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Cheaper good alternative to Phonak Audeo Sphere Infinio regarding noisy environments?

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In reply to @mindsil

I have tried Intent actually. I judged them slightly better than my current Lumity. Significantly more expensive than Lumity though.

I will look into Philips 9050. Thanks.

A few months ago I purchased the Phonak Audeo Sphere 90 aids. I started with power domes and was disappointed. I then had my audiologist make custom c-shells. I am still very dissapointed. When I created manual programs and compare calm, speech in noise, and speech is loud noise, I notice very little difference in terms of directionality and ability to speech in noise. Its so bad that I think there might a be a hardware issue with my aids. Should my audiologist be able to test the performance of the aids rather than just tweaking settings? I wish she would put them in her ears and say yep, I am hearing the same issue. I think I will ask her to send them to Phonak for evaluation. If they come back with the same sorry performance, I will have learned something .

if they haven’t done it already Real Ear Measurements might be helpful. my audiologist does speech in noise soundfield tests in addition. you have a big drop in the mid frequencies so your audiologist will be trying to get a compromise between occlusion/reverberation/echo and high frequency volume. it might take a few tweaks before they get it right.

otherwise for speech in noise, external microphones are the big game changer.

In reply to @Rambo26

@Rambo26 said:

Should my audiologist be able to test the performance of the aids rather than just tweaking settings?

Theoretically there is test box measures.

Did you have ? Real Ear Measurement? Perhaps you’re underamplified in the high frequencies. Look at my , its shape is a bit similar.

You can test P receiver with power domes and place them very deep in ear canals (past second bend of ear canals). It will probably require trial and error with stepping down the size of power domes.

And consider shorter wire, although it’s not as crucial as things above:

In reply to @Rambo26

I’m not sure but I believe Sphere mode is different than Speech in loud noise. Perhaps ask your audi to give you a manual Sphere program? Others who actually have the aids please correct me if I’m wrong as I do not have the aids.

@MDB said:

I’m not sure but I believe Sphere mode is different than Speech in loud noise.

It’s different. Speech in Loud Noise uses StereoZoom 2.0 with very narrow beamforming and requires the same model of hearing aids on both ears (it is program) because it couples 2 mics from each . It doesn’t use .

I am not sure if that program is on Sphere it’s probably replaced by Spheric Speech in Noise AI program. Perhaps @jim_lewis knows more about that.

Speech in Noise (without “Loud”) is unilateral and broader beam from 2 mics from one HA.

Spheric Speech in Noise is unilateral AI program.

Edited

In reply to @Bimodal_user

@Bimodal_user said:

I am not sure if that program is on Sphere it’s probably replaced by Spheric Speech in Noise AI program. Perhaps @jim_lewis knows more about that.

There are two noise programs in Target: Speech in Noise and Speech in Loud Noise. The former uses classical noise reduction processing (StereoZoom, algorithmic processing), whereas Speech in Loud Noise uses neural network processing. See screen captures below. DirectHearing online, the source of my Spheres, shipped them to me with a “Restaurant” program installed. That doesn’t show up in Target, but I can tune it in the MyPhonak app. I presume it’s just the Speech in Noise program. It works very well, but nowhere near as well in extreme situations as the Spheric noise reduction program. Don’t pay any particular attention to my actual settings in Target for the programs shown. I fiddle with the exact settings in the MyPhonak app all the time to adjust to the noisy environment I’m in. One size does not fit all, IMHO. BTW, probably old news, but I noticed Target 11.1.1 is available when I launched Target for the screen captures.

@Bimodal_user said:

It’s different. Speech in Loud Noise uses StereoZoom 2.0 with very narrow beamforming and requires the same model of hearing aids on both ears (it is binaural program) because it couples 2 mics from each HA. It doesn’t use AI.

As shown in the screen capture, you can supposedly adjust the amount of beamforming in both speech in noise programs. Presumably, for Speech in Loud Noise, if you restrict the sound to be processed mainly to what you’re hearing in a forward direction, you make it easier for Spheric noise reduction to do its thing. Both the amount of directionality and the amount of noise reduction can be fine-tuned in the MyPhonak app for each program.

Speech in Noise in Target 11.1, probably equivalent to my “Restaurant” program

image

Speech in Loud Noise in Target 11.1, i.e. Spheric noise reduction

image

Jim is on the money. You can verify that restaurant is based on speech in noise by going into that program (restaurant) and then going into adjust in myPhonak and it will tell you the program it in based on. (Which is speech in noise).

WH

In reply to @platypus

About 6 months in, it is amazing how much junk this vacuum picks up. It didn’t really change how long the left one lasted, but the right one has kept going.

Recommend.

WH

Try airpods pro 3, it has hearing aid feature, also if you don’t want it you could return it for free in 14 days.

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