Oticon Real --> Oticon Intent

I actually wanted to know if Intent will fitt me as I like Real.
I know you can transfer the settings.
I am more worry that I won’t like the sound

The Oticon sound is the Oticon sound. I have been wearing Oticon aids for 14 years and the sound hasn’t changed, while i don’t have the new INTEND I don’t expect they have changed their trademark sound.

It’s just a push of a button and it’s not like you constantly listen to music through the air all the times anyway. I would not want this autosense and auto switch feature myself because no hearing aid is smart enough to know what I really want.

Technically listening to music in the general program with Oticon aids is already very agreeable in the first place without having to resort to a music program. I would only consciously switch to MyMusic if I’m listening to totally immersed and prolonged music through the air and I want the purest sound without much processing the whole time.

For streaming there is already less processing that is needed like feedback control or noise reduction because you’re streaming the content from a device and not from the environmental mics anyway. So a music program is actually not necessary for streaming.

@Volusiano said:

Technically listening to music in the general program with Oticon aids is already very agreeable in the first place without having to resort to a music program.

I don’t think you can generalize your experience like that. All the past discussion about MyMusic and who likes it and dislikes it shows that people need a music program. Music doesn’t sound good in the General program on my Real 1’s, not surprisingly since speech and music have different requirements.

@x475aws said:

I don’t think you can generalize your experience like that. All the past discussion about MyMusic and who likes it and dislikes it shows that people need a music program. Music doesn’t sound good in the General program on my Real 1’s, not surprisingly since speech and music have different requirements.

Of course you’re definitely entitled to your opinion, as I am mine. If you think that I was generalizing, then I’ll add the qualifying “to me” to that sentence to remove the perceived generalization then.

I never said that you don’t need a music program on the Oticon aids, as I’ve actually said that I DO USE the music program on my Oticon aids when I listen to full blown, totally immersed music through the air. There’s a difference between saying “listening to music in the general program with Oticon aid is already very agreeable”, which I said, vs saying “you don’t need a music program.”, which you incorrectly implied that I was saying.

And don’t forget the context that the OP was making his comment in, that he wishes that Oticon could automatically change from the general program to the music program. Within THAT CONTEXT, to me (to clearly qualify and not be accused of making a generalization again this time), I don’t think it’s necessary because it implies a frequent back and forth changing between a musical environment and a general environment (like if the music is turned on for a little while, then off again, then on again, etc) that would necessitate such an automation. In THAT situation, I would rather leave the Oticon in the general program, because I don’t want the aids to decide for me when to switch program, because it would be annoying if the aids repeatedly make incorrect unilaterally decisions that I don’t agree with.

Of course the music program minimizes a lot of the processing and opens up the sound field to the maximum so you can hear all the nuances that you can from the musical experienced. That’s why I DO use it when I want that experience. But what I’m saying is that hearing music in the Oticon general program is not so bad (to me) that I would want to be constantly manually switching between music and general (if the 2 environments alternate frequently enough) in order to be happy, bad enough that I would wish for an autosense capability to switch between general and music programs for myself. I would just leave it in the general program in this situation.

While you may not find yourself happy with hearing music in the general program, I’m perfectly OK with hearing music just in the general program if the music goes on and off and on and off intermittently. Why would I be OK with it? It’s because of the following reasons:

1. The Oticon open paradigm already makes sure that all surrounding sounds are delivered to the ears more or less, albeit maybe in a more balanced way, in the general program. The general program does not kick on the neural noise suppression unless speech is detected, and then the noise suppression is applied to the speech only, not to non-speech sounds. So it’s not like noise suppression is constantly applied to everything in the general program to block out everything but speech, even in the absence of speech. So without speech and droning noise sources, in the general program, the Oticon aids lets you hear virtually everything and doesn’t block anything out. So you’re not missing much here in the first place. It may not be a more “open” field experience like with the MyMusic program, but it’s open enough. It’s like “best” (with MyMusic for music) vs “good enough” (with General for music).

Actually, if somebody says something to me while I’m listening to music, I would still prefer that the noise suppression for speech kicks in over the music so I understand what they say to me. Then it stops and I can enjoy the music again. I can only have both of this in the general program because in the MyMusic program, Neural Noise Suppression is turned OFF.

2. In the general program, there is some degree of beam forming done to attenuate droning noise sources, but if I’m in a music listening environment and there are noise sources present, I actually do want the attenuation of those droning noise sources as well. So in a musical environment where there are droning noise sources, I’d still rather be in the general program than in the music program, so the aids can attenuate those droning noise sources for me. With the MyMusic program, the directionality is set to Fixed Omni, so no beam forming is enabled to attenuate droning noises. With the general program, if the droning noise exists, the beam forming goes to work to attenuate it. But if the droning noise stops, then the beam forming is not necessary anymore and the directionality is opened up per the open paradigm, similar to the Fixed Omni setting in the MyMusic program.

3. But if I’m in a musical environment where I don’t care to understand what someone says to me, and I know there is no droning noises around that would interfere with my musical experience, then I will switch to the Oticon built-in music program so that I can enjoy the experience even more than if the aids were in the general program. But “I” will decide that for myself, I won’t let any hearing aids’ autosense feature make that decision for me.

Also a little bit of history here for those who are not aware. When Oticon released the OPN in 2016, they only had the General program and no other built-in programs were available. That is because the way they designed the OPN with the open paradigm in mind, it’s supposed to be a 1-in-all-situations program already.

While other HA mfgs let people set parameters to fixed values to customize different programs like general, speech in noise, music, comfort, etc, Oticon designed the OpenSound Navigator (OSN, the heart of the OPN) to be “self-adjusting”. The OSN feature scans the current environment for sounds and automatically determines how easy or difficult the scanned environment is, then continuously applies ONLY the correct amount of noise attenuation to the speech → hence the self-adjusting approach.

While other HA mfgs’ aids have set directionality value set in a program (like omni for music, fully frontal directional for speech in noise), the Oticon OSN has a Fully Automatic mode that decides how to change the directionality of the mics for optimal results in a situation.

Unfortunately, people either don’t understand this, or more likely are not used to this, so they started having the negative perception that the Oticon OPN is inferior to other brands’ aids because it only has 1 general program and no other built-in programs like the other brands’ aids. The OPN did have 4 programs for customization, just no built-in programs because Oticon deemed it unnecessary to begin with. Because of this negative perception, it took a whole full year before Oticon decided to release a number of built-in programs, just to appease users’ criticism of this. But I vividly remember hearing Don Schum (then Oticon VP) saying that the general program is already designed to be an all-in-1 program.

Then a while later, because the open paradigm is not a one-way-works-for-all solution and many people still struggle with the open paradigm and want a full frontal beam forming solution, Oticon also started releasing the OpenSound Speech Booter (maybe around the time of the OPN S release) to offer users an option to get a more traditional fully-directional frontal beam forming setup. But Oticon was careful not to make this a built-in program in Genie 2. They make it available only in the ON (now Custom) app so that users can manually turn it on via the app as needed so that it can be turned off automatically when the app is closed. This way, the open paradigm is still preserved because the user has to go into the phone app and consciously enable the Speech Booster every single time they want to use it. This ensures that they would only use it when they really need it, otherwise, they will get the open paradigm experience for the rest of the times.

The whole point of this long history is to say that Oticon has taken a unique approach at the very early onset of its line of “open” hearing aids to design the General program to be a good program applicable to most listening situations already in the first place. Sure, the built-in MyMusic program and the built-in Speech-in-Noise program are icing on the cake, but the cake should already be pretty good all by itself for the most part.

So one should not have to place too much importance on switching to the “right” program all the times when they go in and out of various environments with Oticon aids, and need to or prefer to have a hearing aid with autosense to do this for them. The Oticon already has its own kind of autosense built in within any single of its program already, to make appropriate adjustments within that program, without having to need to switch between programs to get proper adjustments. That’s how Oticon is different than many other brands’ aids, and that’s why Oticon aids don’t offer any kind of autosense program switching feature unnecessarily.

I know that this is a very long post. But I think there’s a lack of understanding about how Oticon does autosensing within a single program then vary the parameters automatically within that same program, compared to many other HA mfgs who set fixed parameters’ values in separate programs then use autosensing to switch from one program to another to vary their parameters’ values. This is an important differentiation that deserves a fuller explanation.

@Liviu said:

this is what I am missing with OTICON, a more powerful software to allow me deeper customisations.

Oticon Companion has an 3-band equalizer for streaming and same for environmental i.e. regular hearing.

I personally prefer the general program for music over the MyMusic program or the earlier music settings. But I am not a musician nor do i care much about listening to music. But i did go to an old time rock concert Friday night, 50s and 60s rock, and i used the MyMusic program with the volume of my aids set at low as possible without muting them and the music was acceptable. But even then i left with a headache. I have never liked loud music. I enjoy instruments a lot more than singing.

@Volusiano said:

many other HA mfgs…use autosensing to switch from one program to another…

I’m only aware of Sonova. Which other manufacturers use autosense?

@user246 , can you elaborate on “They live up to the hype”? I see you are a provider. Are you also hearing impaired? Or is your evaluation based on feedback from customers?

I have been waiting for reviews of the Intent, especially from users who are considering upgrading from the Real or More. I haven’t seen any yet. I have been wearing Mores since they first came out. If I hear reviews that say the Intent is a major improvement I will trial the Intent. Thank you.

feedback from previous Real 1 users. I think it will be a success at least in my dispensing office

@Volusiano said:

many other HA mfgs…use autosensing to switch from one program to another…

@x475aws said:

I’m only aware of Sonova. Which other manufacturers use autosense?

Autosense is the marketing buzz word used by Sonova.

I think Widex uses SoundSense Learn to let users choose between an A/B comparison and the final optimal setting can be saved in an additional program and recalled later when the user enters the same or (same type of) environment. It’s not clear whether this recall is manual or automatic though. If it’s automatic, then it would be an autosense type of sort. Otherwise, it’s not.

The Starkey Genesis AI has a feature called Edge Mode+ that can analyze what you’re hearing and automatically adjust the settings for you. But this requires you to click on the phone app to invoke it. It’s only similar to autosense in that it learns what the environment is like to automatically adjust settings for that environment, but you need to activate it, while autosense learns what the environment is like and automatically switch to the best matched program already pre-adjusted for that environment.

The Resound Nexia whitepaper I read makes some interesting conclusion. They claim that environmental classifiers (the autosense feature, more or less) are not very accurate in complex environment, and the music identification is the main reason for the inaccuracy. Then they claim that they have the most accurate environment classifier of them all. They also subscribe to what they call the Organic Hearing philosophy where they don’t believe in letting HAs switching programs automatically for the users. They have a Front Focus feature that the user would have to activate from frontal beam forming when desired. But they claim that even if the user forgets to deactivate it, they have a long and advanced history of binaural processing such that even with Front Focus inadvertently remained enabled, their users would not be cutoff from the surrounding sounds as badly as other aids when using frontal beam forming. So no, Resound definitely doesn’t seem to advocate for autosense taking over control of program switching.

Interesting thread.

Recently, I’ve had a chat with a Pro Audiologist, who said that Oticon has had since Opn, something they’ve never seen in the audiology, and that the NHS (UK healthcare system) were fitting more Oticon especially pediatrics.
Also, he said that, it used to be Phonak the top dog supplier for the NHS, not any more, the spot goes to Oticon.

I suppose he was referring to Oticon’s DNN or am I missing something?
I mean, Phonak’s autosense, seem to be doing a good job, Starkey with their Ai, they must have had a good success, not to mention ReSound with their M&RI receiver (that was a nice development).
I am sure other manufacturer have something.

So, what’s the deal with Oticon?

I’ve got few issues with Oticon:
1- Xceed has exceeded its time, at least 5 years old!
2- Xceed is way too big if you compare it to Phonak’s Naida Paradise/Lumity
3- Bluetooth not universal, you will need the damn ConnectClip around your neck for the HA to work with a wide range of devices (PC, laptop,…)

Thx