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Oticon Real

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My audi just said she was told that the US launch is this week, but that she’s not being trained till March 1.

I had an appointment scheduled with her next week to have an in depth discussion about the Real and Lumity as options for my specific use case (I currently have P90s, previously I had OPN1), but looks like it’ll be pushed back a few weeks.

With the US launch being this week, hopefully we’ll start to get wear reviews coming in soon!

@habu987 said:

hopefully we’ll start to get wear reviews coming in soon!

@habu987: You’re right - the proof of the pudding will come from the field reports. I hope they indicate something more substantial by way of improvements over More than Oticon literature and press releases suggest.

I agree marketing isn’t a good way to choose and now days marketing seems to rule technology now days

In reply to @SpudGunner

Why’s it ‘unnecessary’ to put out a new product?

If you’ve made an incremental change to what you do, or you’ve got access to a new circuit or you’ve made a gain in the way you process things, you can legitimately release it as a product iteration.

You could either call it More 2 (but that’s already in use) or something new. That’s what they’ve done. It’s no hardship to any user.

Edited
@Um_bongo said:

It’s no hardship to any user.

@Um_bongo: Sure it is! It makes what I paid big bucks just 2 years ago obsolete, and brings me that much closer to the point that the audiologist refuses to tweak my aids because “they are afraid of bricking them with the old software”.

Sure it affects us!

In reply to @Um_bongo

@Um_bongo said:

You could either call it More 2 (but that’s already in use) or something new. That’s what they’ve done. It’s no hardship to any user.

In fact, it is admirable to release these incremental improvements to the existing platform. I don’t understand the bitterness regarding making these new features available to the hearing aid wearing community.

It absolutely does not make the 2 year old prior version obsolete. Oticon and Audiologists will continue to support these hearing aids for years to come. Yes, I have experience with this with very old Oticon hearing aids that I continued to use as back ups, until I had too many back ups.

I see nothing wrong with these incremental updates.

Sure, I would prefer to see them design each generation to be somewhat forward looking so that the tech platform could receive firmware updates as they make software advances and eke out improvements within the performance envelope of the hardware platform, but I’m well aware that that’s not the way the legacy hearing aid manufacturers run their businesses.

Across the industry, I’d love to see them come out with a new product and commit to, say, semiannual major firmware enhancements for 3 years (e.g. ) and stability/bug fix firmware updates as needed for 3-5 years. I’m thinking of something along the lines of what is becoming standard in the cell phone industry.

Will it happen? Most likely not, unless the devices really start to put a hurting on their bottom lines. But I can still dream!

Regardless, a new model doesn’t make the previous model obsolete, just like the new Galaxy S23 doesn’t make a S22 obsolete.

@habu987 said:

Across the industry, I’d love to see them come out with a new product and commit to, say, semiannual major firmware enhancements for 3 years (e.g. BT LE Audio) and stability/bug fix firmware updates as needed for 3-5 years. I’m thinking of something along the lines of what is becoming standard in the cell phone industry.

@habu987: This would suit me fine. But I’m a broken down old hippy that eschews wastefulness and despises corporate greed.

I don’t see Oticon Real offering any meaningful advantages to the community on paper. We’ll see when the field reports roll in.

But, from what I see on paper, Real is much ado over nothing.

I don’t understand how my opinion to this effect can be construed as “bitterness”.

In reply to @SpudGunner

I’m not going to post the Grandpa Simpson meme again.

In no defence of any particular industry; you put out better products to try to secure more profitability/market share. Successful firms do this better and more frequently than less successful firms: and so the World turns.

In an industry where one of the main product goals is to try to achieve the best speech understanding for the most users, surely the more times the manufacturers spin the dice, the more likely they are to get to a product that makes a ‘Real’ breakthrough……

Does anyone have a link to a whitepaper on the Polaris R platform? I’d like to know how different it is compared to the Polaris platform. This will tell us whether Oticon could have just implemented the 2 new features for the R (Sudden Sound and Wind) in a firmware update for the More, or whether they really needed to come up with a different platform to accommodate the 2 new features. If the later, then OK, I guess they have a legit need to release the Oticon Real as a new release instead of just updating the More firmware to add these 2 new features.

@Volusiano: I dunno, MrV … why do you suppose that Oticon doesn’t seem to have published a white paper on their new platform to coincide with the release of the Real device? How did they deal with the technical aspects of VeloxS when Opn S was introduced?

In reply to @Volusiano

Nope. Oticon only offers 1 year warranty on the battery. They did initially have problems with their rechargeables but the Oticon rep has informed me they switched theor battery supplier several months ago as a result of this issue so I’m hoping new MORE devices no longer have that issue.

@Louie said:

Oticon only offers 1 year warranty on the battery.

The warranty in my manual refers to batteries as accessories along with receivers. It is weird having an accessory that is not user removable.

In reply to @SpudGunner

@SpudGunner said:

@Volusiano: I dunno, MrV … why do you suppose that Oticon doesn’t seem to have published a white paper on their new platform to coincide with the release of the Real device? How did they deal with the technical aspects of VeloxS when Opn S was introduced?

They mentioned that they had a new Velox S platform when they released the OPN S, but there was never a Velox S whitepaper. It seems to be the same case here, they mentioned a new Polaris R platform when they released the Oticon Real, but there doesn’t seem to be a Polaris R whitepaper.

I guess what they’re implying here is that for both the OPN S and the Real, they had to build a new platform that is a expanded derivative of the previous platform in order to accommodate the new feature with the new hardware. That is why they can’t retrofit the new feature(s) into the previous generation simply via a firmware update (like the way they added Speech Rescue into the OPN via a firmware update).

What is not clear is whether they genuinely had to come up with a new derivative platform in order to be able to accommodate the implementation of the new features, or whether it was just a marketing ploy to entice users to upgrade, but all the while, maybe it could simply be a firmware update to the existing product if they wanted to.

In reply to @Volusiano

@Volusiano: Well, you know that I freely admit to have very little knowledge of the technical specifications of these chips, but I do know something about marketing … I would have expected that Oticon would have trumpeted any significant improvement in processing capacity or speed over Polaris to convince potential More upgraders that the claimed superiority of the Real device is rooted in real technological improvements, and not in the smoke and mirrors of marketing “hype”.

Edited

In reply to @prodigyplace

@Volusiano said:

That is why they can’t retrofit the new feature(s) into the previous generation

@prodigyplace said:

Can’t or won’t? Inquiring minds want to know.

Technically if they have to develop a new platform that is a derivative of the previous platform, that means that the hardware of the previous platform is not sufficient to implement the new feature(s) with just a firmware code change. It means that new circuitries are required to be added to the current platform to support the operation of the new feature(s). Meaning they “can’t”.

Oticon says that the SuddenSound Stabilizer is implemented inside the RealSound Amplifier (RSA), and that the Wind & Handling Stabilizer is implemented inside the RealSound Intelligence (aka the ). I think it really depends on whether Oticon designed their platform with expandability in mind or not to begin with. If they do, then they may already have extra hardware real estates in place, and if they make things highly configurable, then it’s plausible that they can add new functionalities by reconfiguring their design to use up the spare hardware real estates for the new functionalities.

But, signal processing in the amplifier on the fly is a tricky business, and such things as sudden sounds handling may require very, very fast responses in real time, such that reprogramming of configurable hardware cannot be fast enough to do what they need to do. In which case, highly customized circuitries may need to be built to accommodate rapid actions of the feature.

As for the DNN, if they retrain the DNN with new wind & handling data, and if the DNN is hardcoded for optimum performance, then the new DNN hardware must be swapped in for the old DNN hardware, and for sure a new derivative hardware platform is needed. But if the DNN is a configurable gate-array of some sort and all is needed for an updated DNN is new values for the neural nodes coefficients swapped in (via a firmware change) to incorporate the wind & handling scenes, then a new derivative platform may not be needed to upgrade the DNN.

So it highly depends on whether Oticon designed their platform with expandability in mind or not. The trade-off is that design for expandability will require considerable hardware real estates that’s hard to fit into a tiny spot in the hearing aids. That’s why Whisper had to go with an external brain approach for complete and full expandability.

To summarize, I’d like to give Oticon the benefit of the doubt and say they can’t, not won’t. Otherwise, they’d have to compromise with either a huge aid behind your ear (and possibly a much bigger rechargeable battery to support it), or maybe take the external brain approach that Whisper did. A much bigger rechargeable battery alone will take away the disposable battery option for good as well.

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