Oticon Intent Bluetooth LE Streaming Quality

I’m about to cross the 48-hour mark with new Oticon Intents. I haven’t done much if any streaming in that time, and will pay attention going forward and report back. I did have a long cell phone call last night with a friend and asked him about the sound quality on the receiving end. He said it was just fine. I have an iPhone 13 mini. I suspect the LE stuff may be on newer phones and I’m a long way from switching phones.

I will have three days of “speech in noise” in two weeks when some friends come in from abroad for a reunion and we do four restaurant meals, so I will be better able to judge the Intent’s performance across the spectrum of my uses.

Eliot

@eliotb → I invite you to share your Intent’s personal experience on one of the 2 Intent announcement threads in this forum. I believe that you’re probably the first Intent user that I’m aware of on this forum. It’d be great to hear some personal anecdote after you’ve had some experience with it in noisy places, but I’m sure earlier on experience would be much appreciated as well.

I’ve seen doctor Cliff’s comment about how the BT LE audio experience on his Samsung S23 is substantially better than his MFI streaming experience on his iPhone. I’m not so sure how a hearing impaired person can really discern the fine subtleties in audio quality between different audio formats in the first place, in light of the limitations from the tiny receivers in their ability to reproduce good bass sounds to begin with.

To me, the main difference between what sounds good and what sounds not as good for an average hearing impaired person with the typical ski slope loss is in the ability of the receiver to produce the low sounds, due to its size limitation. The closer to normal hearing of a typical ski slope user can discern very well the inability of the receiver to reproduce the low frequency sounds faithfully. The HA receiver are good enough in reproducing the highs and mids, but what separates it from a bigger ear bud or a pair of headphone is mainly in the low frequency reproduction.

The main advantage of the BT LE audio is the LE part (low energy). I don’t have any doubt that it might also have a better audio format compared to MFI audio. But I have doubt that an average hearing challenged person might be able to tell a difference easily between the two. I suspect that Dr Cliff has a milder type of loss so maybe he can discern a difference better than the average HA wearer. But to hear him say that BT LE audio blows MFI audio out of the water is a (not very believable) surprise for me. I’m already happy enough with the MFI sound quality. I’m only not happy with the receiver’s ability to reproduce low frequency sounds well. But that’s the receiver’s physical limitation, not an MFI audio format limitation.

Yeah it was my understanding as well that sound quality was due to the hardware of the receivers. That’s why I was so surprised to hear him say that, assuming the MFi audio quality didn’t just get worse somehow! Hopefully streaming quality can get better, as that’s one thing I’m really hoping for before I need to switch to full-time hearing aids in the next few years. My sense of music quality has been spoiled by fancy airpods.

Chances are very low that there’s someone else comparing a new android and iphone sound quality on the Intents and posting things online, but I thought I’d check. Always exciting to see what newfangled things are happening

Just FYI, prompted by Volusiano’s request, I streamed a series of different tunes from my iPhone to my hearing aids last night. I was impressed at the clarity, though a lot of bass was missing. Mid-range and upper range tones were very good, better than I expected. It’s hard to compare with the Real 1s which I no longer have, particularly that I really never streamed too much with any of my prior hearing aids.

There were occasional random moments when the quality seemed to waver/fade just a bit, but in the main, I was really pleased. I picked a series of tunes with which I was very familiar as a musician and long-time devotee of the artists – tunes I have picked apart from the standpoint of the various instruments and vocal parts. As I mentioned, all that was missing to any noticeable degree were some of the bass lines. I can’t imagine a tiny speaker could really handle much bass anyway.

It was also not clear to me if I was listening via MiFi or LE. I have an iPhone 13 mini so someone more versed in these things than I will know that.

I’ll add this in when I do my review in a couple of weeks.

It would be MFi if you are using an iPhone Glad the Intents seem to be streaming well.

@eliotb said:

I will say that going from Real 1 to Intent 1 was not filled with any “oh, that’s what that sounds like” moments. It seems to be an incremental change.

While Oticon was able to eke out an additional 2 dB of SNR on speech for the Intent compared to the Real (from 10 dB max on the Real to 12 dB max on the Intent) thanks to the new DNN 2.0, if you’re rarely in a very loud and noisy situation, this improvement would not have much effect on you anyway.

Then it also depends on your audible contrast threshold performance (if you ever had it measured, most people have not because it’s a relatively new thing). If you have a good ACT value (lower number), then the 10 dB max noise reduction in the Real is probably already enough for you in the first place.

The 4D Sensor on the Intent might help vary the SNR speech contrast envelope more or less to make the balancing of the sound scene more accurate based on your listening intent, assuming that the sensor algorithm guesses your intent correctly in the first place. But that’s all you get from the 4D Sensor, a better balanced sound scene between your need for speech SNR contrast and other sounds. Maybe this will help you notice other non-speech sounds better than before because they’re might not be suppressed unnecessarily like before with this added intelligence.

So if the Real has already performed well for you in complex environments, the Intent will probably seem like just an incremental improvement, if even that at all. But for folks who have worse hearing loss who still struggle with the Real in complex environments in terms of understanding speech, then the improvements on the Intent may be more significant for them.

Because the DNN 2.0 claims to have been trained with more “diverse” sound scenes, whatever that means, it may result in the “quality” of the sounds to seem more accurate than before, although that’s a fairly subjective thing depending on the person. At least Oticon showed measurable improvements in a number of metrics when they compared the Intent against the Real. How it translates to real life depends on the person and their level of hearing loss, I guess.

Dr. Cliff Olson said that normally he doesn’t recommend upgrading from a previous generation to the next generation of model because most of the times, it’s only just incremental. But he’s willing to make an exception to the Intent. But I think that’s also considering the fact that the Intent has BT LE Audio support while the Real doesn’t. Without this BT LE Audio addition, I’m not sure if he would have made an exception in his recommendation with just the 4D sensor and the DNN 2.0.

I’m about a week into my trial of the Oticon Intents (with an Iphone 15 Pro). While I was a bit disappointed that the streaming quality wasn’t significantly better than my trial last year with the Reals (didn’t purchase) there is SOME improvement. I still get the occasionaly drop out or glitch when I am outside (inside is almost flawless) and today I was streaming audio from my Spotify playlists while riding my bike in noisy traffic. There were only a few glitchy moments and those disappeared when I moved the iphone from my front pocket to the breast pocket of my jacket - so it seems it is mostly an antenna power/distance issue. My only complaint is that I don’t seem to be able to raise the streaming volume as much as I would like, especially in noisy situations. The volume is definately lower than regular earphones/buds. Adjusting the volume sliders on the app doesn’t make a difference to streaming volume and I don’t have the hearing safety feature turned on in the Iphone settings. I’ll discuss this with my hearing aid fitter later this week to see if it is a built-in Oticon safety feature or just a limitation. Other than that I’m pleased with the Intents so far.

@Stephen_H said:

My only complaint is that I don’t seem to be able to raise the streaming volume as much as I would like, especially in noisy situations. The volume is definately lower than regular earphones/buds. Adjusting the volume sliders on the app doesn’t make a difference to streaming volume and I don’t have the hearing safety feature turned on in the Iphone settings. I’ll discuss this with my hearing aid fitter later this week to see if it is a built-in Oticon safety feature or just a limitation. Other than that I’m pleased with the Intents so far.

You should be able to ask your HCP to increase the streaming volume by raising it to a higher value from the default. See the screenshot below on Phone Loudness for reference. You can also reduce the M(ic) Relative to Phone volume down to a lower level as well so that the environmental sounds don’t interfere with your streaming audio as much, as also seen in the screenshot below.

Adjusting the volume slider on the app might have a combination effect of changing the streaming audio volume and the hearing aids’ mic volume in unison, although sometimes I have seen 2 separate sliders in the MFI menu (and also in the Oticon app), one for the mics and one for the streaming content. I don’t remember exactly when both volume sliders become available though. That’s something you might have to experiment yourself.

@Volusiano said:

So I’m confused as to what problem you’re complaining about.

I think you are confusing me (OldMusicGuy) with Stephen_H. I’m the one that can raise the streaming volume very high.

Oops, indeed I am. Thanks for the clarification. I should have paid more attention to the names.

I discovered that I could modify the streaming sound directly through my music app (in my case Spotify but also available on Apple music). I played around with the various preset options plus the sliders and found for me that the “lounge” option produced the best results, but that probably vary for each person. Bottom line was that the quality of the music was much better, richer than the basic settings on my Intents and in the Companion app. Give it a try.

I believe it was a different user who said they were able to get their streaming sound really loud using their phone buttons. My volume is limited but apparently that can be adjusted by my fitter, who I am seeing today.