Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

Oticon Real 1 vs Philips Hearlink 9040 (huge price difference)

This topic is closed.

185 replies33.6k viewsLast reply

Jump
Link to this topic

I can’t speak with any experience of the Sudden Sound Stabilizer and Wind Handling Stabilizer on the 9040 as compared to the 9030, but I can suggest that you review the Oticon Real same 2 features’ experience of folks who wear them that had the OPN S or More before that. Whatever impressions you read from these Real users on those 2 features specifically should carry over to the effect one can experience on the 9040 similarly, simply because the 9040 basically has those same 2 features as the Real. And there are a number of Real experience sharing on those 2 features that you can find on this forum.

Edited
@user647 said:

Are the Oticon worth the extra money or are the Philips the same technology? Philips & Oticon are made by Damant, the same manufacturer.

I’m an owner of a Philips 9040 aid, and although late to the party I feel I can answer this question from some research I’ve done:

Philips 9040 and Oticon Real 1 are indeed comparable, in the same way that the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 is comparable to the Oticon Real 1…

That’s because the 9040 is a rebadged Alpha XT 9. I mean if you look into it they are identical products - down to the appearance, technology (albeit with different wording), options available for each feature, rebadged Android app, rebadged programming software, and even renamed proprietary fitting rationales available. It must be a straight rebadge, because as others have noted no R&D time was devoted to the Philips product by Demant.

So if you are considering Oticon then there’s not really a huge difference to the Philips, but there certainly are some (bit like an Audi and a VW I guess that share a lot of underlying technology). Which may be important - particularly if you want access to the VAC+ rationale (which a lot of people seem to like), or even the ability to have a different rationale per user-selectable mode.

But if you’d consider Bernafon aids to be ideal for your needs and want to save some money, then may as well just go to Costco instead and save some $$.

@withoutwings, do you have any external confirmation for your theory?

Here is Bernafon’s description of their hybrid technology:

Bernafon hearing aids | Hear your day, your way

Rechargeable Bernafon hearing aids. It’s your hearing. Let’s make it work for you. Bernafon hearing aids match your needs, your lifestyle, and your budget…

Bernafon has a long history of employing alternatives to as is described here. They do mention the use of machine learning for noise management, which would be similar to Philips perhaps, but Philips makes no mention of any kind of sound processing similar to what Bernafon describes here.

Edited

I would probably concur with @billgem that perhaps the used for noise removal from speech is the same as the AI used in the Philips 9040, which is described as an AI to remove noise from speech as well.

The first screenshot below is the Bernafon mention of its use of machine learning to get cleaner speech signal.

The second screenshot below is the Philips chart showing how its AI does noise removal to remove noisy speech input samples.

So both talk about remove noise from speech using AI → it’s highly probably that they use the same AI to do this.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

image
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
image
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I see that the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 mention the wind and handling noise control, but there’s no sudden sound stabilizer mentioned anywhere. These 2 features are the new additions from the Oticon More to Real, and from the Philips 9030 to 9040. It’s very curious as to why the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 only has 1 of the 2 features.

Edited

In reply to @withoutwings

@user647 said:

Are the Oticon worth the extra money or are the Philips the same technology? Philips & Oticon are made by Damant, the same manufacturer.

@withoutwings said:

So if you are considering Oticon then there’s not really a huge difference to the Philips, but there certainly are some (bit like an Audi and a VW I guess that share a lot of underlying technology).

What you call underlying technology, I call them peripheral technologies. That’s because the biggest marketing item for the Oticon aids is the Deep Neural Network , which is its underlying core technology. The underlying core technology for the Philips aids seems to be a different kind of AI machine learning that uses hundreds of thousands of noisy speech samples to train the machine to clean out the noise from the speech samples. Meanwhile, the Oticon sampled 2 million sound scenes (not just noisy speech samples like with the Philips AI) to rebuild and rebalance them through the DNN.

So I would contend that even though Oticon and Philips share many “peripheral” technologies, their underlying core technologies (which is the AI) are significantly different enough. The software parameters in the programming software for these 2 aids (Oticon Genie 2 and Philips HearSuite) for the 2 AIs are COMPLETELY different.

But as I mentioned in my previous post above, it’s possible that the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 AI is the same as the Philips 9040 AI, because both talk about an AI core technology that is trained to clean up the noise from noisy speech samples.

Many people just look at features/specs/accessories and jump to the conclusion that these Oticon and Philips and Bernafon aids are all the same. It’s understandable that they share a lot of peripheral technologies because they’re all sister companies or licensee (in the case of Philips) under William Demant, so it makes sense to do so to save money instead of reinventing the wheels on the basic stuff. But the marketing brochures usually just list out the features and don’t necessarily go into the details of the core technology the aids have. This level of details is usually only found by researching and reading the technical whitepapers from those companies in order to know the difference. So just by glancing through the marketing materials for feature lists and specs and review the accessories, it may not sufficiently be 100% conclusive to say that they are exactly the same aids, just rebadged versions of each other.

Edited

I came to this conclusion by comparing images (products + software), similarities in marketing docs etc (and even things like software changelogs match word-for-word), and then for features I used my copy of the Philips HearSuite with the 9040 loaded side-by-side with this online tool from Bernafon:
https://bernafon.cdn.dgs.com/demos/compare-tool/en/?family={A1C3398B-262E-4DC8-AA95-9356FFF0FE86}14
I couldn’t find any differences at all.

Can I prove it 100%? No of course not. But it was enough evidence for me.

Edited

So, @withoutwings, your conclusion is that Costco and William Demant never stopped selling Bernafon. They simply engaged in an elaborate shell game in which they made a very public display of discontinuing Bernafon but then reintroduced it under the guise of a Philips label, accompanied by detailed marketing materials which make it appear to be a different product when in reality it has simply been the next generations of Bernafon hearing aids all along? Looks like they have very successfully fooled a lot of people and have increased sales in the process.

Bernafon built its brand on the concept of channel free processing, which uses phonemic compression to make soft sounds audible and loud sounds comfortable instead of . All of the technical reports I’ve seen from Bernafon talk about this. According to the linked article below, Bernafon is still using channel free processing as part of its newly termed “hybrid technology”. See “Bernafon Alpha Hearing Aids Technology” down at the bottom of the page:

Bernafon Alpha Hearing Aids | Free Home Visit Hearing Tests2

Bernafon Alpha Hearing Aids. Home visits in Greater London and around the M25. 5-year warranty with 60-day money-back guarantee included.

I haven’t seen any similar description of sound processing on the Philips’ materials. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may in fact be right, and I know one Costco audiologist who agrees with you. But if the Philips HearLink 9040 is actually the Bernafon Alpha, then William Demant has gone to great pains to make the two appear to be very different, emphasizing some feature in the description of one and downplaying them in the description of the other. They may in fact share the same noise reduction but be using different sound processing technologies. I really don’t know.

@billgem said:

I haven’t seen any similar description of sound processing on the Philips’ materials. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may in fact be right, and I know one Costco audiologist who agrees with you. But if the Philips HearLink 9040 is actually the Bernafon Alpha, then William Demant has gone to great pains to make the two appear to be very different, emphasizing some feature in the description of one and downplaying them in the description of the other. They may in fact share the same AI noise reduction but be using different sound processing technologies. I really don’t know.

What makes it weird is that Costco terminated the sale of Bernafon aids (which they’d been selling for years) and (more or less) replaced it with the Philips aids. It’s not clear why they did that, but if the Philips aids are just rebadged Bernafon aids, why would William Demant and Costco bother going through that whole charade, I wonder?

I know it’s very confusing to differentiate the products of these sister companies because they share so many of the common peripheral technologies, but one gotta believe that there must be some differentiation between the 4 brands under William Demant (Oticon, Bernafon, Sonic and the Philips licensee) then just rebadging versions of each other. Why would William Demant bother with the rebadging game like that between its different brands?

I can totally understand the rebadging concept of a name brand into a Kirkland Signature aid, like how the KS7 and KS8 were rebadged aids from Sivanto who owns Rexton and Signia, and the KS9 and KS10 are rebadged Phonak aids from Sonova (who also owns Unitron and Hanaston). But the Bernafon and now the Philips aids have been sold under their own brand names at Costco, not as some kind of rebadged KSxx Costco name brand. So if Bernafon sale is discontinued from Costco, is it because it hasn’t been selling well due to being a weaker competitor? If so, how would rebadging it as a Philips brand aid help improve sales at Costco if it’s really still a Bernafon aid at heart?

I’m not saying that folks who believe that the Philips aids are just a rebadged brand from Bernafon aids are wrong, I just don’t get the benefit of doing a rebadging here unless it’s to change from a non-Costco brand name into a Costco KSxx brand.

@Volusiano said:

I just don’t get the benefit of doing a rebadging here unless it’s to change from a non-Costco brand name into a Costco KSxx brand.

Perhaps for the sake of independent Bernafon sellers.

Edited
@x475aws said:

Perhaps for the sake of independent Bernafon sellers.

Exactly this IMO: they would have agreed that it made sense both as an opportunity to increase sales at Costco (familiarity with the Philips brand) while no longer directly cannibalising/competing with full-price sales of Bernafon elsewhere.

The cost to rebadge and reword is a drop in the ocean compared to actually pouring any new R&D funds into a new/modified product for this purpose.

Oh? Then why didn’t they do it before but instead wait until now??? Bernafon had been sold at Costco for years already, nothing new here. They why didn’t they just rebadge it years ago? Why wait until now if the reason is to help out independent Bernafon sellers from having their sales cannibalized?

Philips used to be in the hearing aid business A LONG TIME ago. Yeah, its brand is ubiquitous in consumer health products, but not with hearing aids in particular, at least not for a long while until very recently. The Bernafon brand is a more well known hearing aid brand than the Philips brand for hearing aids. So rebadging Bernafon to Philips to get the familiarity of the Philips brand as a hearing aid company is not a convincing reason for me. If somebody mentioned to me a couple of years ago the Philips is a hearing aid brand, I wouldn’t have known. But I would know right away that Bernafon is a hearing aid brand.

Edited
@Volusiano said:

Oh? Then why didn’t they do it before but instead wait until now??? Bernafon had been sold at Costco for years already, nothing new here. They why didn’t they just rebadge it years ago? Why wait until now if the reason is to help out independent Bernafon sellers from having their sales cannibalized?

Why does that even matter in this context? Probably at some point some execs looked at the data at the time, didn’t like what they saw, had an idea, and then acted on it…

Isn’t that how things tend to work in the corporate sector? They try something, it either works or doesn’t work and then they make changes as necessary if/when that comes to light.

@Volusiano said:

So rebadging Bernafon to Philips to get the familiarity of the Philips brand as a hearing aid company is not a convincing reason for me. If somebody mentioned to me a couple of years ago the Philips is a hearing aid brand, I wouldn’t have known. But I would know right away that Bernafon is a hearing aid brand.

Yeah well it was for me - as someone new to hearing aids Philips “felt” like a comfortable choice as I knew the brand well. (That wasn’t why I ultimately picked them of course as I did plenty of additional research, but I can certainly see how having a well-known and trusted brand contributes to people’s decision.)

In reply to @billgem

@billgem said:

So, @withoutwings, your conclusion is that Costco and William Demant never stopped selling Bernafon. They simply engaged in an elaborate shell game in which they made a very public display of discontinuing Bernafon but then reintroduced it under the guise of a Philips label, accompanied by detailed marketing materials which make it appear to be a different product when in reality it has simply been the next generations of Bernafon hearing aids all along? Looks like they have very successfully fooled a lot of people and have increased sales in the process.

I think Demant certainly did a much better job at masking it than GN did with the Jabra aids. And good for them, though if I am correct I imagine they won’t appreciate my posts here on the subject (noting that I’m not the first to say it)!

@withoutwings said:

though if I am correct I imagine they won’t appreciate my posts here on the subject (noting that I’m not the first to say it)!

I don’t think they’ll be worried about anything we say here in this regard, in fact they knew when they released the Phillips that there was going to be a bit flank, especially from the opposition! actually I still think there a Sonic, oh hang on is the Bernafon a copy of the Sonic as well, oh well hardly matters anymore, the cats out of the bag anyway, right so Oticon has just released a new model, so we can now expect Phillips to have “something” out in the next few months!

@tenkan said:

Oticon has just released a new model, so we can now expect Phillips to have “something” out in the next few months!

I’ll grab the popcorn and wait with bated breath to see how Bernafon and Philips’ marketing teams can outdo the term “BrainHearing”… :upside_down_face:

The Philips 9040 should do much better in wind than the Philips 9030 by the way. Wind noise handling and sudden sound handling are the 2 main new features in the 9040. If you can, get the 9040 if wind is important for you. I’ve heard nothing but positive feedbacks about the 9040 wind handling, which is the same new wind handling technology as the Oticon Real wind handling.

In reply to @billgem

@billgem said:

And why does the same pair of hearing aids cost thousands of dollars different from the top tier to the bottom tier and in between?

Before I retired, I had a company that developed and sold vertical market computer software. It costs a lot of money to develop and debug complex software; and each additional feature can add a lot to the R&D costs - particularly if you are striving for the highest level of quality because really skilled programmers are nearly impossible to find. It also costs more to provide tech support, etc. on the new features. So, more features means more expensive. Now, whether the higher-lever hearing aids should be thousands more - well I suspect it’s whatever the market will bear.

Related discussions