My Whisper AI trial vs. Oticon More

@ziploc said:

I could hear the increased treble with the Whisper domes on the Mores. And I heard less treble with the More domes on the Whisper. No surprise there…

It seems a bit curious that the Oticon software recommends a bass double dome and Whisper apparently recommends a less-occlusive dome with a tiny pinhole.

I wonder why you think the Whisper dome gives more treble than the More dome? Is it simply based on what you hear with them on? Or some observation about how the domes are built?

I’m looking at the picture you took of them (shown below again for reference), and I notice that the Whisper dome has one vent hole which is not necessarily that tiny, and it seems big enough to remove some of the occlusion. The More dome has 2 vent holes, but maybe their combined vent hole area is roughly the same as the Whisper pin hole?

I guess Oticon calls their More dome a “bass” dome because it’s primarily a closed dome to seal off the low frequency from leaking out too much, while providing some occlusion relief with the 2 vent holes. The Whisper dome does not seem that far off in design, except that it has a single vent hole with perhaps a slightly larger size hole than the More dome. So why would you be talking about hearing more or less treble depending on the domes? I thought that the treble is mostly because of the highs generated from the HAs, not because one dome seals in the treble better than the other. The sealing in is more to seal in the low tones, not the treble.

At any rate, yeah, I think it’s probably best to not exchange domes in your trialing, because the prescription is optimized for their particular dome design. Exchanging them would make things more out of whack and harder to get a more consistent comparison.

How did you position your busy restaurant speaker position compared to your TED talk speaker position? Is the restaurant speaker behind you and the TED speaker in front of you? Do you have 1 speaker for each video? Or 2 speakers?

There is still an outstanding question about your More configuration which hasn’t been resolved because you were saying that you had the MoreSound Booster (or maybe its equivalent) permanently set in your default P1 program on the More all the times. I don’t know how your audi managed to do that, and what was the motivation for you to have that done by your audi in the first place? It may be OK to do that if you’re in a very complex environment all the times, but it may ruin how it should sound like if the MoreSound Booster equivalent is always employed in ALL situations.

@Volusiano, I don’t see any vent holes in the More domes. If they are there I must be missing them because they are not as obvious as the one Whisper vent hole. I’m just reporting what I heard, or at least thought I heard: more treble in the Mores with the Whisper domes. I was expecting to hear more treble so it’s possible I heard something that wasn’t really there.

These differences in sound and comprehension are hardly night and day. I sometimes struggle to decide which HA sounds better. The only striking difference has been at that one family gathering where the Whispers were definitely better for SIN.

I have one pair of computer speakers and I played both videos simultaneously through the one pair of speakers. A better test would be playing the restaurant video through four surround sound speakers and playing the TED talk through one speaker directly in front of me, but I don’t have that capability.

I guess I should make another appointment with the Oticon audi to ask about the More Sound Booster being on all the time, but I’m worried I’m beginning to ask for too many appointments. The audi really has done his best. Self-programming is starting to look better all the time.

@ziploc said:

@Volusiano, I don’t see any vent holes in the More domes. If they are there I must be missing them because they are not as obvious as the one Whisper vent hole.

Yeah, the vents in the Oticon bass dome are very hard to see, and probably just half the size of the Whisper vent hole. They’re located very near the tip of the dome. You’ll probably need a magnifying glass or use your phone camera zoomed in to see them. The tip of the Oticon bass dome has like a semi-circular bridge over the opening to add some structural integrity to the flexible dome. The vent holes are usually placed at the foot on either side of that bridge. They can get clogged up with ear wax often, so I usually would use a toothpick to clear out the vent hole whenever I feel like there’s more occlusion than usual. There’s a very short “pipe” under the dome formed around the vent hole as well, to help add to the structure rigidness of the hole.

I use the Oticon bass dome with single vent for my OPN 1. I don’t know if the More bass dome with double vent is exactly the same or not, but most likely it is, except that it has 2 vent holes.

Whisper says their innovative sound processing takes 3.7 ms to enhance a 4 ms sound segment, and a leading competitor’s processor would take 2800 ms to do the same. Perhaps they use DSP’s in the Whisper Brain too, on much faster technology than that in hearing aid earpieces. I don’t think they wanted the distinction of “only hearing aid with an external processor”, rather they had to accept it in order to achieve their goals.

No updates here; I got my Whispers on November 1st. I can’t begin to guess about upcoming hearing improvements. As for Bluetooth, I believe a fix will be forthcoming. I don’t know squat about hearing aid software, but I have enough programming experience to guess why the BT part went out in bad shape. BT in Whisper involves the phone and the Brain. You can hire phone app programming expertise, but money can’t buy Whisper Brain programmers. Their Brain programming team has probably had more important (directly hearing-related) things to work on. Not to say that BT and streaming aren’t important too, just not as important.

P.S. My Bluetooth experience is with iPhone. Android may be different/better.

Version 1.4 of the firmware was released yesterday. Is it not available through the Whisper app?

Here’s an update on my Whisper trial. I got the software update on Tuesday. I haven’t noticed any difference since I got it. I went out the last two evenings to continue trying to compare the Whispers against my Oticon Mores. Last night was a holiday “pub crawl” where a bus shuttles people among participating bars. I figured that would be an ideal test.

In three different places I tried both the Whispers and the Oticons. Two places were pretty noisy. In all of the places I found that there was no significant difference between the two HAs’ SIN performance. There was very little difference between the Whispers’ dynamic and custom (noise) programs.

With both models I had the same problem I always have in situations with lots of background speech noise: the background noise overwhelms or nearly overwhelms the target speaker. I was really hoping that the Whispers would fix this problem with its “sound separation engine”. It didn’t fix it. With each HA I still struggled to hear the target speaker. I would turn down the HA volume to the point where the background speech was comfortable, but then the target speaker was not loud enough. Increasing the volume increased the volume of the background speech just as much as the volume of the target speech.

I have another couple of weeks left in my trial, but if I had to decide now, I would return the Whispers because they are not significantly better than the Oticons. @x475aws, @happymach , and @billgem have any of you had any audi adjustments of the Whispers since the initial setup? Since no one here has seen the Whisper programming software we don’t know how much can be changed using the software. Would an additional adjustment on my Whispers make a difference? Could they be adjusted to make the custom program more beam-forming and less open? Could the sound separation engine be made stronger? I’ll probably never know. I doubt I’ll be able to get an adjustment appointment before my trial concludes. Maybe I;ll try to contact the Whisper employee audi whom I’m first talked to before I set up the appointment with the dispensing audi.

I will probably end up getting the programming hardware and trying self-programming the Oticons. I’m still not ready to accept that the settings on the Oticons are as good as they can possibly be. I need to try some minor tweaks and then undo the changes if necessary and then try something else or try combinations of multiple small tweaks. I’ll have to do self-programming to be able to do that.

Thanks for the continuing updates, @ziploc. I think there’s probably a point where no matter how good any HAs are, it’s just simply too noisy and loud to be able to manage to hear anyone properly. Was your wife able to hear conversations OK in those difficult places, or did she struggle herself as well? I guess that would be a yard stick you can probably use to measure how much to expect from HAs in general. If a normal hearing person also struggles like you do, then that’s probably about as good as it gets.

I think if you really want to take it to the next step and make it work in these almost impossible situations, you may probably have to resort to some sort of remote mic setup. If you have a ConnectClip for your More 1, then it may be worthwhile to see if the RemoteMic function on the ConnectClip can help let you hear the targeted speaker better or not in those places. I don’t know if the Whisper has an equivalent of a remote mic function in its bag of tool or not. If not now, then maybe it’s in the pipe for a future release. It’d be worthwhile to ask your Whisper HCP about it. But for now, I’d be interested to know if the ConnectClip’s remote mic feature can save the day in those situations or not. I remember a forum member (@Mark_Chambers) struggles with SIN due to asymmetrical hearing loss. I think Um_bongo and Neville both suggested the Phonak with a Roger pen as an option for him. Well, since you only have the More 1, I guess the ConnectClip remote mic function would be the closest to that suggestion that you can get for now.

What I’ve noticed from the v.1.4 update is that Bluetooth seems more reliable: the Brain remains connected to my iPhone for longer.

I have since switched audiologists, and my new one did perform thorough REM and decreased the high-frequency response somewhat, which may have had an effect on intelligibility. Since then, I confess that I too have been in a few situations where I wished the Whispers had done a better job (but I was unable to perform a direct comparison with the Oticon More 1s). I do think I will stick with the Whispers because:

1. I actually like the pricing model
2. I think there’s every reason to believe that the Whispers will get better at processing sound
3. Being in the “Brain Trust” program means that I’ll get hardware updates.

Others have stated that at the end of the 3-year period, I won’t have hearing aids unless I continue the subscription, but hearing aids will likely have improved across the board and prices may have decreased, so I could switch to the Oticon Most 1 if they’re a better option at that point.

Good idea about remote mic.

They should have put remote mic (a la roger on) in the whisper brain…

WH

@ziploc said:

@Volusiano, I was by myself last night (I;m not married). I wouldn’t be comfortable asking a stranger or a casual acquaintance to speak into or wear a remote mic.

Sorry, I presumed incorrectly that you were married. And I totally that the idea of a remote mic would only make sense if you go out with a family member and are comfortable asking the family member to wear it t hold conversation with you. But I totally agree that the idea of asking a casual acquaintance or a stranger (like your waiter or hostess or someone you just met, etc) to wear a remote mic is not apt.

It’s hard to compare someone else’s ability to hear well with their HAs to yours. It may not be about what brand/model that person wears. I suspect that he’d be successful if he wore the Whisper or More as well. It may be more about what kind of auditory cues he still has left in his brain (that you may not have left) that can sort out the cacophony despite his severe hearing loss.

I also don’t think a CIC is superior in terms of performance compared to a mini-RITE theoretically speaking, despite his swearing by it. I think it’s actually the reverse, that a RITE is usually better than the CIC in terms of performance. It’s doubtful to me personally that he’s able to wear a CIC despite claiming to have severe hearing loss. If your severe hearing loss requires a big receiver like a 100 dB one, then I’m not so sure if a CIC can fit such a large receiver AND the HA all inside the ear canal in the first place. Maybe his definition of severe hearing loss is different than the standard definition of it. But nevertheless, I’d take what he says with a grain of salt, at least in terms of comparing his experience to yours. They’re not apple to apple comparison, and whatever works for him doesn’t mean that it’ll work for you anyway.

If REM was never done then your fitting is incomplete, and maybe that’s a problem. As mentioned earlier, a sound described as “mid-rangey” doesn’t call to mind strong enough highs to make speech clear. And Whisper apparently does still need that.

Meanwhile I made a suggestion to them along those lines. According to one of the white papers, Whisper uses the Brain’s processing speed to identify speech in segments of sound, rather than running the sound through a cascade of processing that hopes to highlight speech. So, if I understand correctly, when they finish with a sound segment they know where the speech is, within the limitations of their algorithm. Why can’t they emphasize the highs in the speech-containing part of the segment? Seems like this could be an alternative to what we’re all told now, “Accept shrill or tinny sound overall in the interest of speech intelligibility, and you’ll get used to it”. Could also help with feedback.

@x475aws said:

If REM was never done then your fitting is incomplete, and maybe that’s a problem.

While this comment was directed @ziploc, I think it was @happymach who mentioned that he had a mobile audi who doesn’t do REM, but in a recent post, he said the he switched to a new audi who did REM for him.

So I presume that @ziploc had REM done on his Whisper for him, but it’d be less confusing if @ziploc can confirm that he did have REM done on the Whisper to clarify the situation for everyone here.