I have Oticon More 1. My audi set up a speech in noise program for me. Today I was in a loud social situation and I put my into that speech in noise program. As usual, I was almost overwhelmed by conversations all around me.
I thought I’d try the More Sound Booster on my default program. It seemed like the background conversations were less overwhelming than with the speech in noise program. I thought I could hear the target speaker almost as well with the More Sound Booster as with the speech in noise program.
I wonder if the More Sound Booster can be tweaked in the programming software. I don’t think my audi ever worked with it. Maybe it could be adjusted to provide increased background noise elimination and increased speech comprehension for listening to a target speaker. Does anyone know if such adjustments are possible? Thank you.
Of course we don’t know exactly how the MoreSound Booster is set up by Oticon because they don’t give us the details. But in general, since they said that it’d attenuate the background (rear and side) sounds aggressively, one can guess that they probably set the Directionality Settings to “Full Directional”, meaning that it would beam form completely to the front.
On the other hand, the built-in Speech in Noise program still has “Neural Automatic” as the value for its Directionality Settings parameter. That probably explains why you find background conversations less overwhelming with the MoreSound Booster compared to with the Speech in Noise program, because the Speech in Noise may not always be Full Directional like the MoreSound Booster is.
Of course because full time beam forming is not consistent with Oticon’s open paradigm strategy, that’s probably why Oticon only lets user access and enable the MoreSound Booster via the ON app only, and not allow it to be a “built-in” program like the Speech in Noise built-in program is. This way, if you forget to disable the MoreSound Booster after you’re done with it, eventually at some point, when your ON app is reset (closed then opened again), or your More is reset (maybe after being recharged overnight), the MoreSound Booster would automatically get automatically get disabled by default again.
So you can’t really change anything about the MoreSound Booster. It’s either ON or OFF, and usually OFF by default unless you specifically turn it on. So. really the only way to make adjustment is with your Speech in Noise program, and make it as aggressive as the MoreSound Booster is, and with it being a built-in program, you can select and adjust even more parameters. The first thing to mimic the MoreSound Booster better is to just change the Directionality Setting in the MoreSound Intelligence menu of Genie 2 to “Full Directional” value instead of the default “Neural Automatic”.
Another thing you can do to suppress more background noise and increase speech comprehension in the Speech in Noise program would be to set the Neural Noise Suppression in both Easy and Difficult environment to their max values, as the default values there are not at max yet.
If both of these adjustments in Speech in Noise is still not enough compared to the MoreSound Booster’s performance in a loud social situation, your audi can also go to the Fine Tuning section and play around with the gain adjustments to soften up the louder sounds and maybe lower the (max power output) values (which are the ceiling for amplification) down a little.
There is also the Sound Enhancer setting in Difficult Environment (see screenshot below) to make sounds more comfortable for you if it’s too overwhelming, but maybe at the expense of losing some details.
I also have More1. Sound Booster is enabled thru the ON App in the General Program only. The Audiologist set up an additional General Program in P4 with different parameters, which as I recall, the major differences being the listening environments as Volusiano showed in the illustration. This allows me to toggle between the P1 General & P4 General, and each program now has Sound Booster available. Often Speech in Noise is too noisy for me in a complex setting. I also have the Speech in Noise mics open for left , forward, right to help me hear the person next to me. I know that contributes to the noise.
The Sound Booster helps to slightly dampen or lower the overall constant noise around me. I do not feel it forward beams the mics. I do like Sound Booster and use it.
Great info here, thanks. I will try a new P4 using the suggestions above given the “speech in noise” annoys me. Too noise is amplified in complex situations as @Mago mentioned
I also spent a lot of time digging in the oticon heap of documents on information what MoreSoundBooster (=MSB) is - and if there is a way to activate it without the app. There is neither.
So - as always, if all else fails - i tried to think :
The MSB-Control is only available, if Neural Noise Suppresion is enabled and it disappears, if you set the configuration-control to completely “Very Simple”.
So it’s my theory, that MSB simply pulls the environment-control to the left stop - the effect is quite comparable. Wheter it also temporarily sets the intensity to 10db i can’t distinquish.
As @Volusiano mentioned, MSB also enhances focus to the front (does it really?). So maybe MSB will also change the Directionality Setting to “Full Directional”. And it will not alter the Outer Ear setting, since this should mimic the wearers outer ear and not be abused to get additional directionality.
A program with this settings will behave as with activated MSB.
If oticon had found an incantation that would really do something new, they had made it available in Genie2 - and marketed it accordingly.
So a program with configuration “All Very Simple” might open a way to construct a custom MSB - at the moment i have not the time to experiment for it.
Sound booster, The way I was explained, only shortens the time between the instrument detects noise and it actively reduces it. Think of it makes the instrument reduce the instrument faster. Not the quantity but shortens the time it takes for the system to actively do its work.
this is why its not something the dispenser could tweak
I also spent a lot of time digging in the oticon heap of documents on information what MoreSoundBooster (=MSB) is - and if there is a way to activate it without the app. There is neither.
So - as always, if all else fails - i tried to think :
The MSB-Control is only available, if Neural Noise Suppresion is enabled and it disappears, if you set the configuration-control to completely “Very Simple”.
So it’s my theory, that MSB simply pulls the environment-control to the left stop - the effect is quite comparable. Wheter it also temporarily sets the intensity to 10db i can’t distinquish.
As @Volusiano mentioned, MSB also enhances focus to the front (does it really?). So maybe MSB will also change the Directionality Setting to “Full Directional”. And it will not alter the Outer Ear setting, since this should mimic the wearers outer ear and not be abused to get additional directionality.
A program with this settings will behave as with activated MSB.
Does really MSB enhance focus to the front? Well, we can only go by what Oticon says. And Oticon doesn’t really write any whitepaper describing the MSB in details. There are only YouTube videos about the OpenSound Booster and MoreSound Booster, and maybe RealSound Booster as well. In one of the earlier videos (for Open or More, I can’t remember exactly), Don Schum stated that it puts the focus to the sound in front. That’s really the ONLY clear information communicated to us by Oticon that I’m aware of. If there is other information, please share. So for this reason, if I were to set up a program to mimic MSB, I WOULD change the Directionality Settings to Full Directional.
Regarding the Virtual Outer Ear setting, this is exclusively applicable to Easy Environment only (see screenshot below which shows it squarely is on the left side under the Easy Environment umbrella only. So whether you want to alter this Virtual Outer Ear setting or not in a program where you try to mimic MSB, to me it’s your personal preference and it’s really irrelevant in the context of MSB because the focus on mimicking MSB is primarily for Difficult Environment, not for Easy Environment.
One doesn’t need to really overthink MSB. One just has to ask what the purpose of MSB is for? And what Oticon says is that MSB is for when you want to understand speech better in a difficult environment. So the obvious thing to mimic it is to ONLY focus on adjusting the settings that are applicable to the Difficult Environment only: 1. Turn on and maximize on the Neural Noise Suppression, and 2. Change the Directionality Settings to Full Directional, simply because Oticon said in their YouTube videos on OSB and MSB that they put more focus on the front sounds.
Sound booster, The way I was explained, only shortens the time between the instrument detects noise and it actively reduces it. Think of it makes the instrument reduce the instrument faster. Not the quantity but shortens the time it takes for the system to actively do its work.
this is why its not something the dispenser could tweak
I really don’t understand the concept of “faster” or “slower” neural noise suppression because noise suppression is noise suppression. You don’t get to choose anywhere in Genie 2 how fast to can tell the aids to suppress the noise.
But I can probably guess that the way Oticon explained it to you is that if the user selects MSB in the ON app, that by default tells the aids that “Hey, you just turned on MSB so you’re telling me that you’re in a Difficult Environment, and that’s why you turn MSB on. So I don’t have to dilly dally around to try to detect and determine which environment you’re in so that I can switch the aids to THAT environment. Because you say so by turning on MSB, I’ll go IMMEDIATELY to the Difficult Environment setting instead of trying to detect, then transition, maybe from Easy to Difficult.”
So from that perspective, OK, yeah, I think that MSB would immediately take the aids straight into the Difficult Environment mode with Neural Noise Suppression enabled and perhaps even maximized.
But in all honesty, whether it does it faster than normal is really of no consequence anyway, because even if the transition takes a few seconds to detect and transition (I even doubt that it takes more than a second at most), a few second transitions would hardly matter at all to the user as long as it gets there in that mode and remains in that mode. It’s not like not having Neural Noise Suppression activate a second or two faster will make the user miss out on any important speech anyway.
that’s how it suppose to work, by increasing the speed of the transitions. Not the directionality nor the amount of noise reduction. That’s the why the system doesn’t allow for any tweaks. If that makes a difference it is another matter. I haven’t meet a lot of people who actively use
More sound booster…
Hm, thanks for clarifying. Although I’ve never heard of anybody complaining that the transitional from Easy to Difficult is slow for them. In face, according to Oticon’s whitepaper before on environmental detection and transitioning on the OPN (see screenshot below), it’s not a binary Easy to Difficult, but it’s a continuous and smooth transition from Easy to Difficult. After the upgrade to the More and Real from the OPN, there hasn’t been anymore said about Oticon environmental transition. But there’s no reason to believe that they had deviate from the environment transitioning technology that they’ve employed since the OPN.
Just by virtue of the user enabling the MSB in the ON app, that would instantly “force” the mode into Difficult Environment immediately and lock it into that mode already. But the purpose of the MSB is not about increasing the speed of the transition to help with speech in noise, because there’s never been any issue where too slow of a transition in the environment is causing bad speech in noise. MSB should be about maximizing the speech in noise settings for max effectiveness.
I really think whoever at Oticon told you that MSB is all about increasing the speed of the transition is feeding you a bunch of BS. Either that or they didn’t do a good job of explaining it at all. It doesn’t make any technical sense to me how that would help with speech in noise in the first place, because the transitioning between environment has never been a known reported issue with Oticon aids.
I also never heard anybody to complain about the transition.
the point of MSB as I recall it, this is a long time ago. Is not to increase speech understanding but confort. It seems some users would prefer an instrument who is more comfy specially at the end of a work day when they are simply too tired.
It would be interesting to see if people really use this thing at all. I think it is not a feature people use at all.
Below is a screenshot of the YouTube video where Don Schum talked about the OpenSound Booster (which was later renamed to MoreSound Booster when the More came out). It pretty clearly stated the 2 main tactical approaches : → 1) reduce sound from back and sides, and 2) increase noise removal), to achieve its objective, which is stated at the very bottom of the screenshot in the written summary section of the video → “where the patient needs extra help to make speech stand out from background noise.”
So it’s clearly about speech understanding and not really about comfort or about faster transition time.
I was under the impression that Don Schum left (voluntarily) to go over to Whisper. Did you have some inside info that said he was let go (and that’s why he went to Whisper)?
Now I’m in doubt. I’ll ask my friend next time we meet. I dont know why im under the impresion he was let go.
On the other hand, Wisper isn’t a terrible successful company nor they can afford him. Yes probably they offer equity significantly. I dont see them around for long. Im sure they will sell and someone like, Starkey , GN would buy all their .
I just heard a few days ago that Whisper is out of business. They offer to refund their users so I guess it’s not because they run out of money. Probably being acquired by somebody. Rumor seems to point to Facebook because they need advanced audio tech for their Meta virtual reality stuff. But that’s still only rumor.
Are you asking me where Don Schum is teaching? How did it go from being at Whisper to a teaching job? I have no idea myself. I didn’t bring that teaching thing up. Only mentioned that Whisper just went out of business.
Of course i didn’t try to “reinvent” MSB; there are better things to do. But i looked for a way to activate it without the App since as it is, it’s quite useless (imagine: “sorry, i have to get out my phone to understand the you” )
Hoped, that by “scratching my ear” (using the push button) i could temporarily enhance understanding. The only way to achive this is a dedicated program. So i tried to find out as much as possible how to setup one.
But I can probably guess that the way Oticon explained it to you is that if the user selects MSB in the ON app, that by default tells the aids that “Hey, you just turned on MSB so you’re telling me that you’re in a Difficult Environment, and that’s why you turn MSB on. So I don’t have to dilly dally around to try to detect and determine which environment you’re in so that I can switch the aids to THAT environment. Because you say so by turning on MSB, I’ll go IMMEDIATELY to the Difficult Environment setting instead of trying to detect, then transition, maybe from Easy to Difficult.”
You both came to the same conclusion by different paths:
MoreSoundBooster switches to the “difficult environment” either at once or as soon as there is something like speech in the sound (and if you have on “neuronal directionality” this will automatically adjust directionality).
But the purpose of the MSB is not about increasing the speed of the transition to help with speech in noise, because there’s never been any issue where too slow of a transition in the environment is causing bad speech in noise.
Since there is no abrupt transition, nobody will know, wheter the momentary situation “could have been better”. There has to be a significant delay before an audible change is made or there would be a constant sound switching back and forth.
My old Audeo III sometimes couldn’t make up their “minds” wheter to use the “comfort” or the “focused” mode so i had a constant ssssst pffffff sssst pffffff while driving in my car at a certain speed. The mores definitely don’t have such fancies.
I’ll try to use my “ear switchable MSB” - if i should really get wiser you will hear from me.
Germany/Bavaria
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