Review/report about the Phonak Audeo Sphere Ultra vs P70 vs Nothing.
I have moderate loss in right, severe in left. Mostly high frequency, so typical problem of hearing speech but not understanding speech without aids, but everyting else is too loud (hyperacusis).
My first pair of were a set of P70s bought on ebay…and program augmented with pro hearing test previously. Bought the P70s several years ago. They were ok, folks around me liked them more than I did..ie I could understand more group speech..but I did not like the overal quality…too much noise, too little understanding.
I read some reviews about the Sphere….and decided to give them a try. I found a great local audi (through a friend reference) that was very cooperative with my DIY approach. He found my P70 programming to be pretty spot on (mostly DIY), so he had confidence in my abilties. He set me up with the Ultra Sphere HAs, with a quick program just before the holidays (ie late 2025). I really liked the Spheres right away…really attenuated the annoying environmental noise, and made group speech far more intelligible.
I decided to run a DIY comparison test:
Setting: Outside on a windy day. I had my wife start reading from a book at a steady volume. I then switched between the Spheres, the P70s and nothing. I was sitting in the wind, and she was sheltered about 10 ft away. I did not look at her while she was reading. I started with nothing, and had her lower her voice until I could basically not understand anything she said. She keep to that volume. I then switched back and forth between the P70s and Spheres. I could understand maybe 40% with the P70s and nearly 90% with the Spheres. A very compelling and decernible difference! I did this several times to verify. The Spheres were very effective.
While visiting family out west, I was with them in a very noisy store…the ban of my existance! I was standing in the checkout lane and became aware of just how good the spheres were. Several times I became aware, and could understand, a person talking 10 feet away…in the din…it was clear that the sphere programming was doing its job well…picking out a voice in the noisey environment and bringing it to my attention! Felt like being in the Matrix.
I have now been using the Spheres for about 6 weeks..and the acid test is that I actually look forward to putting them on in the morning!
I recently did two changes which further improved speech comprehension. I switched from small to medium ear molds to get better seal, and I tweaked (DIY) the program a bit…with the medium molds I actually lowered the default volume and also used the handy Target auto fix feature for several items…like speech in loud noise, noise in general, better “sh”, etc. The combination of medium mods and a bit of tweaking was very good.
Overall the sphere Ultra (ie latest firmware) HAs , for me, are excellent. The P70s were marginally useful. The best feedback is from my family…no more complaints about me not hearing them…really! After 10 years or so, I finally have a set of HAs that work well for me. I look forward to even better dynamic noise attenuation, as I still take them out and use earplugs when snowmobiling etc, but a minor issue overall.
A somewhat comical issue with the Spheres is that I noted that folks seemed to “lisp”..hmm I said, thats strange…only after a bit of research did I come to realize that the lisp is an artifact of the frequency shift the HA is doing. Pretty fun when I am aware of it!
I used Truhearing, and paid 2990 for the pair (US). I have a 3 year warranty, damage and replacement ($300 each, one time). Audi provides 1 year of support..but he knows I do DIY, so he is somewhat off the hook. I’ll touch base with him soon to update my status.
Overall, very happy…finally. From my point of view, the hype of state of the art hearing aids finally caught up with reality. I expect even better HAs over the next few years.
Ethan Brand
Roscommon MI
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Hot Springs Village, Arkansas