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Phonak Infinio Sphere I90 Review (Another One!)

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Edited
@Deb630 said:

How do you do that?

You have to go into an environment with loud noise where speech is present , if the noise is getting over the threshold (which is set by the fitter with the Target fitting-software) the autosense will invoke the program “Spheric Speech in Loud Noise” (this reduces the noise for better understanding speech).

You can see and check the current autosense-program if you perform the steps in the MyPhonak App which GaryH and the guy in the video described.

Another possibility: Have your fitter setup a dedicated programm for “Spheric Speech in loud Noise” , then you can switch to this program if you need it. But in this case you have to remember that your are in the Spheric Speech mode and you have to manualy switch back to autosense if you are no longer in the noisy environment. Because the battery drains faster in the Spheric Speech noise reduction mode and the battery would only last about 7 hours if you let your hearing aids constantly in that Spheric Speech in loud noise programm.

In reply to @Richard7

Great review thanks

I have had my I90 Spheres about 2 months - first I have had

Richard - if this helps my I90s I don’t notice muffle even when windy if really windy just a slight brushing sound

How are you liking the Phonak now that you’ve had some time to wear them?

I’m very curious because I’ve had the Starkey Edge 24 for less than 30 days but my own voice sounds metallic. My Samsung 22 either doesn’t connect right away or loses connection.

I’m going to try the Phonak Infinio Sphere this week, but just a short trial to see whether I want to exchange the Starkey for the Phonak. I think I will if only for the better Bluetooth connection.

@Jeffrey_J
There is a very good review made by Guy on this topic since a couple of days on YouTube.

Edited

Thanks for this new video link, @e1405 . The one thing this guy didn’t point out is how the Intent doesn’t block all the voices except for the speaker in front like the Sphere does. You can hear the voice of the person in front well enough to understand them, but that’s not the only voice you would hear, due to the open paradigm. So you’re not in a “bubble” like with the Sphere.

Whether one likes being in a bubble for speech in noise or not is purely a personal preference. I actually sometimes like to be in a bubble for a 1 to 1 conversation, but not all the times. So the best thing in my personal opinion is to have an option to pick either/or, depending on the situation.

He also wasn’t clear about whether he used the Edge mode with the Starkey’s in the noisy environment.

In reply to @Volusiano

@Volusiano said:

The one thing this guy didn’t point out is how the Intent doesn’t block all the voices except for the speaker in front like the Sphere does.

I’ve been wearing the Sphere’s for four months and I haven’t noticed that they block voices from the side or behind. I will say that when the Spheric mode is on, I’ve observed that you lose front to back directionality and are left with only left and right. It’s a bit confusing at first but speech clarity is really good.

Jordan

Of course I don’t use the Sphere, so I can only go by the demo given where in a noisy room with several people in the round table, when the Sphere kicks on, the simulation shows that only the voice of the guy in the front is heard and everything else seems to be blocked. So is that simulation not an accurate representation of the real experience? So if all the people in that round table talk at the same time, you can hear all of them at once? I always thought that the simulation seems to imply that only 1 voice (the person in front of you) will stand out to you and the rest of the voices and noise are all suppressed.

@Volusiano said:

I always thought that the simulation seems to imply that only 1 voice (the person in front of you) will stand out to you and the rest of the voices and noise are all suppressed.

Hi @Volusiano,

It doesn’t quite work like that. You sort of hear everyone talking around you. The Spheric doesn’t lock onto a voice and amplify it. Rather…it sucks out the noise around you and then passes the sound off to the hearing aid’s regular sound processing. Think of the Spheric AI as a noise pre-processing tool. What you end up hearing is all the voices around you. Bear in mind that louder/closer voices tend to sound very clear and clean and quieter voices (due to greater distance away from you) tend to get muddled or filtered out as noise. The net effect is that close voices are super clear but the remaining background noise that the Spheric AI processor didn’t remove sound very weird at times. The reason it’s a strange experience is that the voices are very clear and the background sounds are weird. It’s something you really have to test yourself. The other thing is that it works best with closed fittings. Otherwise the background noise leaks in via the open fitting.

Jordan

Edited

Thanks @JordanK for the clarification. This makes more sense than what that simulation implies. Granted nobody sitting around that table was speaking except for the 1 guy anyway. I think I understand better now why they call it a Sphere. So all speeches inside of your near field “sphere” or bubble can be heard, but the ones outside the sphere get treated as noise and therefore “muddied up” because they’re considered more as noise than as speech.

I don’t have the Oticon Intent, but I have the Oticon Real 1. They use the same anyway, although the Intent has the 2.0 new and improved version. With Oticon aids DNN however, you can here the near field speeches well, but you can aIso hear the further-away speeches pretty well, too. But of course their volumes are still relative based on how far away they are. But without this near field “sphere” like the Phonak has, you’ll have to contend with hearing all the speeches from near field and far field, and it’s up to your brain to focus on what you want to hear and what you want to ignore/tune out. I guess with the Phonak Sphere, your brain wouldn’t have to work as hard to manage and juggle between all the sounds.

I guess that might be the key difference between the Phonak Sphere experience and the Oticon DNN experience → the speeches and noise outside the Sphere get suppressed heavily on the Phonak Sphere, but for the Oticon aids, but the speeches outside the near field (the equivalent of the sphere) don’t get suppressed aggressively, although the non-speech noise might get suppressed more aggressively, but only in the presence of speech. But if there is no speech going on in the far field, the Oticon aids do allow the non-speech sounds (otherwise might be considered noise) to have a presence for the users to hear.

This brings up a couple more curious questions maybe you don’t mind answering → if you have the Sphere feature turned on, but none of the speakers at your table are speaking, then do the noise outside the sphere gain more presence? Perhaps AutoSense kicks in and turn off the Sphere mode? Or do they still get suppressed aggressively regardless of whether there’s speech at your table or not? If AutoSense kicks in and out, how fast does it do it? Let’s say if your speaker in the field talks, then pauses for 5 or 10 seconds. How long does it take for Autosense to turn the Sphere off? If too often, though, wouldn’t it be annoying?

The other curious question is that you’re at a busy airport restaurant or lounge, having the Sphere on to carry a conversation with folks at your table, then there’s an announcement in the background regarding flight information, will that flight announcement be suppressed aggressively as noise, or will you notice it clearly somehow? If you notice it clearly, then what about the background music in that restaurant? You probably by now get what I’m trying to ask → how do you juggle with having a sphere for conversation but not miss out on things that might be important to hear outside the sphere? Thanks!

Edited

In reply to @Volusiano

@Volusiano said:

The one thing this guy didn’t point out is how the Intent doesn’t block all the voices except for the speaker in front like the Sphere does.

Both in Target and in the MyPhonak app, you can adjust the amount of forward focusing in play with Spheric noise reduction and the strength of noise reduction. You can adjust whether soft sounds are amplified vs. loud sounds suppressed (Dynamic sound adjustment). You can access a primitive equalizer to adjust bass, mid-tones, and treble within limits. And you can save up to 10 user-defined adjustments of the various AutoSense programs for future use (plus your can create four custom programs, IIRC).

Direct Hearing created a custom program for me called RESTAURANT, which appears to be some variation on the Speech in Noise program. With the Spheres, it works almost as well as Spheric noise reduction but doesn’t chew battery as severely as the full-on Sphere mode does.

The main difference between the Restaurant program and full-on Sphere mode is that the Restaurant program doesn’t remove background noise as cleanly as Sphere mode does. The Sphere mode in wide area mode seems to grab onto the loudest voice. A good compromise for both programs is to have speech focus set about halfway on, which favors the forward-facing direction, so you can focus by where you look.

I haven’t worn any other hearing aids but ReSound Omnias and ReSound Quattros, but I’m very happy with everything about the Spheres, especially Spheric noise reduction, and glad I plunked down the cash to get them. YMMV. ****

Edit_Update: The difference between Spheric mode and Speech-in-Noise is nicely illustrated by a Phonak “evidence” image posted by @Bimodal_user (click to enlarge):

image
Image copied from Phonak Sphere l90 versus l70 - #28 by Bimodal_user

The upper figure shows that theoretically Spheric noise reduction can give you a huge 3.6 boost over Phonak’s StereoZoom 2.0 forward-focusing used in Speech-in-Noise. Someone will have to explain the lower figure to me. It seems to show in practice, starting with a test situation where the volume of speech is several dB below the noise, the actual performance of Spheric noise reduction over Speech-in-Noise isn’t that sensational, but both modes are still much better than whatever competitors Phonak chose to display.

**** For perspective, I’m wearing cShells with no vent. The occlusive fit makes my voice pretty loud, but the suppression of noise going directly to my eardrums is great. One can make various adjustments to help with the sound of one’s own voice. My audi charged me $120 each for cShells with new receivers, allowing me to keep my original receivers as spares since any cShell with a receiver problem must be returned to Phonak for repair or replacement.

In reply to @JordanK

That’s important.

I work in construction. I couldn’t hear behind. I was almost hit 3 times by fast noisy equipment.

With my Paradise P90rs I can hear from behind. Essential

I do have issues walking my dog. I don’t hear cars coming up from
Behind.

Edited

In reply to @Volusiano

@Volusiano said:

This brings up a couple more curious questions maybe you don’t mind answering → if you have the Sphere feature turned on, but none of the speakers at your table are speaking, then do the noise outside the sphere gain more presence? Perhaps AutoSense kicks in and turn off the Sphere mode? Or do they still get suppressed aggressively regardless of whether there’s speech at your table or not? If AutoSense kicks in and out, how fast does it do it? Let’s say if your speaker in the field talks, then pauses for 5 or 10 seconds. How long does it take for Autosense to turn the Sphere off? If too often, though, wouldn’t it be annoying?

The other curious question is that you’re at a busy airport restaurant or lounge, having the Sphere on to carry a conversation with folks at your table, then there’s an announcement in the background regarding flight information, will that flight announcement be suppressed aggressively as noise, or will you notice it clearly somehow? If you notice it clearly, then what about the background music in that restaurant? You probably by now get what I’m trying to ask → how do you juggle with having a sphere for conversation but not miss out on things that might be important to hear outside the sphere?

To answer your questions:

  1. When Sphere is on and nobody nearby is talking, the Spheric program continues to filter out the noise and everything sounds quiet. Remember…the Spheric AI chip first processes the sound and removes noise and then passes the cleaner signal to the main sound chip for processing. This can cause a unique situation where you start talking and you think it’s not that noisy so you don’t raise your voice. Turns out it’s very noisy (but you can’t hear the noise) so the person you are speaking to asks you to speak up because they can’t hear you.
  2. AutoSense kicks in very quickly to turn on/off the Spheric AI program. As long as you exceed the threshold (75db noise I think) it will switch or switch off and it’s not annoying. I’ve found that AutoSense is lightening fast to switch between programs. You could force it on with the manual Spheric AI program but I don’t like to do that. The only exception where AutoSense takes it’s time to switch is the Music program. AutoSense seems to need about 30+ second of music before it switches to Music.
  3. With respect to your question about the airport and flight announcements…this works really well. Announcements at the airport gate are usually very loud and the Sphere’s just treat this as another person talking. Once again, the Spheric AI chip just removes noise and it knows the difference between background noise and speech. I now have no issues hearing flight announcements at the gate when travelling. This is huge for me.
  4. The only time you can have issues occurs when there is loud music playing in while you are talking to people at the table. The Sphere’s will switch into Music mode and you won’t be able to hear the people at the table. The bests solution here is to select the manual Spheric AI program so that you can hear the people you are talking to. This will mess up the music quite a bit but you really have to decide if you want to listen to music or listen to the people at the table.

Hope this helps.

Jordan

You mentioned that sometimes people say that you need speak loudly, for example at a table when the music is loud. The problem could be that if you have chosen a manual sphere and at some point the music stops and people will ask why are you shouting???

Edited

No. What I meant is that sometimes you are somewhere where the noise is really loud but nobody is speaking. The Spheric program is on and actively scrubbing out the noise. To the person wearing the hearing aids, it doesn’t seem that noisy anymore but it actually is quite noisy. Turns out you are just not hearing the noise because the Spheric AI program is doing its job and removing it. Somebody walks over to you and starts speaking. You hear them perfectly but you are still not hearing any noise so you respond in a normal voice. They then ask you to speak up because it’s really noisy and they can’t hear your “normal” voice.

It’s a funny situation to be in for a deaf person. Usually you are the one asking the normal hearing person to speak up.

Jordan

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