The difference between Oticon More tier 1 to tier 3

@Zebras

Well appreciated - There is a major difference as shown in the diagram.

Recently bought More 3’s for my mum because the more 1’s are beyond our budget - however she only has moderate hearing loss so I hope that it will still make a major difference to her hearing loss especially in listening to speech.

To put it in simple language, the comes down to tough hearing situations versus easy hearing situations. If you are in tough hearing situations often, it may be worth it to go with higher capability HAs (regardless of brand) and if you are a stay at home person not in tough hearing situations, then the lower tier models will save you money you will rarely miss.

The higher tier HAs have features for noise and special situations the lower ones don’t have. The lower tier units can almost always be fit to the hearing loss, but may not help you as much if you are in a noisy restaurant or party. Those situations may still be tough, even with premium HAs.

WH

Yes but as the environments change and become more challenging the lesser tier aids don’t normally fair as well as the higher tier aids.

Try reading this:

Oticon More3 (vs More1) Might Be Capable Enough For Some

I’ve been having a bit of fun with @Volusiano for the past few days, lacing some of my posts with sarcastic references to my “pore, crippled up, dumbed down, less capable More3s”. The origin of this latest bout of hilarity was a detailed explanation that @Volusiano gave to a new More1 user who was not getting “More” from their new devices. The bottom line was that More1, with its higher noise attenuation and number of alternative adjustment scenarios, should be more capable of providing a bette…

Just click on the blue title text.

I think this issue is often over-simplified. It depends on the users requirements in noise. In my clinic, we always do a QSiN (speech in noise test). This tells us how much separation a person needs between the volume of background noise relative to speech in order to hear speech reasonably well. We then match their score to the most suitable device/technology level. The more advanced the technology, the more background noise suppression applied, thereby creating greater separation between speech and noise. Someone who doesn’t need much support in noise probably won’t notice much difference between the MORE 3 and More 1. Someone who does need a lot of the support is more likely to notice an improvement with higher technology levels.

Do you know if your mum’s audiologist performed QSiN? If so, let me know her score and we might be able to provide a more insightful response that is more specific to your mum’s hearing abilities.

Hope that helps

@cvkemp said:

At the VA clinics that I have used the speech understanding in noise is the most important test that I get. At least my experience is that white noise is piped into one ear by way of headphones while the word recognition test is piped to the other ear. I have also had word recognition test done without the white noise just for a comparison.

I wonder what you mean by white noise here. If it’s just artificially created mechanical noise, that’s hardly representative at all of the babbles of speech and myriad of other sounds including background music that you typically find in a restaurant. Or constant traffic noise and road noise when you’re in a car.

The other thing that doesn’t sound right in this test you mentioned is that piping the noise into one ear via headphones then piping single words into the other ear also hardly simulates properly what you actually hear in a noisy environment. First of all, both the noise and the speech should be fed to both ears simultaneously in order to simulate anything close enough to the real world. Secondly, the single words they feed you one at a time for recognition is far from complete full sentences you’d hear from human speeches in real life.

So even if it does measure and give you some degree of speech over noise separation, what you described above is far from accurately simulating a real life environment which would require your brain to do speech over noise separation in a different way. I’d take that test you describe above with a grain of salt and I wouldn’t consider it important for myself because it just doesn’t sound like a realistic simulation at all.

@Volusiano said:

Secondly, the single words they feed you one at a time for recognition is far from complete full sentences you’d hear from human speeches in real life

Exactly, Mr V … Exactly!

Oh agreed but it is much better than just using the sound proof room. And my results since having that test is that my speech understanding in noisy environments has been improved greatly. While not proof it is much better than no noise test at all.

Not sure what you mean. They say sentence that ask you to say a word they want you to reply with. It is a standard test that I have ever time my hearing is tested. My Audiologist is in one side of the sound proof room I am on the other side we are separated by a glass wall.

I agree that having some kind of a noise test, no matter how unrealistic it is, is better than having no noise test at all.

In terms of getting some kind of good result out of the test, I guess it depends on what actionable item they would take to tweak the settings on your hearing aids to improve your score if they did the test again after whatever tweak(s) they did to your settings. If they did the test just to show you how well (or badly) you score, but didn’t take any actionable item, then you simply would just know what the result is without having the result improved.

If they did some tweaking then test you again after the tweaks to look for better results, then I wonder what they’d do other than cranking up the Neural Noise Suppression value to a higher (or the highest value). It seems like you’d want to avoid tweaking the gain curves too much in the Fine Tuning section because even if it may help with noisy situations, it may adversely affect your experience in normal or quiet situations when there’s no noise. So the most logical and easiest tweak with minimal adverse effects is simply to turn up the Neural Noise Suppression value so that it’d help when it’s noisy, but it doesn’t mess things up when it’s not noisy.

For this, you don’t really need a speech in noise test, you’d just do it (increase the NNS values) and send the patient out to the real world to see if it helps then report back to you. OK, doing an in-office white noise over word recognition to measure for a better result or not is better than nothing. But what I’m trying to say is that even if you get better results from that hokey “pipe noise in one ear, pipe words in the other ear” test, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’d get the same better result in real life.

So I really hope that the QSiN test that @Louie mentioned is much more than the white noise test that @cvkemp described at the VA office.

@cvkemp said:

Not sure what you mean. They say sentence that ask you to say a word they want you to reply with. It is a standard test that I have ever time my hearing is tested. My Audiologist is in one side of the sound proof room I am on the other side we are separated by a glass wall.

I assume what you mean here by saying a full sentence and ask you to repeat the word is like “Say the word ‘man’”, "Say the word ‘truck’, etc. That’s basically the Word Recognition Test, and the fact that they use full sentences to ask you to repeat a word doesn’t make it any different or better because it’s still just single word recognition.

Also true. But at least it isn’t like some places placing you in a room with a computer peeping tones at you and your response is the only test you get. That is so ridiculous and useless. I went with my neighbor to her audiologist appointment and that is what was done. From that simple test the person was advised to get hearing aids that I never heard of at a cost of almost $10,000. I advised her to just leave. I called my VA audiologist and asked his advice on a clinic for her. She got a real test and real aids that were really adjusted.