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Oticon Intent 1, Phonak I90 Sphere, or Starkey Omega AI 24, which should I choose?

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@dandyt said:

Maybe they will need to change that for BLE streaming to have each aid directly connected to the phone. That would probably be a significant change for them.

Hmmm… Maybe. Both sides already maintain an LE “command and control” connection, and the Bluetooth Classic side can be switched in Target, so there’s no obvious hardware problem here. But software? Who knows?

The more this discussion goes on, the more I want to see that source code! (And I don’t even know what language it’s written in - but still.) Sigh…

@DonRadlauer said:

The more this discussion goes on, the more I want to see that source code! (And I don’t even know what language it’s written in - but still.) Sigh…

Hahaha… Yeah, I am a software engineer so definitely curious about that code, but might be afraid of what I see :face_with_peeking_eye:

@dandyt said:

Yeah, I am a software engineer so definitely curious about that code, but might be afraid of what I see :face_with_peeking_eye:

Well, in my day job I can inconvenience - in theory - 3 million people if I screw up. (In reality, the healthy ones are harder to annoy since they’re not buying much medicine.) So I’ve gotten fairly hard to frighten!

@DonRadlauer said:

Well, in my day job I can inconvenience - in theory - 3 million people if I screw up. (In reality, the healthy ones are harder to annoy since they’re not buying much medicine.) So I’ve gotten fairly hard to frighten!

:flushed_face:

I used to work on the GPS ground station system. There is sooo much testing and verification that goes on at multiple levels before any software delivery is made operational. Knowing that, I was able to sleep at night LOL. Perhaps Phonak has similar mechanisms in place, out of an abundance of caution, that it greatly slows down their ability to push out streaming :smirking_face:

In reply to @JordanK

@JordanK said:

I have a hunch that they cannot run both Classic Bluetooth and LE Audio Bluetooth at the same time. They have to enable one or the other and that is why they are waiting. LE isn’t really standardized or universally available on many phones and devices yet.

Jordan

My Intents were limited to when they were fitted two months ago, as my Android phone hadn’t had a software upgrade to enable LEAudio.

About two weeks ago a phone software updrade enabled LEAudio.

There is now a setting in the phone hearing aid accessibility settings to enable/disable LEAudio.

I keep this enabled. However, disabling this setting and the Intents use ASHA.

In both cases each hearing aid pairs with and connects to the device Bluetooth.

Do each of the Phonaks infinios pair & connect to the device Bluetooth or is it just one aid?

Edited

Yes, LEA streams to each aid independently, so a significant change for Phonak.

I can power off 1 aid and the stream continues uninterrupted in the other aid. Power on the aid and the stream automatically resumes in this aid.

I suspect the issue facing Phonak is that LEA and their Classic protocol cannot coexist.

Hence a reluctance to enable LEA when there aren’t many phones with LEA enabled and unlike Oticon no backwards compatibility.

I’m probably wrong, but it will be interesting to see when Phonak eventually enable LEA.

In reply to @JordanK

Last programming session we set Deepsonic in my Auto base program to a bit higher then medium, it enables in noisy markets and house party’s well. I will try DEEPSONIC this weekend in loud noise. If I walk into a real loud restaurant i want to hear voices and not too much else. I am finding that the battery life is really good event being in an aloud environment for 3 hours. I leave and still have 60%+ of my battery life left after 11 hours of usage. That night i went to bed after wearing ultra’s for 16 hours and had 35% left on a heavy use day which included podcast streaming. Impressive after the 2.0 release, battery availability is amazing in my opinion. I have never gotten near below 255 of battery left.

In reply to @tenkan

@tenkan said:

No for streaming, they use master/slave set up, although this would change for LEA I presume.

Why the heck did Phonak decide to use the master/slave setup in the first place? My 6 year old ReSound Quatro’s individually pair to Bluetooth for streaming so it is certainly not a new technology. I don’t understand why Phonak would choose to have only one aid paired for streaming, with that aid then having to then send one side of the stereo signal to the other aid. That must introduce some amount of additional latency on top of the Bluetooth classic latency with is significantly greater than the streaming latency. I just got my Spheres 3 days ago and I can see that the right (paired) aid is always lower on the battery charge level than the left aid as a result of the master/slave design.

Edited

I just got my initial fitting with a pair of the Infineo Spheres 3 days ago. I specifically selected an audiologist who does the Real Ear Measurement and expected to get that done during the fitting. When I asked about it at the fitting, she claimed she doesn’t do that until the first follow-up appointment and then also told me my insurance doesn’t cover it. Yet, during my hearing test, I told her I chose her because she does the and she never said anything to about my insurance not covering it. She said it is a 15 minute process, so I will insist on it when I go back in about 3 weeks. After just 3 days it is obvious that where will be a lot of adjustments necessary, as I currently prefer my 6 year old ReSound Quatros over the initial fit of the Spheres (especially with music) - with the exception of the speech in loud noise performance which is significantly better on the Spheres. I am sure the Spheres will be much better after a few rounds of adjustments. I will miss being able to use the disposable batteries though. On the other hand, it will be great to be able to tryout making my own adjustments/tweaks in a few weeks (thanks @tenkan). I was worried about the size being about 50% larger than what I was used to, but they don’t feel bigger and are very close to being as comfortable as my Quatros. They are slightly more noticeable, but not enough that I care about it.

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