Philips 9040 added to HearSuite, new model coming to Philips

@Volusiano said:

I take it back what I said earlier about the 9040 doesn’t have a new Wind Noise management feature.

@nqq98392 said:

This just proves you have no idea what you’re talking about. Everything you posted was wild speculation. You don’t work for the manufacturer. You weren’t involved in the development of the hearing aids. You’ve never even worn the hearing aids. All you did was read a few marketing whitepapers and fabricated this fantasy explanation that seeks to justify your belief that Oticon is better than Demant’s other brands.

@nqq98392 → wow, such uncalled for hostility! Does anybody here on this forum work for any of the HA mfg that you know about? How I wish there are people who work for the HA mfgs on this forum so we can hear right from the horses’ mouths! All any of the users on this forum have are marketing materials from the HA mfgs, or info from the HCPs. That’s what spur all these discussions of new aids, beside people’s hands-on experience.

When you said that I’ve never worn the hearing aids, you couldn’t even say it right. Of course I wear hearing aids. I’ve worn hearing aids for the last 30+ years. Oh, you meant to say that I’ve never worn the Philips hearing aids? So is anybody who has not worn the Philips hearing aids not allowed to participate in this thread? Please show me where that rule is.

And I challenge you to show me ANY of my post anywhere which I said that Oticon is better than other Demant’s brands. I only said they are different. Please back up you claim.

At least if my analysis doesn’t seem to add up due to new information, I own up to it and clarified what I find wrong with it right away. One wrong analysis doesn’t prove any of the things you say above. And it could be wrong simply because now the companies share the same core but they didn’t before. That’s not a wrong analysis, that’s new information that may make an old analysis outdated. Outdated is not the same as wrong.

@SpudGunner said:

"sister " companies

Except, I believe Philips is not a sister company. They are a company that has licensed some of the technology so they are affiliated but not owned by Demant.

William Demant and Philips Enter into Hearing Aid Branding Partnership33

William Demant—owner of Oticon, Sonic, and Bernafon—has announced a licensing agreement to bring Philips-branded solutions to hearing healthcare.

@prodigyplace: Please be more generous with your parsing. I think you understand the general principle I’m trying to invoke.

My point it they are more like a distant cousin than one of the sisters.

This would be like saying Ford hybrids were the same as the Toyota Prius because Ford licensed some of the technology. Toyota did not license all of it.

@prodigyplace: Well - I should have done my homework more thoroughly - and I concede this point to you, however, I don’t think it masks Oticon’s current degree of possessiveness in regards of their technology too much.

But you’re correct - being a licencee versus being a sybsidiary does make a significant difference. Sorry for my sloppiness.

It’d make sense for sister companies to share technologies more easily compared to a licensee/affiliated company to obtain technology from the mother company. But still, no matter how many similarities they may share between them, conventional wisdom says that they must still maintain some kind of key differentiation, or else why would William Demant want to keep 2 (or 3) companies that sell essentially the same product under different brandings anyway? It’d just be simpler and probably cheaper to merge them together and be done with it. But since William Demant acquired Oticon and Sonic and Bernafon over the years, they probably already have developed different technical innovations and have had separate product histories way back, so the product differentiation is easy to do, if not even crucial to keep and maintain to reach a wider portion of the market.

But with Philips, while they had a hearing aid arm way back, they did sell it out to Beltone 24 years ago already. So they’re in a different position as a William Demant licensee because they don’t have a heritage of hearing aid technology development under them anymore. William Demant licensed to them because Philips has an extensive reach into the health care market, so WD hopes to be able to leverage this reach from Philips to expand further into those sales channels in the Philips HealthCare arm. From this perspective, the technology differentiation becomes less important (like what they have with the 3 sisters), but what’s important is to take whatever sells best between the 3 sisters, or whatever else they may have cooking in the WD incubators, to give to Philips to expand into the Philips sales arm. From this angle, it would make sense if Philips may eventually be given the same core from one of the 3 sisters.

What I’m speculating here, at the risk of being accused of talking out of thin air by certain folks here who are hostile to me, is that when Oticon developed the AI DNN for their More, they came up with several DNN versions. The one that fits best with the open paradigm, they implemented it in the More. One of the other versions (with a focus on speech in noise), they gave to Philips to package and sell. It’s possible that with the 9040, WD might have decided to give Philips the Oticon More DNN core that has the added Wind handling which became the Real DNN. It’s also possible that they decided to train the Wind handling directly to the Philips AI core as well, like they did with the Real DNN core. So it’s not a foregone conclusion that if Philips now has the Wind feature, then they must have the Oticon Real DNN core.

All we can do is speculate for new releases, and share our personal anecdotal experiences on old and current releases. That’s what this forum is all about. Anyone who doesn’t like to participate in these kinds of speculation of new releases can simply choose to ignore and not read these posts. There’s really no need to get hostile and turn an interesting speculative discussion into a bad thing.

I went to Costco to get tested and fitted for new aids. I tried out the Jabra and mentioned I might switch to the 9040 when they come out. My specialist mentioned that it should drop to Costco in a week or so as that is when they are expected to come in. I also found some new FDA report and new reviews of the product (albeit in German) via Google.

How much for the 9040?

I pickup my Jabra 10 rechargeable today

Same price as for the 9030s — $1600 for pair. Also still available as 312 battery option.

Nice that they still sell disposable battery model.

WH

I went off the advice of the hearing aid specialist at the time. I felt comparing both in the scenario of walking around and conversing with the free samples staff with some background noise and conversing with the specialist that both hearing aid’s were fairly good high quality aids when we found the right domes and settings, just the Jabra’s was like 10% better so I went with those.

I could not tell you if the 9040s will be better in specific conditions as marketed (wind AI), and would welcome input from others that tried it on. I can say that my initial impression is that both aid’s were about the same level with Jabra having a slight edge for me.

Likewise I’ll need to try the Jabra’s for a few months to be absolutely sure I’d want that or not, and may switch to Philip at that time.

BTW, I forgot to ask for a copy of my audiogram, but from memory it is fairly uniform with 20-30 DB loss for low pitch up to 1000hz, 30-50DB loss between 1000hz to 4000hz, and 70DB loss at 8000 and higher

TLDR: this was my own initial impressions from trying for 30 minutes, if you’re in the market, go try them on yourself

@user351 said:

Likewise I’ll need to try the Jabra’s for a few months to be absolutely sure I’d want that or not, and may switch to Philip at that time.

BTW, I forgot to ask for a copy of my audiogram, but from memory it is fairly uniform with 20-30 DB loss for low pitch up to 1000hz, 30-50DB loss between 1000hz to 4000hz, and 70DB loss at 8000 and higher

Yeah, I agree with you that it’s best to trial one set of aids at a time, and since you’d have to pay for the aids to be able to take them home to try it out more, it wouldn’t make sense to pay for both aids and try them in parallel. If you choose to try the Jabra first because you think it has a slight edge over the 9040, then it makes sense.

The only thing I wanted to point out was that walking around Costco alone shouldn’t be sufficient to decide to settle on which aid permanently, but for sure it’s enough to decide to settle on which aid to try out first.

But do keep an open mind that even if you’re perfectly happy with the Jabra after a few months, I think the 9040 is also worth trying out to compare if you’re willing to invest more time and money (temporarily until you decide which one to return). I assume that both of them cost the same?

Also search this forum for Philips vs Jabra threads to see what other people think. I found this one Philips vs. Jabra (Costco decision), but there may be more as well.

By the way, I think with your audiogram, you can probably afford you to wear open domes with the Philips 9040 and not have to worry about feedback due to the new feedback prevention technology they got from Oticon. While they’re not 100% the same as the Oticon More or Real, they do share a lot of great peripheral technologies. The sudden sound stabilizer and wind & handling stabilizer are the 2 new technologies available recently on the Oticon Real that also seem to have made their ways over to the Philips 9040.

Jabra’s were $1699 and Philip were $1599. After a month or two, I can try the Philips out and hear what other users have to say about it…unless I get hit with all the layoffs going around as I’m intending to use FSA on this.

That Philips vs Jabra thread is about 9030s vs Jabra Pro 10s. We need (a) new thread(s) about 9040s vs Pro 10s. I’m interested in reading about the 2 aids.