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Phonak Launches Infinio Ultra and Ultra Sphere: Improved Processing, Battery

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In reply to @WhiteHat

@WhiteHat said:

Two weeks ago I would have said Spheres didn’t have a great ability to reject wind noise. Yesterday was really windy here, and I was doing work outside boxing fruit and squash for food pantries. I was really not looking forward to being around people doing this work in the wind, but they did very well! I was shocked as the experience so far had been terrible.

My issue with the Sphere’s and wind noise isn’t that they don’t work. They generally do a decent job of muffling the wind. My issue is that whenever they filter out the wind, my speech recognition drops to close to zero. Phonak’s approach is to just cut everything out and that makes it impossible to go chat while walking with someone. Good example is when my wife and I go for a walk along the beach at night in Florida. The wind blowing off the ocean continuously triggers the Wind filter and I get embarrassed by the number of times I have to ask her to repeat herself. Maybe I should wear a hat as others have suggested.

Hoping this is improved in Autosense 7.0

Jordan

I was working around several 25 bushel bins of apples and squash, boxing it to go in private vehicles to pantries in the region. About a dozen of us doing the work. I had little trouble. I did ask a few times for repeats, but usually when they were 20 feet away etc. I can’t complain.

WH

In reply to @DaveL

@DaveL said:

Phonak replaced both hearing aids and charger with new.

Okaaaayyyy. That is interesting! Cuz today I also picked up my 2 pairs of rechargeable aids. Only THEY got the refurb. No one said to bring in their charging bases, so they’ve been at home EMPTY for the past 3 weeks.

Why do I feel that Phonak service is kinda like a visit to Oz? You only get the right answer if you know the right question to ask. It never occured to me to send in the aids + charger at the same time.

The one thing I will say about the Ultra firmware is that Bluetooth connectivity has been seriously improved. I’m just finishing day three of using my upgraded Sphere’s at work for Teams meetings and phone calls. ZERO drop offs in three days. That’s a new record! Thank you Phonak (if you are reading this)!!

Also went out again to a noisy Italian restaurant in Toronto last night (Piano Piano) to celebrate my younger son’s birthday. I went half the meal wondering why the restaurant was so darn quiet until it occurred to me to flip into the Music program to see how loud it really was. YIKES…it was loud. I just couldn’t hear the noise while in the Spheric program. I will say that the firmware update definitely includes smoother transitions between programs because you almost never notice the transition to the Spheric AI program while in Automatic mode. You sorta have to open the app and check what program the Automatic mode selected to confirm you are in the Sphere program.

Just some random thoughts between meetings…

Jordan

@JordanK said:

because you almost never notice the transition to the Spheric AI program while in Automatic mode.

It is abrupt for me because my activevents close in spherical. Speech in noise creeps up though. The noise melts away imperceptibly until it breaches that threshold and bam! Isolation. It gets really quiet. And I get asked to speak up…. “You’re being too quiet. No one can hear you.” I have a hard time judging how loud I need to speak to be heard.

WH

In reply to @JordanK

@JordanK said:

Bluetooth connectivity has been seriously improved. I’m just finishing day three of using my upgraded Sphere’s at work for Teams meetings and phone calls. ZERO drop offs in three days. That’s a new record!

WOW really positive observations here! Do you use iPhone? Cuz even with the older Phonak Lumity Life 312s I wear, the like NEVER EVER drops a call. Do you do the Teams meetings on iPhone or PC? I will share your thoughts with my audi. I just saw her today, and she mentioned that really none of her Sphere patients have had a “WOW!” moment wearing them. BUT! Nearly all these folks are NEW to wearing hearing aids, so they don’t really have anything to compare it to.

Thanks for sharing the good news with us here.

In reply to @JordanK

@JordanK said:

The one thing I will say about the Ultra firmware is that Bluetooth connectivity has been seriously improved. I’m just finishing day three of using my upgraded Sphere’s at work for Teams meetings and phone calls. ZERO drop offs in three days. That’s a new record! Thank you Phonak (if you are reading this)!!

OK, that made me laugh :slight_smile: … Congratulations Phonak on a new record of three consecutive days of properly working Bluetooth connectivity! Achieving this only 8 years after introducing Bluetooth in 2017 is truly amazing!

@JordanK, wasn’t it you who was very happy with Bluetooth stability even before the upgrade?

I spend a lot of time in the wind playing golf at seaside links courses. I did have a golf program set by my audiologist to beef up wind suppression. I deleted it as I so rarely used it. The Infinio Spheres seem fine, I can hear my golf mates in all but the strongest winds. However, yesterday I played a 4 hour round in very windy conditions for the first time since upgrading. By the end of the round battery was down to 10%. Normally battery never goes below 60%. So I am wondering if spheric mode was triggered by wind and drained the battery. I’ll monitor this and report back.

Edited

In reply to @JordanK

I’ve found that the Wind noise manager in my recent Sonova fittings has defaulted to 0 unless I specifically set an outdoors program. It’s usually benficial to have it on a low level in other situations as it helps with tyre rumble and engine noise too.

Well, that’s an obvious candidate. Good to know - I wasn’t clear that the improvement correlated with the upgrade.

In reply to @JordanK

Same here: bluetooth is rock solid for over a week now! Not even the short drop outs I always had to every few minutes. I started to use it for teams meetings again also. Just as stable as my Airpods were!

I also had my cases switched to black when I got the update , so they might have given me new devices instead, but reading your experience it was probably the new firmware that made the difference.

It would have been nice if Phonak had acknowledged that there was a problem with but they were working on it. But ah, who cares about that now. Happier than ever with my spheres. :grin:

In reply to @wtolkien

@wtolkien said:

@JordanK, wasn’t it you who was very happy with Bluetooth stability even before the upgrade?

I have also posted here that I am SUPER DUPER happy with Phonak’s rock steady connectivity. I have an Android cell, use a MacBook Pro and stream with the Roger On iN mics.

In reply to @wtolkien

@wtolkien said:

@JordanK, wasn’t it you who was very happy with Bluetooth stability even before the upgrade?

Yup. I was happy with the Bluetooth before the Ultra upgrade. Compared to my Resound and then Lumity hearing aids, the Bluetooth connection on my Sphere’s was much more stable (than my previous hearing aids) and only dropped occasionally (1-2 times a day). After the Ultra upgrade I get zero drop off’s so the Ultra upgrade was a big improvement.

Jordan

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