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Phonak Audéo Sphere

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Edited

From Phonak’s Canadian site. This page looks like a draft page of the new features in the myPhonak app that shouldn’t have been published. It describes some interesting features with the new platform.

IMG_2262

And looks like new Virto comes either rechargeable or 10 battery. Ah, decisions decisions.

Edited

It also looks life you only get the deep neural network-based noise reduction and the width of beamformer adjustment feature with the top “Sphere” model. I’m guessing this is the hearing aid with the larger form factor and bigger battery. No mention of Bluetooth either.

This is also interesting: “Access remaining usage time estimates for each manual program”. Implies some of the programs chew battery faster. Maybe the new Neural based noise reduction comes at a cost of high battery drain.

Jordan

certainly the “made for all” consumes a lot of battery you might be right in that it might be the trade off

In reply to @user246

@user246 said:

width of the beam forming … and strength of the neural network that is interesting …

Can’t you do that already? Not the deep neural network per se, but I thought you could adjust both the width of the cone and the strength of the noise-cancelling algorithm.

“Find my hearing aids” would be useful, though! I’ve thought about sticking an Airtag in the charger, but that doesn’t help when the aid itself has gone AWOL.

In reply to @JordanK

If they can do the find my hearing aids feature and perform well in the hearing in noise department and add non rechargeable batteries then LE audio over LE Bluetooth is all that is left to do. I would certainly consider upgrading to new Phonak 90s if they meet those specs. I have come so close to losing a hearing aid that cost me $5,000 each on several occasions and worry my luck could run out at any time.

No mention of the “Life” model with the supposedly enhanced water resistance in this list of models. I wonder if they are discontinuing the Life model. Or maybe the enhanced water resistance of the Life is being applied to all of the upcoming models.

In reply to @ziploc

It looks like they took the Infinio/Sphere stuff off the charger page. But I looked at it before, and they had a Go version of the Infinio charger that – unlike the Lumity chargers – didn’t look much bulkier than the Ease version. My guess is that they’ve decided to offer a charger with a built-in power bank (finally!), but without the special charging connectors that the Life versions used in the past (hence Life requiring different, bulkier chargers).

In reply to @cvkemp

I worked for 3Mfor 15 years

Change is all about increasing profit
Sometimes by reducing manufacturing cost. Sometimes increasing sales volume.
Always measuring market share.
3M sold to distributors. Kinda like hearing aid manufacturers

I wish they sold to us…the people who use hearing aids

I hope the hard working Audis and hearing instrument specialists are paid adequately

@DaveL said:

I wish they sold to us…the people who use hearing aids

An analysis I recently read said that top hardware costs just a few hundred dollars, when the price we pay (thousands) mostly goes to fitting/audiologists. The reality is that most HA users have an advanced age and are not very tech-savvy. But I agree with you- companies ought to also have a “direct to customer” channel for those with run-of-the-mill hearing loss and a PC handy: “here are the devices, instructions and the programming software, just pay us the hardware and R&D costs”.

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