My Adventures With Oticon's Random Reboots Come to a Close

Hi. I’ve had a set of Starkey Genesis for 8 months. My first Cros after several Phonaks thru the years but my right ear is about dead so trying these. So far the only advantage I see over 2 real aids is the Cros setting where I can slide it all the way right which helps me hear my wife in the car. I’m not sure it’s working correctly as this is my first Cros experience. I have returned to VA audiology a couple times and told they are working ok. Just wondering what your experience has been with Phonak Cros. Do you also have one ear significantly worse than the other? Considering top of the line Phonak once I am eligible for replacements on 2 years. Thanks.

@cvkemp - Thank you for your service, good sir! Both to our country and for helping to give back.

I have worn my Phonak NAIDA B90 plus CROS aids since Friday morning almost 24/7. It is now Monday. I have not had a single random reboot. None. I am ecstatic.

I can hear things so clearly it’s unreal. Although I still have some of the muffleness feeling of learning to hear with these devices again at the same time, it’s getting less and less as the days go by, however.

I could not believe how noisy Costco was on Saturday. I could differentiate between different types of sounds clearly…I could overhear the people next to me speaking as I was walking by them. I could hear the rattle of the wheels of carts 10 feet away. I could hear the beeps of the forklift as it made its rounds in the back warehouse clearly. I do not recall that kind of detail coming through the Oticon aids I was wearing.

I can understand better what the digital woman’s voice in my Ford Edge is saying through the GPS navigation. I had a heck of a time understanding what was being said with Oticon. She was very muffled with Oticon. It’s like they made me “feel deaf” by comparison, and almost the inverse of the Phonak signal. I’m wondering, now, looking back, if there was more wrong in my individual instance than I knew…who knows.

I’m just happy to have some semblance of normalcy back.

It isn’t what brand aids you wear it is what works for you.

I know that’s the case in most cases, 95% of the time (at the very least). For me, I wonder about Oticon’s quality control (or lack thereof) when both aids I received, including the warranty replacement (my second pair was supposed to be a complete warranty replacement of both units). Even they had rebooting issues nearly from the start. Out of the box.

This particular experience does not provide me with very much trust or confidence in the brand overall in general. Even though I realize it could have been an individual experience and Oticon helps many, I simply had a pretty horrible experience overall. So, I will not be using Oticon again.

Experience and perception are everything. Rebooting 2-3 times a day or more does not work for a working professional who relies on their aids 24/7. Thankfully, Phonak realizes that.

Maybe it was something odd about the way they were programmed. Very odd.

WH

@cvkemp - Very interesting. Thank you!! I appreciate your experiences as well. What really perplexes me is how my first set kept deteriorating as the months went by with what seemed like more random reboots on a daily and weekly basis.

I believe like I said before the harder the device has to work, the more head is created the higher likely the device is to break down. This is also true for high or low temperature environments as high humidity environments.

At what point did I raise my voice or tirade? I am confused. I disagreed and defended my position using logical points. I also type around 120 wpm so it’s effortless for me to write long posts. I don’t think my expectations are out of line here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect $5,000 devices to work 24/7 without random reboots that are a clear manufacturer defect.

If you have another point, you’re more than welcome to offer them. But I am allowed to point out faults with Oticon. These are my experience and expectations after wearing hearing aids since 1982. If you love Oticon, more power to you. I’m not here to get anyone to abandon their love of Oticon.

15 Posts in a 32 Post thread, would seem to indicate otherwise.

You had a bad aid - you were dissatisified with it, fair enough.

I’ve got a Mercedes S 550 AMG that has a starting issue. Are all Mercedes therefore rubbish? Do I think Mercedes doesn’t care if they make decent cars or not? Should they be concentrating on me rather than their Formula 1 ambitions this year?

Or am I going to decide with my mechanic whether we sort it (at my cost) or write it off?

So I’m supposed to ignore everyone else who comments? This is called a discussion forum. Discussion. Not the post-once-and-never-post-again forum.

I’ve already tried to resolve it with the mechanic (the other audiologist). The only option was a warranty replacement after being beyond the thirty day return period. And the warranty replacement had the same issue, despite one or two improvements compared to my first set. My biggest mistake was not knowing what to look for and what the beeps signaling the random rebooting were during the first thirty days. If I had known this was a random reboot as I later found out on these forums too little too late, I would have returned the aids immediately for a full refund.

The warranty replacement hearing aid devices had the same issue. So yes, I’m a little miffed that I’m out $5,000 and have a product that doesn’t work to show for it. But not on a tirade.

There also appears to be, based on multiple threads on this forum, a random reboot manufacturer defect that is severe and pervasive across multiple Oticon brands that is rooted in poorly-programmed firmware that has needed multiple updates to resolve (and still isn’t resolved yet fully) - their Opn, More, and Xceed, and they are uninterested or unwilling to resolve the issue. And, of course, Oticon is not planning on releasing any new firmware updates anytime soon to improve any random rebooting on the Xceed, which is my model.

Am I allowed to be a little bit miffed in that scenario?

1. I’ve got to the bottom of an Oticon power /reboot cycle with a couple of clients by establishing that the aids don’t like it when there is excess current drain on the system: either through communications demands or saturation in feedback. It’s not misuse, it’s just a quirk of how their systems work when there’s not enough power availble.
2. Software releases are certainly designed to overcome hardware problems, but that would also cover subroutine loops that were sucking power cycles or better marginal management of power demands.
3. It’s not victim blaming to state that your results are atypical given that you aren’t a typical hearing loss or programming situation. You ‘should’ expect aids to work as they’ve been sold, but seeing that nobody on this board can see how they’ve been programmed or worn in a fairly atypical situation, I don’t see how you can extrapolate your position onto other user experiences.
   Take them back and get a refund vs. a pair of functional instruments.

Phonak are great aids I know a number of people that wear them. Oticon are also great aids and the parent company has been making and designing aids for a very long time. But like anything else the aids are designed for a specific range of hearing loss requirements. You wouldn’t want to tow a freightliner trailer with a one ton pickup would you. That is what I am seeing that happened with your Oticon aids. Your hearing loss is that freightliner trailer the Oticon aids were perhaps a ton and a half truck. It was a miss match from the beginning. I grew up an a farm we had to unfortunately make due and it caused failures. My Oticon aids are pretty much running in a relaxed manner due to my having the 105db receivers where some point out that i could make due with 85db receivers. The problem with their thinking is that I would not be understanding speech near as well and my aids would be pushed to there redline. That is not what I want or require. And to your money comparison well would you use a $100000 Mercedes that was an executive vehicle to tow a freightliner trailer.
I have nothing against any of tje brands of hearing aids, not even over the counter, but make sure that you have the right device for the right job. Don’t blame the failure on an overworked employee, blame the failure on poor management.

Re: victim blaming - Okay, fair enough.

How do you explain it when something like this happens in a completely quiet environment at 3:00 a.m. that a. doesn’t cause oversaturation of feedback, b. no communication was happening and aids were a good bit of distance away from anything making noise, and said noise was simply the quiet hum of the refrigerator across the room? And when 2 of these reboots happened within 15 minutes of each other? Also, within 20 minutes of being turned on after having several hours’ worth of rest due to a nap.

I can’t get a refund. I’m beyond the 30 days. I’ve already tried to at least get that audiologist to switch me to another brand that actually worked. They refused.

I wish there were some kind of a lemon law for hearing aids like for automobiles so you’re protected to be able to get a refund if you have full documentation of the issue you have with the Xceed, but unfortunately there’s no such thing for hearing aids and you’re at the mercy of the audiologist, and even Oticon, from trying to make it right for you. And it’s too bad and shame on them for not doing right by you.

But because your situation is quite unique and rare actually, just by measure of how not too many of this same complaint exist on forum like this anecdotally, your conclusion that if you have a lemon Oticon aid must mean that Oticon is a bad manufacturer overall and they don’t do QC and they do bad designs, etc, tend to fall on deaf ears. Not because people don’t want to hear it, but more like because people don’t see it with their own experience, either as a user of Oticon aids or a dispenser of Oticon aids.

Oticon is a very popular hearing aid brand, and if they’re truly lacking in doing good design or manufacturing or QC OVERALL like you think, it would have manifested itself all over the place, and it would have resulted in falling sales and mounting customer complaints. But it’s just simply not evident so, anecdotally speaking. So it seems like a likely conclusion is that you have a lemon for some reason, and possibly because of your unique situation of using just 1 hearing aid, as well as an ultra power hearing aid with its own complications to boost. If there has been as many special-case users as yourself on this forum as the batch of normal users, then perhaps these peculiar weaknesses of the Xceed might have exarcebated into a more common and a louder complaint. But luckily there aren’t as many special use case here like this, although it’s unlucky that you fall into this rare use-case and must suffer the bad outcome that it is. So I think we acknowledge that you do have issues with your Oticon Xceed for real, but it’s just that we don’t agree that it carries over to your conclusion that Oticon is a bad HA mfg overall. So we just have to agree to disagree on that.