Agreed with lots of what you said, even this bit is subjective: ’Natural sound’ - might play well for the marketeers writing a ‘What HiFi’ article, but in reality the ‘nature’ of the listening experience comes from flavouring (adding errors) to the listening experience to make it suit our soft analogue brains better.
In particular Widex (historically) uses fast attack and slow release times around their syllabic processing, which has a certain smoothing effect - while traditionally Phonak has used fast attack AND fast release times to preserve syllable integrity (process noise in between) and maintain their . (Slightly different with the Sphere as it’s considering the whole pattern of words; like an instantaneous ‘autocomplete’.)
(Slightly different with the Sphere as it’s considering the whole pattern of words; like an instantaneous ‘autocomplete’.)
Maybe why I find vocals crisp and sharp with the Spheres but also percussion. Bass is fairly subdued although I think I’ll be able to work on that with my audiologist.
’Natural sound’ - might play well for the marketeers writing a ‘What HiFi’ article
You have raised the bar, even for yourself with that sentence!
I was wondering, even as I wrote that, if I was coming off like a member of the marketing community.
in reality the ‘nature’ of the listening experience comes from flavouring (adding errors) to the listening experience to make it suit our soft analogue brains better.
The reason vinyl, and tube (valve) amps/pre-amps are in vogue, right?
The last paragraph of your post is very informative, Thanks for that.
caembry - first, welcome to the forum! You mentioned your current are Stylettos and you mention looking at Phonak but having a “limited space behind my ears”!
I will demo the Phonak’s next, My only concern with them is their size & the limited space behind my ears, the reason for the original Styletto’s. Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I will look at Audiogon. BTW I am Signaforce on Audiogon. Thanks!
I use Phonak Slims, which have the Styletto slim style. So if you are looking at that company’s offerings, definitely check out these HAs!
Widex Smart RiC is a strong contender if music is important for you (as it is for me, too). It’s has a slim and seek design. It feels very comfortable behind the ear and the tulip domes are also very comfortable. Excellent charger, great looking design.
I’ve had these ’s on trial a few month ago. Still I didn’t buy them, because the improvement of hearing of speech wasn’t big enough compared to my current Signia Pure.
Also the prize of the slim design is the absence of a button, so you have to use your smartphone or the RC-DEX remote control to change program, volume and others.
The reason vinyl, and tube (valve) amps/pre-amps are in vogue, right?
Yes, anything that ‘conditions’ the signal due to the physical limitations of the reproduction device has an effect.
So people talking twaddle (and spending buckets of money) on vinyl due to some notion of the ‘richness’ are effectively ‘listening’ like you would see through ‘rose tinted glasses’. Some filtration is occurring and in my opinion diminishes the quality of the sound.
Whether (subjectively) the softer sound is more palatable to your ears is another argument. However in my book anything doesn’t faithfully reproduce the signal is headed the wrong way for this industry: however much people spout about it.
You are far from alone in your quest. Do you find the quality acceptable for speech? What I hear through them is metallic, thin, and mono dimensional. Enhancing’ with features further circumventing the issue - two trials later. Transmission of speed - Liszt, Chopin a dismal whirl of trafgic quality sounds.
I’ve got good quality music reproduction through both streaming and speakers via Oticon 1s. The simple answer is that you need to learn to so that you can sit in front of your high quality speakers and adjust the frequency gains so that it sounds “right” to you on your equipment. I have reference tracks that I have “known” for over 50 years and I use these to set up my aids so the music sounds how I think it should on my studio monitors.
I damaged my hearing by playing in loud rock bands for too many years with no protection. I was falling out of love with music as my hearing got progressively worse. However, I recently switched to a much better audiologist, got new aids and learned how to DIY thanks to this site. I am now in love with music again.
Well, Bose is (was?) already in the market. Maybe their aids sound as good as their speakers.
When Naim produces HAs, maybe I’d be interested, although as great as Hicaps and Supercaps and whatever-caps they sell now are, I’m not sure I’d want to carry around an external power supply…
Have you tried strapping a Naim Supercap on your head? Start now to train your neck muscles now. All joking aside, I had been involved with High End Audio all my life. At 73, I decided to step aside and retire from the Hi-Fi business. It has been a bit over a year now, and I have been enjoying going to classical and jazz concerts. After a lot of research, I have come to a conclusion that Widex have high recommendations for live music listening. To my horror, the typical price for a pair of top of the line Widex with fitting costs around $8000+ CAD. I discovered that Costco offers top of the range with fitting for a lot less. So I headed in and asked them what Costco has that would come close to the sonic quality of Widex. I was recommended a pair of Jabra Enhanced Pro 20, and I decided to give them a try since Costco has a generous 6 month full refund policy. The first couple of fittings were focused on speech recognition. They were acceptable. I must say that both the Audiologists and the fitting technicians at Costco were more interested in fitting the HA’s with a clinical solution, and they offered no help in as far as m their music capabilities. As long as the HA’s help with your speech recognition, they feel they done their job. When I started to use the Jabra HA’s for streaming, I had found them far inferior to my Stax ELS Headphones driven by a tube amplifier. In fact, the Jabra’s were inferior to a much lower cost Grado Bluetooth Headphones, the GW100 x. I could NOT listen to streamed music with the Jabra’s because of the tininess and compressed highs. They were not much better for listening to live music or for music from my Hi-Fi set. Fortunately, at that time, Costco was introducing the new Rexton (sister company to Widex) Reach HA’s, and I decided to purchase a pair to compare. The Rexton Reach HA’s made all the difference to my hearing. Live music, music through the Hi-fi and streaming through the HA’s came alive. I no longer feel depressed from resigning myself to unlistenable music which did not give me any enjoyment. I did return the Jabra Enhanced Pro to Costco. I never investigated into the Widex HA’s because I am so satisfied with the Rexton Reach. Besides, between coming up with $1600 CAD for the Rexton Reach HA’s and Widex at 5 times more, I’d rather upgrade my Rexton more often, since technologies in HA’s change quite fast. For the best sound from the Hi-Fi set, I still use the Stax ELS Headphones without any HA’s. I did shared my experience with a friend who had just purchased a new pair of top of line Oticon, and he asked to try out the Widex and had found them more satisfying for music listening. These are my limited experience in different HA’s as evaluated from a music listening stand-point. Good luck in your journey with listening to music with the right pair of HA’s. I look forward to hearing about your experience.
Amateur musician here who’s been on a quest to find the best hearing aids for band practice and for listening to music live/through speakers (not streaming).
I had the Oticon Opn 1 and Oticon Opn S hearing aids for a couple years each, and got depressed about how dull music was sounding. The comb filter effect seemed strong, giving music and speech a blurry, chorus-like sound.
I then had the Earlens system for the past 3 years. It made live music sound great, but had other drawbacks: cost ($12k for the system), inconvenience (nearest clinic 2+ hours away), reduction in my unaided hearing (~5 ), and unimpressive performance with speech in noise.
Since having Earlens removed, I’ve been comparing my old Oticon hearing aids against some options (Airpods Pro 2, Sony CRE-E10) and Widex SmartRIC 440. The Airpods Pro 2 are by far the best I’ve found for streaming music/phone calls (Earlens in 2nd place for both), but for live music and speech, the Widex hearing aids are the strongest, even better than how I remember Earlens sounding. Music using the Puresound mode sounds more alive than Earlens’ Music program, and Puresound does a better job filtering out road noise in the car without affecting the music. I sought them out because the processing latency is <0.5ms, and I haven’t noticed the chorus/comb filter effect I hear with other devices. Streaming music sounds terrible, but that’s the case with all the hearing aids I’ve tried other than Airpods. The Widex hearing aids also gave me the best Word-In-Noise test score across all the devices I’ve tried. I’d highly recommend them to anyone looking for great hearing aids for music.
I have Phonak 90s and listen to both streaming and vinyl via speaker and a tube amp. Very happy with the SQ even though when alone I’ll pull the and crank the volume. All in all I’ve been very pleased listening via the Lumities.
In particular Widex (historically) uses fast attack and slow release times around their syllabic processing, which has a certain smoothing effect - while traditionally Phonak has used fast attack AND fast release times to preserve syllable integrity (process noise in between) and maintain their SNR. (Slightly different with the Sphere as it’s considering the whole pattern of words; like an instantaneous ‘autocomplete’.)
How would you describe other brands - Starkey, Oticon, etc - using a similar framework?
Are you suggesting that many musicians were used to some smoothing and this may be why they prefer the Widex sound?
The problem with answering the ‘brand’ question is that it’s a movable feast with extra caveats based on each particular strategy AND each platform development.
Let’s just take the Sonova example (pre_lumity) they were analysing the sound environment with their classifier some 600 times a second and decided which mode AutoSense was in - if it decided speech/speech in noise, it would do the fast stuff with more directionality and noise reduction. If however it detects Music, you’d get slower release times and less processing (more like the Widex). They also have the ability to blend the transitions across AutoSense. So depending on your environmental mix you could be getting a bit of both.
More modern usage of means that once the technology is trained in what to recognise, it chooses the portions of enhancement by pattern and (hopefully) retains the syllabic differences which refines the kind of dynamics above. So ideally you’ll get the ‘cleanest’ enhancement of speech in noise, but should hear music in its intended form.
As to whether analogue audio and ‘audiophiles’ - it’s mainly twaddle, especially given how many ‘musos and sound-engineers’ have quite poor hearing. Especially the stuff about digital sound. Let’s be honest, we haven’t really moved much better than CD reproduction through a Marantz Amp to a tidy set of Wharfedales (or wired Philips sealed cans) in the 1990s. Though I’ve noticed that some of the HD music feeds do have some extra depth.
As ever, it’s subject to the characteristics of each element of the system and the original signal/recording quantisation. The ‘softness’ of Analogue sounding smoother is a function of taste as we age imho.
HiFi guy to HiFi guy, tue answer is Widex. Period.
I tried Phonak Lumity and Oticon Real first but neither could pickup and restore the resonances in acoustic instruments when the Widex could.
To their credit the Luimity had response higher frequency response (I measured) and the detectible compression in music mode, wasn’t objectionable. The Reals distorted all sound and very problematic at higher frequencies and never got as far as the same testing.
So, what’s Widex magic sauce? Primarily, their higher sampling rate is above industry standard. The low processing delay, as a benefit and relatively speaking, is a magnitude lower and is going to be case specific. This is achieved through bucking the industry standard by opting for cleaner sounding time-domain processing.
Hearing aid signal processing is central to the sound that surrounds the user every day. This article lays out different possible signal-processing strategies, focusing on the choice of filter bank and sampling rate, and how these relate to sound...
I’m interested in experimenting with verification of dynamic range and frequency response of hearing aids.
I had horrible experiences with a set of Costco Preza 861’s, made by Resound, and roughly equivalent to Resound LiNX Quattro 9. The problem was the features the technician enabled by default that compressed both dynamic range and frequencies (moving high frequencies into a lower range). Listening to the bubbler on my aquarium was an acid trip because of the latter.
After several visits to disable features and adjust the frequency range, I finally bought a Noahlink Wireless, and entered the grey area of tweaking my own. I soon realized that I needed to do something like a Real Ear adjustment. So I bought a few cheap microphones advertized as measurment mics, and made my own acoustic coupler to the tube for the ear. I quickly found that cheap mics may have great frequency response, but they lack sensitivity to the low sound levels required.
I then went through some cancer treatment, and haven’t picked up on it again. I imagine I’ll need to buy a used audiology probe microphone to save time.
Since then, I’ve also changed to Phonak Audéo Lumity L90-RL’s through the . I can’t seem to find a safe download for the Phonal Target software. I fear malware infected downloads.
What I wish is that some enterprising audiologist would do audiophile testing of and publish them. I’m interested in dynamic range and distortion, in particular, as I find that typical setups from audiologists boost voice frequencies as a rule, and sound processing seems to distort quickly, riding the edge of feedback on louder sounds.
Ideally, a manufacturer would recognize the market for sound professionals who need hearing aids and want verification of sound quality before purchase for shopping. The stats published on most HAs are practically useless. I imagine the manufacturers will counter that and features make this all moot, but DSPs and AIs could be adjusted to provide the best possible audiophile experience just as easily.
I’m an amateur, by the way, but I’ve built electronics from scratch, and done acoustic testing to verify my home setup in the past.
Ultimately, I’m sure we will confront our tragic hearing loss by pursuing this. I’m ready. Bring it on. I just have no confidence in the audiology industry in addressing my desires at all. They just match an already poor fitting curve based on decades old audiology theory and practice, and enable features that are poorly described by marketing hype.
Friday night I was at an amazing concert. Jake S is a virtuoso ukulele player. His concert was spectacular.
I went and sat early. His system was playing wonderful music I turned on my Phonak. MUSIC. I’ve checked often. It’s never shown as the autosense selection before. I saved it. Turned my phone off as requested. Left the app on the phone in autosense. Last time I checked it was in speech in noise as the concert hall filled. DaveL
As I previously mentioned, I’m new to and have been wearing Phonak Lumity 90s for less than six months. I have no other HAs to compare them to, but I had my audiologist program them to go as high in frequency as possible (which is 9.6kHz) in Music mode. (Having them go that high in speech/conversation mode is counter-productive.) I do hear some distortion on audio peaks in the lower treble if I listen to music loud, but I can’t tell if what I’m hearing is the HAs’ limited dynamic range or my own damaged hearing (lots of loud live music in my younger years and my hearing loss is bundled with tinnitus and an occasional weird “blown speaker” distortion effect in certain frequencies). But listening to music through HAs is significantly better than without them. Before I got HAs, I tried using (analog) EQ to compensate for my hearing loss (digital EQ would be much more precise but isn’t an easy or appealing option because I listen mostly to vinyl through tube/valve amplification), but listening to my stereo with HAs and without EQ sounds better to me.
My audiologist freely admitted that she was trained only to pay attention to speech recognition and that this is still where the industry focuses its attention. She initially programmed my HAs only to go as high as 6kHz, even though when I initially consulted with her I stressed that I wanted HAs that could reproduce frequencies up to 10k.
I suspect she just forgot about my priorities in the few weeks that lapsed between consulting with me and fitting me with the Phonaks. Or that she just went into automatic mode and programmed them for speech only. My impression is that she just doesn’t come across many audiophiles. But surely birders would want to hear the frequencies between 6k and 10k too. It can’t be just us audiophiles.
To my audiologist’s credit, she happily worked with me in follow up visits to get the HAs to work as I wanted them to. That seems to be the golden rule of HAs: the HAs you buy are only as good as the person who programs them.
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