (as I did on my OPN 1) for taking calls, and generally listening to stuff like random youtube videos or podcasts where audio quality isn’t paramount importance.

Another thing to mention is how much better feedback control is with this. With my OPN 1, I had to have a separate program created for my over the ear headphones, since I like to wear my HAs while I wear my over the ear bose headphones. I could never not have feedback kick in with my OPN 1, so the headphone program was created to dial down the levels/gain. It worked but music sounded thinner and was a pain to manage switching profiles. With the More 1, no special program is needed. I could use the same standard program that is setup for my hearing.

Lastly, I really like the rechargeable option. Yesterday, had them on all day from 11am through midnight, with probably 2 hours worth of total audio streaming and was at 50% battery left at the end fo the day. The charging station is a little bulky, but it’s a nice setup on the nightstand. It’ll be annoying to travel with it, so I hope later on they make some type of travel optimize charger, which maybe could include a hybrid corded+battery case so you could charge on the go in a pinch (e.g. long layover or set of flights).