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GN Hearing launches ReSound OMNIA

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Because of the claim that “Front Focus” in the Omnia is superior to “Ultrafocus” for the ReSound One and the repeated reference to the ReSound One as “legacy technology,” I would say that the Omnia is now ReSound’s premier .

GN Hearing launches ReSound OMNIA
The white paper details on how the Omnia “Front Focus” supposedly provides 150% better hearing of speech in 70 dB noise as compared to the ReSound One “Ultrafocus” mode are found at the following link: 13512_136155017 (webdamdb.com) This link is also available under the ReSound Support Materials for the Omnia by clicking on the + sign next to White Papers. It’s the middle one of the white papers at the following ReSound support page: Hearing aids ReSound - ReSound OMNIA support P.S. I thin…

I would say that when a new “platform” comes out, it becomes king for that line of . The implementation of a new chip/chipset is not trivial.

WH

Edited

“Ultrafocus” never impressed me so being 150% better isn’t saying much in my experience. The Resound MiniMic works very well in noise. If they can approach that level of comprehension in noise, in a hearing aid, I will eat my words.

I don’t think it really matters, as it’s all marketing hype anyway, every time these manufacturers release a new platform it hardly ever lives up to the blurb.

@Ureout said:

to get the full benefit of these HA’s that the M&RIE receiver wires must be used??

Seemed like for M&, he was only addressing directionality, being better able to tell where a sound is coming from via the pinna effect. In the part that he said “Front Focus” was a big benefit compared to previous ReSound technology, it wasn’t clear whether M&RIE had any involvement with that. And since Dr. Cliff mentioned that directional vs. omnidirectional hearing differentiated differently at low, mid, and high frequencies was an integral part of differentiating what was noise, I don’t think M&RIE is specifically needed for that processing. Also, nowhere in ReSound’s claims of improved speech recognition is there an asterisk * noting that M&RIE is required for their claim to hold.

I’d put more weight on any review that he does after he actually has more hands-on experience with the Omnia and after he’s had a chance for the same experience with the new Phonak.

I can tell you from experience with the Jabra aids that the M& receiver is turned off when the Ultrafocus program is active.

I wasn’t impressed with Ultrafocus, and I’m not too interested in this new aid as a result.

Edited

In reply to @jim_lewis

I’d have a pound/dollar on MaRIE mic being really good at natural ambience due to the flat response across the chart; however there’s two potential reasons why it wouldn’t help with speech in background noise.

1: It’s not directional: despite some pinna effect ( I don’t think it sits deep enough to get the full function); while the two mics on top of the aid can be mapped for directionality - this is worth somewhere between 3 and 9dB signal to noise ratio (depending on which manufacturer you believe). The mic also sits in a different and variable plane from the other mics so you you can’t even use it for 2nd or 3rd order directionality (unless you did something really nifty with in-situ calibration of your complex array).

2: Feedback: not in the completely traditional sense, but if the receiver is producing a given signal; it ‘wiggles’ in a reverse oscillation of the diaphragm direction. This action will get passed to an active mic attached to it. This is why the MaRIE is limited to lower loss situations. Take this a step further and physical sound in the air (the mic input) becomes more and more compromised by both the direct vibration and the reflected sound from the canal. This means that at significant input levels speech clarity is going to take a hammering from the drive artefacts of the MaRIE mic.

So I guess what I’m saying is that they’ve invented a hearing aid that’s great in the quiet or if you’ve only got a mild loss.

Edited
@Um_bongo said:

I’d have a pound/dollar on MaRIE mic being really good at natural ambience due to the flat response across the chart;

I found Dr. Cliff’s precocious YouTube Omnia review interesting in that he remarks that the M& is, according to ReSound, only for moderate loss (not quite true as I remember that it’s important for the loss to be relatively flat across frequencies). Yet he says in the video that he’s successfully fitted patients with M&RIE with more severe loss and that his patients who’ve tried M&RIE prefer that over standard behind-the-ear mics only.

Here’s a link to the specific time in the video (4:54) where he discusses M&RIE: https://youtu.be/eBcN_S1I1bI?t=2945

I like my Quattros and the way they work with my iPhone and Apple Watch. My main issue is that I’ve had almost a half-dozen Quattro external microphone sound failures and it’s ~always the left ear. My audi always says that she can see no problem with debris in the mic opening and ReSound, despite repeated attempts to get them to analyze what went wrong, always has just provided me with a replacement aid.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what the next Phonak aid offers in comparison and what forum members have to say about each aid before plunking down money for any new ’s. Perhaps I should have Oticon, Signia, or Starkey on my shortlist, too, but from the number of forum members who are enthusiastic about Phonak aids, there is this strange gravity pull …

Edit_Update: I did have one specific question about M&RIE receivers that perhaps you know the answer to, @Um_bongo.

The question is basically if I got fitted with custom occlusive earmolds to help prevent feedback at higher frequencies to give M&RIE a try, but it doesn’t work out successfully, whether I can have my audi just turn off M&RIE functionality and have the Omnias function FULLY as if they only had standard behind-the-ear mics? That would avoid the cost of having to get new standard receivers if using M&RIE receivers is a bust. My audi, when I asked about the ReSound Ones awhile back, said I wasn’t a candidate to be fitted with M&RIE receivers. A Costco rep, though, was willing to let me try the Jabras with M&RIE receivers and with occlusive molds if I had wanted to go with those.

Further_Edit_Update: Graphs on severity of loss that can be fitted with M&RIE receivers - straight from a ReSound Audiology Online course after ReSound having ~1 year experience with fitting patients out in the field (relatively flat losses across the frequency spectrum work best):

Resound quattro vs resound one
No course transcript available yet - they might spend quite a while correcting typos in the speech-to-text transcript as Zoom would routinely make “M&RIE” as “marry” in the text, etc. The handouts associated with the course (all the slides and 3 white papers on M&RIE performance relative to standard HA’s) are available to me as a participant in the Audiology Online course listing and perhaps will be to anyone auditing audiology online when the course is available as a canned, archived session. …

Wonder if Costco will be soon releasing this aid with the Jabra branding… I’m about to purchase a pair of Jabra Enhanced Pros … perhaps I should wait.

In reply to @jim_lewis

These examples (in the Resound link) are pretty much what I was saying above.

The ‘flatter’ losses are aidable, but just don’t occur nearly as often in reality (perhaps 20%). They are essentially just plugging the canal to drive/hold more sound in there before feedback.

The whole point/raison d’etre of the style is to keep the canal ‘open’ while dealing with a sloping loss. If you seal it up, you trade-off the benefits. Even the loss illustrated with the moderate/severe level is still only likely to use 20dB or so of gain. That’s in the moderate foothills of what you expect to be able to fit. The fact that you’d be throwing away a £200 set of receivers and £150 of canal moulds within a short space of time on a ‘maybe’ fitting doesn’t make any sense in trails either.

If you want a straw poll on here: just ask how many people have been successfully fitted long term with MaRIE receivers vs not (GN Customers only).

I don’t understand why (if they wanted to use this configuration) they didn’t try to place a mic in the Helix area (like the Resound Be - So they have the patents, spares and tooling). That would have potentially yielded the same Omni benefits without the feedback/fitting/venting issues.

Thanks for your comments, Um_bongo. I’m not sure whether your reply directly answers my question whether M& can be turned off, if desired, on a ReSound MM receiver and the receiver then function in all ways like a standard ReSound receiver. I would think that should be so as even in a fully functional M&RIE receiver, at least for the One, ReSound has stated that as the noise level in an environment increases, the response phases out the M&RIE mics and switches to the entirely behind-the-ear mics on the body. So it seems like the One at least can function without the M&RIE receiver working.

On occlusion, there seems to be different lines of thought amongst audiologists. I started out wearing an and as soon as I had my first meal or two in a very noisy restaurant, I came to the conclusion that a very open fit with open domes is worthless in dealing with noise. A lot of noise is low-frequency spectrum and the noise just leaked into my open hear canals straight to my good low-frequency hearing and made understanding conversations very difficult. I also thought with an open fit my speech recognition wasn’t as good as it might be. Putting my fingers in my ear canals seemed to help me better understand my wife’s voice.

A while back MDB posted a 2016 review article on open vs. closed fits: Article on open fit vs closed fit

from that article, I found a 2006 Widex paper on the advantages of going with a more closed fit: Article on open fit vs closed fit - #11 by jim_lewis

So after the first few months of “enjoying” an open fit, I decided to follow Don’s route and I got molds with Select-A-Vent. For the first year or two, I quite happily wore the molds with no vent. After a while, I don’t know if it was from flying in airplanes or what, I decided I’d rather go with a 1 mm vent in each mold.

I’m presuming that the options in Smart Fit to specify the type of dome or mold and the size of any vent opening in a mold actually mean something relative to the gain applied via the HA’s to low-frequency sounds and if one has little or no venting, the HA’s just transmit low-frequency sound to the eardrum at the level it was heard, as for good low-frequency hearing little or no amplification should be required but the sound needs to be reproduced by the HA’s if the vent is non-existent or very small.

The bottom line is that with a very occlusive fit, the world sounds no different to me with and without my hearing aids except for two obvious things. I don’t hear high-frequency sounds well without my HA’s and the sound of my own voice sounds different and deeper wearing my HA’s, which doesn’t bother me at all.

My molds were very well-made by ReSound. Normally, I can cup a hand over either ear and get no feedback. The DFS Ultra III feedback test (or whatever it’s called in Smart Fit) shows little or no gain control is needed in either ear.

So, based on my own experience of using a very closed fit for years, if I had molds as good as I have now, I might experience little feedback problems with M&RIE receivers. I’m well enough off that I could afford to blow a couple hundred dollars on the receivers and molds to fit the M&RIE receivers. That’s peanuts to blowing thousands of dollars on one premium high-end hearing aid only to find out that another brand or model might have been better, etc.

The view of audiology espoused in the 2006 Widex paper is that a lot of audiology is marketing a sound experience to users that doesn’t cause them to reject hearing aids, both for the patient’s long-term benefit and the financial bottom line of HA OEMs. There is the ease of using the hearing aids with cheap easily replaceable open domes, the natural sound of one’s own voice with an open fit, and so on. But I’ve tried that and I much prefer a very closed fit, especially for the opportunity it presents me to deal with noise and directionality more effectively and to control the frequency spectrum I hear more effectively with the ReSound Smart 3D app Sound Enhancer functionality.

Great observations which just confirm my suspicions about hearing aids. So here is a question. What do you all think of Resound’s New Custom by Resound Bluetooth hearing aids that launch in parallel with the Omnia platform? Full Bluetooth in an ITC format with dual microphones, waterproof, rechargeable and hopefully better music listening tech.

Jordan

In reply to @jim_lewis

Yeah; I know they can work without a MaRIE -it’s the way I’ve fitted them.

My point was that they marketed as the reinvention of the wheel. However it doesn’t work any better for the majority of losses if you use them as intended. Couple that to the clunky design and we’re seeing the fall towards otc product that claims a lot, but delivers average performance.

Thanks for your reply again. I will be very interested in learning what Phonak has to offer in its new aid tonight: https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/new-phonak-hearing-aid-to-be-revealed-tonight-at-midnight-cst/70327?u=jim_lewis (member archive).

I do like ReSound for the naturalness of the sound, especially while streaming podcasts to my ears and for the way it works with the iPhone and the Apple Watch. I haven’t checked recently but the fact that Phonak’s app didn’t transfer in any way to the watch was a downer. I guess one can never have everything one wants in the world…

@JordanK , sorry, I don’t know anything about the devices. My own preference, since one can have a bigger battery, is to use an device. With your low frequency loss, it looks like you don’t have to worry about the pros or cons of an .

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