Bose self-fitting hearing aids are finally here (Bose SoundControl™)

You can still hear sounds around you, but softer. Sort of like a fader on a car stereo that changes the volume of the front/rear speakers.

Wife and I were at a restaurant last night. Noise around of course with annoying music playing over junk speakers. I was having trouble hearing her. Put it in “focus” and the surrounding sounds got quieter (and the music became less annoying) and I could understand her perfectly. A wonderful feature.

What do you mean by focusing? Do you do it with the app on your smartphone?

There have been few opportunities to try out my new Phonak P90 in indoor noisy environments because of lockdowns. However I was in a restaurant last weekend and was having problems. The main issue was that our table was too near the kitchen with its extractor fans. Autosense didn’t switch to the correct program.

Stupid me forgot to go to MyPhonak and manually focus in like Fig did. Next time.

@KeithL
Usually the fitter adds such a manual programm, then you can activate it by pressing longer to one of the HA’s toggle buttons.

@Fig said:

You can still hear sounds around you, but softer. Sort of like a fader on a car stereo that changes the volume of the front/rear speakers.

Wife and I were at a restaurant last night. Noise around of course with annoying music playing over junk speakers. I was having trouble hearing her. Put it in “focus” and the surrounding sounds got quieter (and the music became less annoying) and I could understand her perfectly. A wonderful feature.

Interesting. I’ll have to test this out.

Is there any chance, in the not too distant future, that a version suitable for serious losses like mine will come out?

Or perhaps the problem is the impossibility of creating personalized snails yourself, indispensable for this type of loss

@lello58 said:

Is there any chance, in the not too distant future, that a version suitable for serious losses like mine will come out?

Can’t see this happening, OTC laws that were passed for mild/moderate only, for serious and profound you’d need new laws passed, as HAs of this type have very high output, it’s just to dangerous for the layman to be playing with, so no they will stay classed as medical devices as they should be.

@kevels55 said:

There will always be a place for laymen or DIY’ers, Target software essentially does its own thing, which most computer literate can easily negotiate or navigate around, it looks complicated, but once you are fairly familiarised with the software, it ain’t rocket science!

Absolutely I couldn’t agree more, being a DIY type for a long time myself.

@kevels55 said:

there is no better person to program a set of aids than the end user,

Again I 100% agree with you here.

@kevels55 said:

if they are competent enough?

Yes sure, but this is why I should have used another term instead of layman, you wouldn’t want someone who’s not “competent” or just not confident messing around with settings at that MPO or more (a lot more for the profound losses)
I’m pretty sure this is how the manufacturers and audiology professors of the day were able to get HAs classed as medical devices in the first place.

@kevels55 said:

I decided to change the algorithm from; Adaptive Phonak Digital 2.0, to DSL v 5a Adult which I have used previously on other Phonak aids, reset the acoustic parameters, and Woohoo, we are now cooking again with gas, what a difference

Thats great, I like when I “hear” success stories like this, although I like to just stick to whatever settings I have saved, it’s not always possible, as unfortunately my hearing changes on a regular basis!

Thank you @tenkan, I am much obliged for the kind words…. I learned a long time ago, that success is a very fleeting thing, especially when it’s in conjunction with severe hearing loss, just when you think you have cracked it, something or other rears it’s ugly head, and kicks you where it hurts! Perhaps fate, or Karma from a previous existence, but I try to remain positive, not always easy though! I am sorry to hear you have your own trials and tribulations, the lot of we HOH is never an easy path, and when misfortune calls, we just have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down, except it, and move on….I wish you all the best in the future, take care, cheers Kev

I sold my HearPhones so I’m going off memory but I remember them fully occluding my ear canals with essentially a power dome style ear tip. The SoundControl aids have an open or closed dome option. The closed domes appear to be single vented. So out of the box, I don’t think they can acoustically reproduce the noise cancellation of the HearPhones, but I could be wrong.

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Yep! I’m working on being 76. I remember at ~age 4 or 5 that my maternal grandmother had a real “icebox,” and would take frequent deliveries of packaged ice to her door to keep the “refrigerator” running. Fresh milk was delivered daily to her back doorstep, too.

I’m not too nostalgic about how good the “good ol’ days” were. We’re all a lot more materially wealthy in terms of everyday goods and purchasing options than we were back then.

I did always like the opinion of a scientist acquaintance of mine, though. He judged how “wealthy” he was in terms of how many months salary it took him to buy his favorite GM model car back in the day… Maybe we oldsters can now apply the same algorithm to our favorite HA’s? (just to sorta get back on topic!).

I came on here because I was really enthusiastic about my new Bose HA. A lot of people have accused of being a troll but I promise you I’m not. I’m at a solid month using them and very satisfied in their performance but… 2 days ago the focus, which has 2 functions, a front facing and a multi-directional setting and the multi-directional stopped working. I called Bose support and they were patient, generous with their time and knew what they were doing. They walked me through several steps to try and fix the issue and were not able to. As I was still using them, I started getting a crackling noise in the one with the issue and shortly after, it stopped working altogether. They had authorized a replacement before it stopped working altogether and sent me a UPS label to send my current set back with the caveat that they needed to get notice that I dropped them off at UPS until they shipped the new pair. They did a follow up phone call the following day and also sent me an extra pack of batteries. To my surprise, 2 days later which is today, a new set arrived and I haven’t even printed the UPS label yet. Once you set them up once, it’s simple so I was back in business immediately. I was worried because I have 2 meetings tomorrow in our office. One is with my boss and coworker and the other is a review on a 100 K job I just sold via the internet. So that problem is solved, Bose was excellent in their customer care but I’m very concerned that one of these HA crapped out in less than a month. Hopefully this is a one off situation and not an indicator of a problematic product. A great performing HA that’s unreliable is not a good thing. Moving forward, I’ll troll you on my experiences.

Had a chance to try them out yesterday… Here are some screenshots I took from app:

[18 new items added to shared album] Bose Hearing Aids

The app works really well, and the aids seem really responsive to changes I made on the sound settings. Overall I’m impressed. There was feedback for me if I turned up the highs too loud, so I think there is a pretty hard limit on how bad your high frequencies can be for these to be useful. Probably no worse than mild. Hopefully they improve the feedback reduction in future models. The setup was dead simple and I found adjusting sound seemed straightforward. I can see why most people can dial in decent audibility using this approach.

@AbramBaileyAuD said:

I think there is a pretty hard limit on how bad your high frequencies can be for these to be useful. Probably no worse than mild.

So the OP says he’s severe loss, go figure.

Do they supply different size, types of domes?