Philips 9030 can't eliminate background noise

@jcw11 I thought that was the philosophy of Oticon/Demant with the More/OPN HAs, but not the Philips/Demant brands.

As far as I understand things, I thought the AI in the Philips 9030 was a Noise Reduction AI algorithm.

The OP just made a very generalized statement without being clear. Of course the Philips 9030 can do noise reduction and reduce background noise. Not sure what the OP meant by “eliminating” it like the Rexton does by cutting off the back mics. The OP needs to go back to his or her Costco HCP and bring the issue to their attention to get it addressed. It doesn’t help for the OP to make a very short and vague statement on a thread like this to start out with, not without providing more elaboration on the issue.

And @whatdidtheysay is correct that the Philips 9030 doesn’t support the “open” paradigm like the OPN/S/More HAs do.

Below is an example programming screen of the 9030’s features:

I believe it really just comes down to different marketing language for similar technologies. Philips may not use the “open paradigm” terminology that Oticon does, but at the foundation, the two brands still utilize the same philosophy. Philips says its AI “innovation trains the hearing aid to first listen to speech in noise, then apply the learning to make speech clearer even in noisy environments.” Oticon says its Brain Hearing technology “gives the brain more of the relevant information it needs to make better sense of sound, so you can get better speech understanding with less effort and the ability to remember more.” A whole lot of different words to kind of say the same thing. My point would be that neither focus on noise attenuation and mic beamforming, which is what most other brands have historically focused on and advertised.

Just like the Signia AX advertises its dual processing in their chip, and Rexton instead just calls it “Bi-Core” … are we really going to try to argue they’re completely different? I’m not suggesting the chips/technology are exact, but they use the same fundamental approach. Parent companies for these brands generally will share core technologies.

I started this thread because I only have had the Phlips 9030 for a week and I wasn’t sure if I was missing the concept of background reduction. Your comments have made me aware that these HA’s are designed to make speech clearer. I was hoping to eliminate background speech in a noisy restaurant. The Rextons should do that.

@prc50 said:

I was hoping to eliminate background speech in a noisy restaurant. The Rextons should do that.

@prc50: This conclusion intrigues me, especially in the light of @jcw11 's enlightened post.

May I ask what brought you to this conclusion?

@Volusiano said:

The reason I mentioned that I didn’t think the Philips 9030 is designed with the open paradigm in mind like the Oticon OPN/S/More is because of an anecdotal sharing from a forum member (Tony, aka @Abarsanti ) who had the OPN, then went on to try out the Philips 9030 for a while, but then returned it and bought the More. If I remember correctly, Tony reported that he like the Philips 9030 a lot, and it does a very good job of improving speech and reducing noise. But particularly, I recall that he said that the 9030 seems to suppress noise a lot more aggressively than the open paradigm a la OPN that he was used to.

I have both the Philips 9030 and the Oticon More 1s right now. This is what I’m finding as well. I am logging my experiences with both HAs and will share my experiences and comparisons with the forum when I am complete. But here is a row from one of my observations:

Then I would get the Rexton

Why Rexton, the comparison was Oticon, Phillips and no doubt others from Demant.

Oh yeah for sure, however I thought you were replying to @whatdidtheysay .

@jay_man2 said:

I’m currently wearing Philips HearLink 9030s and demoed Mores before buying them. My experience is that they both sound very natural and “open.” I don’t hear much of a difference between the two.

I think the marketing/literature of the two aids is presented in such a way as to obfuscate the lack of any substantive difference, and maintain the wide price gap between the two models.

I don’t doubt that the 9030 sounds natural and open, depending on what you define “open”. In simple and medium environment where speech in noise is not a challenge, there’s no reason why the 9030 or most HAs don’t want to let you hear everything. It’s in very noisy and complex environments is where the difference may become more apparent. The Philips 9030 may start to do more aggressive noise reduction in this scenario to help with speech clarity, while the More may not be aggressive in terms of noise reduction, but more in terms of rebalancing the soundscape to clarify speech more while still letting you hear the rest of the sounds more or less without subduing them too much. But everybody’s experience may be different as well. If you don’t get exposed to very complex and noisy environments often, then you may find your listening experience to both of them very similarly enjoyable.

It’s not to say that the open paradigm is the preferred experience by most people. Although I wear the OPN, sometimes in very noisy situations, I may not always care to hear all that noise (depending on what those sounds are), even though others may. In that case, the 9030 may give me a more enjoy experience than the OPN/S/More experience.

I started out with the Rexton BiCores and now have the Philips 9030. The one thing I did notice right away is that the Philips and not the Rexton did a better job with dulling the noise in a place like a Costco warehouse for instance. Not totally but a big help. There is a noise and speech in noise program and the latter didn’t do much about the noise so I’ve stuck with the former and set the speech clarifier to medium in that program. The Rexton did very little to my ears and the directionality function did not seem to make even a little bit of difference. I had the Rextons for about 2 months and the Philips now for about the same amount of time. I’m still a frustrated new HA user but I am happier with the Philips than I was with the Rexton’s and probably have more realistic expectations now too. I’ve even made my first DIY tweak that helped a bit without having to wait 2 weeks for a Costco appointment.

I found that the speech in noise program didn’t do anything useful. In fact, I found the standard program was better (but still not very good in that situation). I had Costco change to another version of the program, but I don’t think that it’s any better. I’ll have to go see them again. I was somewhat surprised that they didn’t have a way to actually test it (i.e. a sample speech in noise audio track).