Phonak sphere - ambient mute automatically unmutes

Has anyone come up with a fix yet?

My wife is a TV binger. But I’m not a fan, so with my previous Oticons, I’d mute them and then happily surf, doom-scroll or stream music from my iPhone. Life was good. (Except for the ‘doom’ part of the scrolling.)

Not any more. My new Phonak Spheres unmute anytime I do pretty much anything on my phone.

I can’t even play solitaire — even with all its beeps, clicks and bongs turned off.

Is this a bug? Or perhaps a feature? Either way, I don’t like it!

-Doug

What happens if you use a manual program rather than automatic and then mute? Don’t think that’s possible for streaming but you could have the default for streaming changed to mute.

Yes - tried that.

I got a reply after sending a message on the Phonak “support” site. Probably written by an ai bot.

They said to try rebooting the aids by holding the lower button down for 15 seconds (I didn’t know that could be done) and unpairing and repairing the phone.

Still working on it.

I just tried setting volume to 1 tick above the bottom. That seems to be working.

Turning volume completely off has the same behaviour as mute... i.e. the setting gets overridden whenever my phone sends a ding.

I wondered if there was a way of turning them off via the app? It takes 30 seconds and a lot of fiddling to turn them off manually. A button in the app would be awesome.

I reported my complaint to Phonak... just one more voice that won't be heard I suppose, but have to try. Who is the daft design monkey that thought it was OK to override my decisions? You can't mute by accident, so... if it's muted that's the way I want it to stay until I change it back.

Try the "1-tick-from-lowest-volume" trick.
Worked for me. Curious to know if it works elsewhere too.