My Whisper AI trial vs. Oticon More

Definition of “boxy”5

It doesn’t mean anything to me, used as a description for sound. The definition above is what “boxy” means to me.

Boxy apparently is a technical term. Not sure how this link will come through, but see #3 7 Weird Mixing Terms: What They Mean and How To Use Them | LANDR Blog15.

I always find hearing aid users talking about sound like it’s a fine wine amusing.

@MDB: Thanks very much for this link. In 50+ years of playing music professionally, I don’t remember hearing the term used. (I’m not saying it isn’t used - just maybe not in the time and place of my heyday.)

I do get it when you say “dry”, or “flat”, however.

I guess midrange-y would be a more understandable description.

I agree that it doesn’t seem to fit. For truly world class searches, consult a librarian (especially a medical librarian) I consider myself pretty good, but librarians put me to shame.

Watching football now. Football is the easiest TV experience for me, as opposed to movies, which are often the worst. Sports announcers are trained to articulate. Commercials have their audio compressed (that’s why commercials often sound annoyingly louder than the actual TV shows). With movies the audio is not optimized for speech comprehension. A moody atmospheric movie with sports announcer audio wouldn’t work for normal-hearing people.

I started out with the Whispers. The midrange-y sound of the Whisper (I’m retiring the word “boxy”) worked well with football on TV. I could understand everything without any real listening effort. Then I switched to the Oticon. The Oticon on the default program sounded more processed and unnatural than the Whisper, with speech comprehension that was good but significantly not as good as the Whisper. The Oticon program that my audi set up for my music performing sounded much better for football than the default Oticon program. That music performance program was set up to minimize feedback suppression and eliminate or minimize compression and all speech-comprehension features that interfere with my singing.
I switched back to the Whisper. I preferred the Whisper for watching football. Interestingly, while watching football I am getting the impression that the Whisper is isolating and emphasizing the announcers’ voices.

This is a very good effect! I haven’t yet noticed this effect in real-world face-to-face conversations. Maybe I haven’t noticed this effect until now. Maybe the Whisper is learning my unique situations and is adapting. We’ll see as the trial progresses. What I’m hearing from the Whisper right now (the perceived “speech separation”) while watching football is exactly what I’ve been hoping for. Whisper has a TV program that can be loaded into the second program slot. I wonder how that would sound.

@ziploc: You didn’t happen to turn the Brain off for a few minutes to gauge the difference between the assisted earpieces and unassisted ones, did you? (This is just a curiosity question - I realize tou said that your testing would always be Brain-assisted.)

Watched a couple of minutes of the movie “The Irishman” on Netflix. Oticon on the music performance program was better than the Oticon default program. I thought the Whisper was a little better for speech comprehension for this movie than the Oticon music program, but not a lot better.

According to the dispensing audi, Whisper comes only with a one-size-fits-all dome. It’s a single dome with one tiny pinhole near the center. My Oticons have “bass double vent” domes. It seems unusual and a bit curious that, at least according to my understanding of what the dispensing audi said, Whisper doesn’t offer different dome options.

He/she doesn’t have to use Whisper domes. I started Whisper with ReSound domes, the same ones I was using with my Quattros. Those domes gave me some feedback on Whisper, more than I was getting with Quattros. Apparently this is due to Whisper’s emphasis on higher frequencies, combined with my ear canals having an atypical cross-section that domes may have trouble sealing. Last week she took impressions for custom molds (apparently at Whisper’s expense, though I’m still on the trial). The molds may take a while due to supply chain issues, and in the meantime I’m using Whisper with Signia sleeves, which seem to seal a bit better in my ears.

I do wonder about Whisper sounding midrange-y to you, given that higher frequencies are important for speech. Will you be able to talk to the audiologist about REM?

No. Below is the excerpt from the Genie 2 online Help on the Lecture program.

Given that the advantage of the Whisper design is specifically framed in terms of the much greater processing power afforded by the external “Brain” unit, I think that turning it off may be analogous to using the Oticon OPNs or Mores with the setting on less than full noise reduction.

I was wearing the Whispers (with the Brain) in a noisy restaurant this evening. I was facing a couple of friends. It was interesting to me that I could make out what female friend was saying quite readily, but that I actually had more difficulty distinguishing the words of the male friends, whose voice was lower and presumably requires less processing for someone like me with high frequency loss.

@ziploc @x475aws is right: AFAIK, the receivers aren’t made by the hearing aid manufacturers, so you can use whichever domes fit them. I currently have Oticon open domes fitted to my Whispers.

Frankly, I think that opting for the Whisper over anything by Oticon (or any other high-end hearing aid manufacturer) is a no-brainer because:

1. These really do appear superior in helping to understand voices in noisy situations
2. Not only does the month-to-month payment plan make it easier to manage the outrageous cost of these devices, but at around $90/month, they’re actually considerably cheaper if one changes hearing aids every 3 years or so
3. One will get hardware upgrades over the 3 years, unlike for any other manufacturer, so hopefully the earpieces will get outfitted with lithium-ion batteries and become smaller.

I guess, then, my audiologist customized the Lecture program by making them more directional.

@happymach said:

Frankly, I think that opting for the Whisper over anything by Oticon (or any other high-end hearing aid manufacturer) is a no-brainer because:

1. These really do appear superior in helping to understand voices in noisy situations
2. Not only does the month-to-month payment plan make it easier to manage the outrageous cost of these devices, but at around $90/month, they’re actually considerably cheaper if one changes hearing aids every 3 years or so
3. One will get hardware upgrades over the 3 years, unlike for any other manufacturer, so hopefully the earpieces will get outfitted with lithium-ion batteries and become smaller.

I mentioned this in the other Whisper thread already but there was no reaction. If you want to compare something that’s more similar to the Whisper in terms of having a DNN that specializes in speech in noise like the Whisper does, the Costco Philips HearLink 9030 would be a better comparison than the More.

Yeah, the More has a DNN, but that DNN is trained for balancing sound scenes with an open paradigm in mind. Yeah, it’s also trained for removing noise from speech, but because it maintains an open field and allows for almost all other sounds to remain in the sound scene, it becomes a compromise because the other remaining (albeit rebalanced) sounds can still compete with the speech, espeically if there are a lot of sounds going on. On the other hand, the Philips HearLink 9030’s DNN is trained specifically and exclusively and more aggressively to remove noise from speech. That is its primary goal, very similar to the Whisper’s DNN removing noise from speech being its primary goal.

At $1800, if you divide it by 3 years, it’s $50/month, much cheaper than the discounted lease price of $90/month for the Whisper. It’s also more likely that in 3 years, the third generation of the Philips HearLink, is more likely going to still be $1800 or $50/month while the Whisper would more likely go back up to their normal $179/month pricing.

Regarding getting hardware upgrades over 3 years period for Whisper, it’s unlikely that it’ll be as often as every 6 months or even every year. I think it’ll more likely be every couple of years at the fastest for an entirely new hardware upgrade. The current second generation Philips HearLink 9030 supercedes the older original Philips HearLink only 2 years after the introduction of the first generation HearLink.

So let’s say 2 years from now the third generation Philips HearLink comes out and you decide to buy this 3rd generation HearLink, the $1800 cost of use for the second generation HearLink (currently sold) for 2 years worth of use still comes out to only $75/month, still cheaper than the $90/month discount that would go up to $179/month in 3 years. And you ARE also effectively getting new hardware as well in the form of the 3rd generation HearLink in a couple of years, not much different from getting new hardware from Whisper that more likely will come out every 2 years. But better yet, you’ll have the 2nd gen HearLink 9030 as a back up pair when you buy the 3rd gen HearLink. With the Whisper, you don’t have a backup pair.

So I think you’d be remiss if you want to find a holy grail DNN for speech in noise but totally ignore the Philips HearLink 9030. For sure it’s cheaper than the current cheapest Whisper lease price that’s just going to go up in 3 years, no matter which way you slice and dice it, $50/month for a 3 year time frame, or $75/month for a 2 year time frame until a next gen version comes out.

Of course for @ziploc this doesn’t apply because he’s already owned the More. But for those trialing the Whisper but still on an older generation HA brand/model, it wouldn’t hurt to try out the Philips from Costco. They have a 6 month trial period with full refund.