Yes, I recall his statement now. I think that was his personal fitting. I don’t believe it is a general problem though.
With respect to the issue battery life on the Spheres my personal view is this is totally overblown. I haven’t seen a single post, anywhere, of anybody saying they have got to the end of the day and run out of charge. Still, I respect and understand the views of those who don’t want to risk it. It should only be a matter of time before the next generation comes out, which has much better battery life.
For me, in general, I don’t recognize the benefits of rechargeable vs. disposable batteries. Yes, it can be inconvenient if you run out of battery power and have forgotten to bring spare batteries with you. But the disparity in battery life between rechargeable vs. disposable continues to surprise me – hours vs. days. Starkey is claiming up to 51 hours on their rechargeable Edge , but they also claim that their #312 battery version will go 6-7 days. The only thing you lose is full waterproofing.
My ideal HA might be a Sphere with a #13 battery option. But it seems like that is unlikely to ever happen.
I was kind of with you on that, until I had my 1st child. Now as far as I’m concerned, they can ban all these batteries and that will force better and better rechargeable options. It will be painful, it will be a bit slow, but it’ll happen. Just like when Apple got rid of the headphone jack on iPhones. After a few years, we had really good quality knockoff Airpods using stable connections, to say nothing of the top end makers with high quality headphones. Now hardly anyone thinks about the old 3.5MM jack on phones. disposable Batteries IMHO need to go away and we need better technology. I completely sympathise that they feel like they’re required for some things, but a push towards a better alternative has to be a good thing.
I actually agree with you 100%. It was sold as a massive benefit, but how? The only argument that I found remotely convincing was that you would not suffer the embarrassment of your hearing aid running out of battery, midway through a job interview, for example. But they did not mention the scenario where one might end up in hospital, late at night, with a low battery and no possibility of recharging.
It is funny, because I remember it being sold as a game changing revolution, whereas it was anything but. Still, enough said. This topic has been beaten to death. I am lucky enough to have a spare pair of Xceeds with disposable batteries, so not a big issue for me.
I was kind of with you on that, until I had my 1st child. Now as far as I’m concerned, they can ban all these batteries and that will force better and better rechargeable options.
Are you worried about your child swallowing a battery? Hearing aid batteries aren’t an ingestion hazard according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission…even though they’re included in the child-resistant packaging rule that was aimed mainly at much more dangerous lithium button/coin batteries.
When rechargable batteries start to approach the energy density of disposable batteries, things will improve. Right now, Phonak’s main challenge is catching up with the competition’s low energy chip designs.
It’s all about expectation setting which was the whole point of this post in the 1st place.
Let’s not forget that at their core, the Infinios are a great set of waterproof hearing aids with a lot of customisable features. Not to mention that they already have a really good speech in background noise program which I think would work well in many situations and particularly those where the noise is a constant drone. That Speedh and noise program is quite seperate from the spheres and until now, has been the program many people loved for these types of situations.
The problem is, all the marketing hyp has been around friggin and . The problem with that, is that not all DNNs and not all AI is equal. I’ve not used the Starkeys in Edge mode, but I used genesis and my impression is that Edge will be a simple frequency tweak with some clever compression to pull speech to the forefront.
Probably similar with Oticon combined with a bunch of fancy marketing around their motion sensors etc. Good for droning, probably not good for pulling speech within a certain radius out of other background speech. I’m not downing these companys, I’m just pointing out that their AI at least to me, sounds like a tweak to their existing platforms, but of course it has to be on the marketing blurb to keep up. I think this is quite evident from the fact that I’ve seen no audio demos of either Edge or Intent AI. The sphere demo however, is fairly accurate given I tried the units for about 3 weeks.
Then we have Phonak who built a seperate chip, specifically designed to perform this one very complicated function. A chip that many people have said should not have been seperate. I don’t really understand that. You want the chip seperation in order to perform more calculations and use more multithreading but more to the point, it allows the equalisation, compression and other settings to work seperately from the noise reduction which is taking up a huge amount of compute power and you want the ability to put that chip into idle mode when not using it. Similar to how a graphics card on a gaming PC spins up and down depending upon what is being required of it. The architecture might change in the future, but for now the 2 chip system does seem sensible to me.
At their core, Infinios are a great every day hearing aid. The spheres are an Infinio with a huge turbo jet engine on the back. a jet engine that when you use it, will drop the cars fuel significantly because you’re now going at 400 miles per hour. Many people have responded saying the battery time is bad, but the truth is you’d not use a jet engine to go 400 MPH on the roads all day, you’d use it in short bursts or for very specific situations.
If you don’t use sphere mode, then the hearing aids have a stupid amount of battery. I used mine for the whole day about 18h and came out with 70% battery left. That is insane. Of course it will vary from person to person depending upon hearing loss, but the fact they can do that is to be greatly admired in my book.
I should point out I’m in no way advocating people go and buy the Spheres. each person has their own unique requirements. what I’m trying to say though is that when you consider what the sphere is doing and how it’s doing it, the battery life which people have an issue with, isn’t so bad and it will only get better.
I think I now need to go and try Starkey Edge to understand how their AI sounds
My wife works in A&E, or ER as it’s called in the US. she sees children swallowing tiny batteries more than she’d like, quite a few die as a result. Can’t say for 100% certain if they’re hearing aid batteries but I’d rather not take the chance. Call me paranoid but I think it’s not unreasonable being totally blind as I am, I could drop a battery and my boy could pick it up and eat it. as someone who wants to try and get a decent option I’ve considered it to the point where I’d change them in my office but I know I’d be caught short at some point and need to change them somewhere else. I tried Widex ItEs a while back and they only have a disposable option. I felt sick to my stomach for the week I had them because of this problem and because you have to open the doors to turn them off. The irony is that whilst people find batteries provide more independence, for me they provide less. However yeah I’m sure the topic has been beaten to death and like it or not, disposable batteries are going away now. Charge cases are holding more and more battery all the time. Tiny external power packs are also getting more powerful. If you’re not given an option, you find ways to adapt. Remember when Nokia phones used to last a week? then we all got mini computers that last a couple of days and suddenly we all had to charge them at night. Not ideal but people make it work I guess.
It might be in fairness, I do recall an interview though where one of the Starkey reps was talking about the fact that people ended up using Edge all the time when using Genesis and that’s how they developed this idea that Edge should always stay on if required. Which implies the tech was already there. My guess honestly is that the chip was upgraded to be a bit faster and a larger battery was slapped on to it. I’ve not tried it though so I won’t claim to know how it works or what it sounds like. I didn’t care for Genesis because of the unnatural sound processing that was happening to every day noises without Edge mode activated. I am curious to hear it though.
I agree with your general point that what Phonak have achieved here with the Spheres is only possible with a huge amount of computational power and this comes with at the expense of needed battery power. I think it’s also arguable that in terms of scrubbing background noise, the Spheres are peerless. The marketing department at Starkey are making noises and claiming their product is the best, with the 13dB reduction, but I remain sceptical.
That said, what is undeniable, is that one has to trial these aids and see for oneself. I actually do not agree with your assessment that the “Infinio” are great aids that worked anyway in speech and noise. Assuming that the Infinio, without the Sphere chip, is similar to the Lumity, then my assessment, based on wearing the superpower version, was that their performance in noise was not a generational leap. To be honest, I could not say they were a leap at all. I did have some moments where I thought they were not too bad, but I had a couple where I had great difficulty in understanding even a person right in front of me in noise.
To further elaborate, and this is the reason that I am replying to you, one has to be very careful about assessing a hearing aids performance in noise. I have read a few posts on here wherby people seem to believe that if you scrub the noise, the problem is solved. To me, there are 2 issues with this. First of all, the Spheres don’t kick in for mild/moderate noise; although one can force the issue by manually selecting the Spheric mode. This means that if you are using the standard speech in noise or speech in loud noise programs you may not be getting any /generational benefit. The 2nd issue for me is that once you scrub the noise, you are still potentially in a group setting, assuming there are a lot of people, and then you are evaluating speech in quiet. I don’t see this talked about, but it’s damn important. If your hearing aid doesn’t deliver simple clarity then there are big problems.
So for me, the battery argument overshadows the real argument, which is best in noise? My feeling is that it is impossible to know, as there are too many variable factors involved. The extent of one’s loss, whether one can hear or not in noise, the fitting, the capability of the fitter, was used? etc etc. This can only by answered by a trial.
One thing I did learn and was stunned by, was that the Oticon open paradigm actually worked for me. I wore KS10s and resolutely stuck with Phonak for over 15 years. When I was given a pair of Xceeds I found that it did not have the aggressive noise reduction of the Phonaks. I cannot say with certainty that the Oticons give me better hearing all the time, as there are limitations with all these devices, but I believe that in noise I am hearing better.
I completely agree with everything you’ve said. as someone who’s fairly new to hearing aids, the one thing people never talk about anywhere is how the things sound. I have mixed feelings on this on one hand people all over the net do demos of how noise canceling headphones work, but no one does this for ’s. however, it is fair to say that NC headphones assume “normal” ears where as the same hearing aids sound utterly different to different people because of how our individual hearing loss works so perhaps this is why no one talks about how they sound, other than to use words like crystal clear, natural etc. I would be more specific if I talked about sound, but then again sound is that much more important to me.
It’s a shame you didn’t find the regular speech in noise useful when you tried the lumity. The Spheres do sound different to the Lumity to me and I think a closed fitting would work the best with any of Phonaks noise programs. I have found that you really need to play around with regular speech and noise and sphere mode using the app for them to work properly. I was not impressed when I 1st put on sphere mode, I had to switch up the intensity of the reduction and narrow the speech focus. which weirdly didn’t mean I was only able to hear people in front of me like I thought it would. I’m surprised Phonak doesn’t have it set more aggressively when you 1st get it.
Likewise the standard noise reduction program took a lot of tweaking. Horses for courses I guess.
As you say, there are just too many variables involved and without trialing the things, you just don’t know how they’re going to work for you day to day. An audiologists office is not the place to try
Your observation that the Oticon open worked for you is really interesting to me for 2 reasons.
firstly because before I trialed Oticon, everyone but everyone told me they were the most natural sounding hearing aids, respected all sound etc. I hated them. I mean I hated them with a passion I’ve never known for hearing aids. All sound was warbly and unnatural. I actually tried them from 2 different fitters and 2 different cliniks as well. I lost all directionality, there was such a huge cone effect that it made me unaware of things were around me. Now maybe for you if you have to use a super powered receiver, you don’t get the cone effect and maybe some of the warbling goes away because your ear isn’t picking up sounds around you.
my 2nd point though, I do believe, is that the hearing aid industry and its users in general, are going down a very scued path re hearing aids. We are relying so much on the hA telling us what we should and should not hear, we’re relying so much on the style, we’ve forgotten what our ears are actually meant to do. I think there’s a lot to be said for a very natural analogue sounding hearing aid. Not an analogue device that boosts across all the freq bands that’s just painful, but an open sounding liniar program which gives you real world sound back.
It might not work for everyone, but I think it’s where hA’s should start from, and then only dial in the more aggressive programs when needed. I think that is what Oticon were going for at least and clearly it worked for you.
I’ve not spoken directly to Phonak as you can’t unless you’re an audiologist but my audi has spoken to them and his understanding is that the update will come out in the next year or 2. I suspect though can’t prove, that LE audio standards are still fluctuating in some way and this is why for example iPhones also don’t have LE locked down yet. I could be wrong. We’ll have to see I guess.
It’s late here in the U.K. so I’ll have to return to the discussion at some point.
Just some quick points. I probably did not get the full benefit ot the Lumity because I did not have and the combination of my own efforts and my fitter did not achieve a good fit. I know that looking at the specs of the Lumity that they had good speech in noise capabilities.
With respect to natural sounding etc, I know this is important to some people. The model opinion has tended to be that Widex delivers really natural sound, Oticon likewise and Phonak less so. Probably because of trade offs in determining speech. I think when I mentioned about a hearing aids performance in quiet, I also meant that it was somehow able to cope with multiple dynamic talkers by way of some kind of frequency separation i.e. being able to isolate and track individual voices, which is what the Signia is claiming it does. Of course, with your sight loss I understand that you may have completely different and conflicting priorities. You need to hear everthing.
Hahha yes it is late in the UK that’s also where I live.
So in my experience, Widex is the most natural, weirdly followed by Phonak Infinio (not Lumity) and Oticon are then the least natural. That includes the Oticon music program which I tried.
Of course natural means a lot of different things to different people, so I will try to describe.
Widex shoves all sound in your face. It has good low freq extension. It has a slight cone effect on the Universal program. The EQ settings really do change the EQ. The further away from a sound source you are, the better that cone effect sounds. so if you’re sitting in front of hifi speakers for example, music just sounds lovely and natural. If you’re near a wall and receiving lots of sound reflections, the cone effect is weird, but that’s true of all ’s.
Noise reduction on Widex is fairly terrible. You have to have fairly good hearing or just not use it.
Oticon does shove all sound in your face in that you can hear everything around you, but I find it muddy. It doesn’t seperate the individual sounds out like Widex. It’s just a load of high freq noise coming at you in my experience. EQ does make a bit of difference but not like Widex. Speech in noise not noticeable to me, made little to no improvement.
Phonak, very very very veery bias towards speech. They can pull speech out of a hat and the rabbit will come with it, but at the expense of the environment around you. You can sort of treat this with the music program, but then you run into issues with loud sounds slamming on the compression which I’ve discussed in other posts. Phonak do work well day to day but they really are meant for pulling out speech which I think is why people find them less natural.
However the big issue with Phonak is that often I think people are fighting Autosense more than they’re actually using the HA in a natural mode. So many posts I’ve read where people say they sound rubbish with music and then it turns out Autosense has left them in some stupid program. I get the idea of Autosense but for my book it needs to be removed and let the person decide their own programs. Unpopular opinion I know but there we go
Yes for me it’s important to hear all around me. I have 2 or 3 programs I’d use on a HA.
One linniar music for every day life.
One speech in noise for mid to noisy situations or where the noise was constant.
One spheric/Edge type program where you want to scrub as much noise as possible.
To your point about multiple voices and being clear within a quiet setting but multiple speakers, the spheres to me at least did this well. I was kind of shocked how well. No one sounds natural with Sphere mode it’s true but I never expected them to. What it did do though was seperate out the voices. Granted that may not work for you I’m just giving my experience
I trialed Audeo L90R for two months. Compared to my KS 9’s, I found them to underwhelming. Speech in noise was slightly better than the KS 9’s at times, but not really an improvement. But overall, I found the L90R to really suck the brightness out of normal hearing, as compared to the KS 9s. They also suppressed a lot of the natural sounds around me, including things like bird song.
And yes, Phonak’s in general ruined music for me. The Phonak do this weird thing when streaming from TV, that when the sound track includes music, they kind of swell and increase volume, and reduce speech clarity, then when the music track dies down, they go quiet and I have to turn the volume back up for speech.
I also trialed the Oticon Intent for a month, but I did not get custom earmolds made and the double domes just don’t work for me anymore. I could get a sense of how they might work by plugging my ears with my fingers, but there were a lot weird little distortions. That trial was a spur of the moment thing.
I should mention that I’ve been in a holding pattern for the past 6 months, because I’m awaiting a decision from WorkSafeBC on whether or not they will fund my HA purchases going forward, due to my 10 year work history in a noisy industry. So, I’ve had lots of time to compare features and watch comparison videos, but I can’t make a purchasing decision until I get the yea or nay from WSBC. But in these 6 months, my choices have expanded, so that’s a good thing.
