AutoSense - music mode- Phonak Audeo Infinio Ultra Sphere

Yes but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad (church bells being a relevant example). I believe the point of music mode is to pass through audio without the same aggressive EQ matching your loss that would be applied to speech since that processing is undesirable for music. Soundscapes with a wide range of frequencies very unlike speech may trigger this (hence the broad spectrum noise of a vacuum cleaner setting it off). For me the main problem is when it doesn’t switch back from music automatically.

I understand why the algorithm might classify a vacuum cleaner or church bells as ‘music-like’. My problem is that in those real-life situations I still need speech understanding, and Music mode removes the processing that helps me hear speech comfortably. It also makes sudden impact sounds much louder. Interestingly, not all vacuum cleaners behave the same. My Makita vacuum consistently triggers Music mode, while my Bosch vacuum is correctly classified as Noise. So it doesn’t seem to be simply ‘non-speech = Music’.

my main goal for the phonaks (infinio sphere) is speech recognition, and I found that autosense was not always choosing the speech mode whtni needed it. So i just manually set the phonaks to speech mode each time i put them on , all day every day

When you say ‘Speech mode’, do you mean a manual Speech in Noise/Restaurant program, or simply a custom program that your audiologist created?

I have the opposite problem of autosense almost never going into the music setting. In my car it always picks the speech in car mode and never the music mode - even when I have music playing and no one is talking. At church with the band playing it will pick speech in noise instead of music. At home it will almost always pick one of the speech settings based on how loud I have the music playing. I have to manually set to music and even then, the music mode does not do a good job - still overemphasizing the speech related frequencies. I have tried having music mode adjusted to sound better but am still unhappy with it.

@dandyt said:

I have to manually set to music and even then, the music mode does not do a good job - still overemphasizing the speech related frequencies. I have tried having music mode adjusted to sound better but am still unhappy with it.

Been a while since I tested Phonak, but I’m certain you can have the manual music program added to one of your program slots. Unlike the autosense one it has all the speech algos turned off.

You still may need to dial down whistle block, but you’ll get a flat eq curve for music.

@flashb1024 said:

Been a while since I tested Phonak, but I’m certain you can have the manual music program added to one of your program slots. Unlike the autosense one it has all the speech algos turned off.

Thanks. I have a manual music program setup with the speech enhancements turned off. The way Target computed the basic curve for my hearing loss just does not sound good with music at all. I had a Phonak rep make changes she felt would help but it was actually worse but in a different way. I have played around with the settings in Target but have not hit upon a setting the is anywhere near as good as my old hearing aids are with music. I’ll keep fidling with it though.

There may be some merit to the way I understand ReSound handles the “sound scenes” their general, default program looks at. They seem to be focussed on speech and comfort. As such, their default program doesn’t even look for music. The user can have a separate Music program set up to manually called upon, but the general program doesn’t look for music. I’ve read that because so many places have background music playing, it would detract from the ability to clearly present speech to the wearer, to have the general program try to figure out if the wearer was more interested in hearing the music or the speech. ReSound seems to side step the potential conflict altogether. There’s lots of ways to “skin” that particular cat.

It is good nto know that I am not alone!

I wear the Sennheiser Sonite Rise (equivalent to the Phonak Infinio i90R) & have recently experienced the AutoSense switching from Speech in Loud Noise to Music - due to a crying baby!

Swiching into the Music program essentially removed the noise suppression effects of the Speech in Loud noise program, making the crying of the baby even more of an assault on my ears than the baby intended.

@flashb1024 said:

OK, so you are DIYíng. I wear my Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones while tweaking my custom music program on my Oticon Intents, and have had great results.

The problem with Phonak, and other makes is you can only have one fitting rationale, so you’re limited.

With Oticon, I can create a second program with DSL V2 which is much better for music, and turn off all the speech processing. Doing that, and making small tweaks to the fitting curve yield great results.

I hadn’t thought of trying to DIY for music with headphones on. I will have to give that a try. Thanks

I was thinking the same thing about the fitting rationale. I had fiddled with the Phonak Target software to try changing that but, as you mentioned, it changed the fitting for everything and I couldn’t find a way to just change the rationale for a single program.

In Target, go to the fine-tuning section and MPO & Gains. Choose the program you wish to adjust (eg Music).

Yeah it’s pretty easy to make adjustments in just one program, check out the step by step user guides, this will make it easier to understand how to do the things you want.