Rechargeable aids: wanted by customers or by factories?

@bradw said:

My 3-day old rechargeable aid

Not to mention, manufacturers replace their hearing aids with new ones when they are sent to them for warranty inspections.

(@AbramBaileyAuD, thanks you very much, quoting finally works in my Android phone...!)

quoting finally works in my Android phone...!)

How did you do it,as the quote pop up no longer shows on my Android

@tenkan said:

quoting finally works in my Android phone...!)

How did you do it,as the quote pop up no longer shows on my Android

I don't know, a few hours ago it didn't work, even after restarting phone. Now it works out of the sudden.

@bradw said:

these Sonite Rise aids

I also have the Sonite Rise, with hearing loss very similar to yours (if not worse) & have previously posted my experience of battery usage data with these aids. My experience is that the published data from Sennheiser of up to 30 hours of 'light' use or over 20 hours with more streaming is realistic. I routinely use my aids for around 18hrs with many hours of streaming (various sources) without getting 'low charge' warnings. A simple overnight charge & ready for the next day. I'm sure that if necessary a short re-charge late in the day for extended use could be achieved without inconvenience, e.g. whilst getting a shower & a change of clothes before going out for the evening.

I suggest you look to how your aids have been set up, what your daily usage actually is (streaming, noisy environments etc) & discuss the battery usage with your HA provider, there may well be a solution to the problem you seem to be having.

Yeah, you should be getting better battery life. It makes me wonder whether the Costco product has inferior batteries in comparison to the brand name products. There were definitely manufacturing quality differences when Sonova were making the Kirkland Signature models.

@Hearing_Potential said:

It makes me wonder whether the Costco product has inferior batteries in comparison to the brand name products.

I think it is a bit early to draw such conclusions based on a single post & a 'yesteryear' issue.

My recollection is that there is enough evidence from other users of this forum to suggest that the Sennheiser Sonite Rise battery is good for a very full day of use, broadly in line with their published data.

Yeah/no. I think it comes down to different production batches with different supply lines delivering different battery performance. There used to be a major issue with the Sonova charger in the previous model iteration, but that’s been largely resolved. However, I’ve just had a pair of Unitron Smile 9 go wrong sequentially in months 6+7. Do I know that the batch is faulty? No. Do Sonova, possibly?

Does this mean that they are cheaping on the build for the Unitron models? Highly unlikely, simply because it makes zero manufacturering sense to put product down your supply chain that is likely to fail and impinge upon your your reputation.

Simple really, isn’t it.

The charging issue was widespread and was also in the phonak models. It was found out that the territory reps were all handling things off book so sonova wasn't aware of it either. Handful of problems here, handful there. No central reports. Turns out, phonak/sonova had a problem where the aid would go into essentially a shipping mode/standby and would come back if the button was held for 30 seconds.

Quick update on my experiment turning off the "always connected" and the health monitoring

Yesterday they were in my ears and on around 5AM. 6 hours in the car at highway speeds, most with the radio going + a little more around town driving

I've noticed that the aids go into a noise reduction "comfort" sort of thing in the car. I'm not sure what that does to the battery life, but it sure makes it harder to understand my daughter! I'm not sure what mode it goes into when the music is turned up.

Anyway, the rest of the day was nearly all quiet room and outdoor conversation. Might have been around 20 minutes of streaming...a short podcast and a couple of short calls

When I powered them off about 11PM, left was something like 30% and the right was right at 20%. I'm sorry I didn't remember the precise number. Within a couple of digits of that anyway.

so

if it's a linear discharge profile, 18 hours/0.8=22.5 hours...so yeah, with those things off the 20 hours per day number looks reachable

@1Viking said:

I should have added that the 'health monitoring' function will give you daily numbers for the different hearing environments you have been in plus total wearing time. Useful records to monitor your battery life.

interesting. I didn't realize that it would show minutes worn in different environments. I just didn't look that closely. I saw steps, calories I think, and total hours worn. I was disappointed to loose the total hours worn but the rest of that stuff I get from my Garmin watch (and rarely care about it anyway). I figured oh well, the audiologist/tech should still be able to see that use data through their back-door. You're right that this sort of data showing how much time in each environment/program would be interesting.

Observations after I turned off the "always on" and health monitoring. The tap control didn't work well when I tested it. I didn't have time to sort that out, but my understanding is that it shouldn't need the app for that function to work.

Maybe after a day or two more with it off, I'll try turning health back on with the app's always on still deselected and see what the battery life looks like that way....but I think that the tap control thing is more useful to me long term so I'll also need to try it with the health thing off but the always connected on and check it that way.

@Bimodal_user said:

Not to mention, manufacturers replace their hearing aids with new ones when they are sent to them for warranty inspections.

You can't count on that anymore according to this post:

https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/should-i-be-skeptical-about-rechargeable-hearing-aid/83786/294

oh yes, I'm very familiar with Autosense. I've worn Phonak Marvels since June 2019. Just prior I had trialed oticon's aids and got a little experience with the idea of manually switching programs.

I'm somewhat familiar with the controllability that's available through their software, but I probably don't know everything that's possible.

I do know that the car mode as it is now has 'comfort' or 'noise reduction' turned far too strong

I went through the keep working it 6-7 years ago with those marvels. The audiologist was very responsive and did a lot of tweaking as I trained my brain

Becasue of that experience I don't think that this will be nearly as long or hard of a process

but

The costco guy spent a grand total of zero seconds with me after doing the REM routine, to find out what wanted in the set-up or how these sounded to me.

and as I mentioned in a different thread....after I forced the issue of changing the mic sensitivity to ambient sounds when streaming, it was clear that he doesn't really know either. I had to tell him that the adjustment for that was in the Phonak software, not the app....and I helped him find it. Then he had no idea how much to decrease it....

Oh dear, a bit more of a struggle if you are having to educate the Costco guy.

With my old P90Rs, I tweaked the 'car' mode every chance I had on longish journeys & got to the point where my custom version was recognised by Autosense as its own 'car' program. After that I decided it was not worth customising any further.

On my Sonite Rise, I optotomised the 'car' mode again & compared it to the 'Speech in 360'. The '360' mode had similar background noise reduction but speech detection was significantly improved over 'car' mode. I now manually select 'speech in 360' whenever possible in the car.

@RobHooft, @OcramSagev, IIRC, you discussed about EU regulation regarding earbuds and HAs.