Sonic is a sister company with Oticon and Bernafon, and all three of these respectable hearing aids companies belong to the William-Demant holding group in Europe. The Oticon OPN was released last year and raised a lot of interest and became a pretty popular hearing aid. Sonic recently released a new line of hearing aids as well, called Enchant, with 3 models, the 100, 80 and 60. Bernafon recently followed suit and released a new model as well, called Zerena (which is available through the Costco channel).
When the Sonic Enchant came out, there was a peak in interest about it on this forum, mainly because forum members want to know whether it’s the same or a waterfall version of the OPN, considering that Sonic is a sister company of Oticon. Online vendor BuyHear.com18 went so far as to say that the Sonic Enchant is equivalent to the OPN line and urge people to buy the lower priced Enchant. One of our forum members here who wears the OPN 1 was given on loan a pair of Sonic Enchant 100 from BuyHear to try out. I don’t think he gave a comprehensive review of it, but he did report back that he found the Enchant 100 very favorable to him. So much that he couldn’t really tell much different between his OPN 1 and the Enchant 100.
I recently came across a similar opportunity to get my hands on a pair of Sonic Enchant 100, on loan from Audiometrix for a few weeks to try out. This is a similar arrangement that I had with the OPN 3 which I gave a review on against the OPN 1. It’s a completely voluntary arrangement where I did not get paid to do the review nor will I get to keep the Enchant 100 afterward. It’s strictly a loan arrangement where I will return the Enchant back after a few weeks and I agree to post a review of it on this forum for members to see. I’m not influenced by anyone on how I’ll write my review. Audiometrix only asked me to post my personal unbiased opinion of it in return for the loan arrangement. So I do appreciate the opportunity to get my hands on them to try them out because next to the OPN 3, this is one new hearing aid that I’m very curious about; 1) because it’s from a sister company of Oticon, 2) because it’s still too new on the market to have had many review (except the one I mentioned above), and 3) because I think everyone (myself included) is curious how well it works compared to the OPN line.
I’ve only had the Enchant 100 for a couple of days. Because it’s very new to the market, I’m still learning about its technologies from marketing literatures and white papers, as well as seminars from AudiologyOnline. I think it would be helpful to share what I learn about the Enchant technologies here with forum members, in this thread in the next few weeks, as a preface leading to the review. This way, readers will get a chance to become familiar with the Enchant technologies beforehand and maybe it’ll help them get the most out of the review.
The following Enchant technology summaries will be what I’ve learned about the technologies from various sources, but I’ll try to condense their contexts in (hopefully) shorter and easier to understand terms to keep the readers engaged and interested and informed enough to help with the review.
One disclaimer is that in putting together the summary of the Sonic technologies, I re-use many of the phrases and sentences from the Sonic literatures verbatim. What I try to do is take out snippets from the papers that I think are important to mention and organize them in a more condensed way and create a shorter but still sensible flow to readers to follow. I’m not really trying to write my own papers here so originality is not my goal or claim. Some folks may see it as plagiarism. I just see it as relaying information in a more condensed, organized and succinct way.
Sonic Enchant Speech Variable Processing (SVP) Technology:
The Sonic SVP technology is rooted in the Cochlear Amplifier model. The outer hairs of a healthy cochlear helps amplify soft sounds and control the levels of loud sounds. But damage to the outer hair cells affects the cochlear amplifier’s ability to properly amplify sounds, resulting in sensorineural hearing loss (). SNHL shows significant loss of low intensity sounds, some loss of moderate intensity sounds, and near normal perception for high intensity sounds -> a non-linear loss at varying intensity levels.
Wide dynamic range compression () is the hearing aid industry’s solution to SNHL. It amplifies low intensity sounds more than higher intensity sounds. But it has limitations because it doesn’t address some of the other ways the cochlear functions, where 1) the cochlear acts as a very fast (and therefore accurate) signal analyzer and amplifier for incoming sounds, and 2) it processes frequency-specific contents to impart clarity.
All modern digital hearing aids have some sort of WDRC. Sonic is no exception, and SVP is their WDRC system. Conventional WDRC systems can only process audio events in slower time frames due to the lack of computational power needed to analyze incoming signals and adjust gain fast enough, especially for speech signals. With speech, individual phonemes occur on the average of ten times per second. A phoneme is any of the perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another, like p, b, d, t in the English words Pad, pat, bad and bat.
The SoundDNA platform developed for the Enchant line claims that it has enough computational power to process speech signal fast enough, analyzing incoming speech signals and adjusting gain thousands of times per second. Other systems are not fast enough to accurately measure rapid differences in the sound intensity of speech. They also commonly have fast attack but slow release times, which typically apply too much or too little gain because they do not react quickly enough to track dramatic changes in speech sound intensity. The end result is homogenous application of gain and under-amplified soft speech sounds. SVP, on the other hand, claims that with its very fast attack and fast release times (thanks to the high computational power), can accurately measure and compensate for sudden changes in sound pressure levels, resulting in very accurately amplified reproduction of the speech signal. This addresses the limitation (1) as mentioned above that plagues many conventional WDRC systems.
If speed is key to speech accuracy, then frequency contrast is key to speech clarity. This is the limitation (2) mentioned above for conventional WDRC systems. Frequency contrast is the difference in intensity across frequencies of an incoming sound. In speech, the frequency contrast between individual phonemes provides clues for listeners to tell different phonemes apart. In a SNHL patient, the ability to amplify correctly at different frequencies is diminished, resulting in a loss of frequency contrast, hence loss of speech clarity.
Most traditional multichannel compression systems (a) split the acoustic signal into separate frequency bands, (b) measure the signal at separate levels for each band, and c) compress each band based on its own prescribed gain setting. But in doing so, they flatten the overall spectrum of the sounds, losing the frequency contrast in the process. SVP takes a different approach by measuring and applying gain to the entire wideband acoustic signal. The signal is never split up, processed and recombined. This helps avoid the deleterious (flattening) summing effect of applying gain in multiple bands that traditional multichannel compression systems employ. The result is that the frequency contrast is preserved by SVP, and with it, speech clarity (clarity of individual phonemes is preserved). Of special importance as well is the vowel identification performance for hearing impaired people that is very dependent on the peak-to-valley ratio preserved by this frequency contrast.
SVP as a WDRC amplification strategy was started by Sonic in 2011 and maintained until 2014. Its strategy of using fast time constants (i.e. fast compression) to achieve phoneme-level clarity is originally called SVP, then later dubbed “Phoneme Focus”. Fast compression allows a system to rapidly apply gain to low-level phonemes (consonants) and then immediately reduce gain for high-level phonemes (vowels) that follow.
Although successful with a majority of patients, believe it or not, the Phoneme focus is not for everyone. Sonic has found that if the patient is over 75 years old, has a severe to profound hearing loss, or is starting to display cognitive issues with memory or attention, then they may be losing their ability to use TFS.
TFS is Temporal Fine Structure, carrier waves that contain useful information for sound identification because its rapidly varying oscillations carry details about the signal’s fundamental frequency and short-term spectrum. Without going into too much details of TFS, it’s basically what the Phenome Focus strategy (as explained above) was designed to go after (fast signal analysis and amplification for speech accuracy, and frequency contrast preservation for speech clarity).
For the patient profile described above who aren’t suited for the Phoneme Focus strategy, Sonic has developed an alternative strategy they call Envelope Focus (since 2015 to date). It basically uses slow time constants (slow compression) which adjusts amplification based on the long term average changes of the auditory environment. Concerning speech, gain does not change from one phoneme to the next. Instead, the natural peak-to-peak differences between louder vowels and softer consonants are preserved over time, and retain a greater loudness contrast to each other, compared to a faster system.
To date, the Sonic SVP as we know it then, now provides two options for selection in its ExpressFit Pro software. The hearing professional will determine which profile criteria their patient fits into, and select either the Phoneme Focus or the Envelope Focus for that patient accordingly.
In summary, Speech Variable Processing (SVP) is Sonic’s Wide Dynamic Range Compression strategy that’s tailored specifically for speech, originally with a Phoneme Focus strategy, then later with an Envelope Focus strategy.
SVP is the compression strategy that Sonic uses when there’s only speech with no noise (Speech in Quiet). When noise is added to speech, a slew of issues present themselves, like the undesired amplification of noise for one, because SVP does not know better if the signal is speech or noise. To handle compression for speech in noise, Sonic came up with a new compression strategy/technology called Smart Compress, which we’ll explore in a future post here.
Compression is only one side of the equation, the amplification side. Noise reduction is the other side that Sonic addresses with their SPIN (Speech In Noise) noise reduction strategy. Traditional systems treat directionality and noise reduction as two separate ways to improve speech in noise issues. Sonic’s SPIN stragegy combines the operation of directionality and noise reduction together to come up with what they think is a much more effective integrated Speech In Noise solution. That will be the third post in this series of posts covering Sonic Enchant technologies.
As mentioned in the Sonic SVP post, Sonic SVP technology is the system for speech in quiet. In fact, most commonly used fitting rationales prescribe amplification targets specifically for this type of listening environment, speech in the absence background of noise. This is not ideal when noise is present because surely you don’t want to consider noise as a soft sound and amplify it while it should be reduced instead. But many WDRC systems don’t know the difference between speech and noise any better, and can perform amplification that counters the effectiveness of noise removal strategies like directionality or noise reduction algorithm.
In the past, Sonic addressed this issue with the use of Environment Classification to help SVP know which environment it’s in. However, Environment Classification uses non-adaptive static rules to classify the environments, which is too rigid and slow (300 msec delay) to deal with rapidly fluctuating environments. Beside imprecise performance based on information from the past, sometimes it also requires manual adjustment by users to change from one program to the next (for example: Regular to Speech-in-Noise to Noise-Only to Quiet to Music, etc).
To address this issue, Sonic came up with SmartCompress, an adaptive compression system that works together with SVP, directionality and noise reduction to intelligently apply compression differently (to any fitting rationale used) in various listening environments with no delay. How does SmartCompress do this? By using fast (digital signal processing) to detect both the short-term signal to noise ratio () of the signal at phonemic speed, and also the ongoing long-term SNR of the overall environment. With this robust SNR information from both short and long-term signal analysis, SmartCompress now has sufficient SNR information on where the speech is and where the noise is to decide what type of compression strategy to apply adaptively along the way.
The end result is that in high SNR environment (speech in quiet), SmartCompress is not activated. In very low SNR environments (quiet, and/or noise only without speech), SmartCompress limits gain to the incoming signal to offer greater listening comfort. In low SNR (speech in noise) environment, SmartCompress reduces compression and minimizes the amplification of noise following short pauses in speech, or even between phonemes to improve the output SNR.
In the ExpressFit Pro programming software, SmartCompress offers 2 adjustable parameters. First is Gain Control for listening environments without speech. The user can set Gain Control to Maximum level, where the non-speech signals will be amplified 6 less than a speech signal. Medium level is 4 dB less, Minimum level is 2 dB less, Off is 0dB (no less).
The other adjustable parameter is Compression Control. The values are Max Audibility, Audibility, Balanced, Comfort and Max Comfort. The patient can select a value on this scale to match with their desired need. Audibility is when speech intelligibility for soft phonemes is most critical for their auditory needs. Comfort is for when they want greater listening comfort in difficult listening situations when the sounds are too much for them to handle. Balanced is somewhere in between and is a practical compromise between both.
Noise reduction systems in hearing aids encompasses both directional microphones and noise reduction algorithms. Although they go hand in hand, they’ve been two separate uncoordinated strategies with lots of limitations.
Directionality by way of microphone control is well known. It can be grouped in two types, adaptive and fixed. Adaptive directional mode has polar patterns that continuously track and reduce dominant sounds from the sides and the back. Fixed mode can incorporate one of several types of polar plots, like cardioid, hypercardioid, supercardioid, etc. , and unlike adaptive mode, fixed mode does not change the pattern according to variations in the listening environment. Both types can process signals in separate frequency bands to further cancel noise sources simultaneously with different spectral characteristics from different directions.
But there are limitations to the success of directional microphones. The signal has to be close enough to the listener (6 ft or less), the noise has to be on the sides or the back, and the room has to have minimal reverb. Another limitation is that directional modes tend to cause a low frequency roll-off that would be compensated by the system through amplification at the low ends, resulting in higher internal microphone static noise levels. On top of that, it gets more complicated when you throw in the human factor. Some people prefer omnidirectional patterns even in noise for different reasons. Users may still want to hear subtle elements of their surrounding environment and feel robbed of it due to the nulls (angle of maximum attenuation) in the polar plots. Sometimes, the lower output level due to directionality may reduce the volume of all sounds too much, included the desired sound in front. Sometimes, the user can simply forget to switch to the right listening program that has directionality at the right time.
Many of these issues can be resolved with automatic directionality and a multiband design. Automatic directionality monitors the overall level and the temporal and spectral characteristics of the environment to transition in and out of directionality based on the information it receives. A multiband design can help preserve low frequencies with omnidirectionality in the lower bands (to solve the low frequency roll off issue mentioned earlier) while activating directionality in higher frequencies.
Whereas directional microphones provide measurable improvements in speech recognition in noise, the effect of noise reduction algorithms is more subtle. While it’s widely accepted that noise reduction can provide listening comfort, there’s not much evidence that shows it can improve speech recognition. But it’s still helpful and widely used because it can help reduce listening effort, improve , improve acceptance of noise, improve speech recall, etc.
Sonic believes that if they coordinate the operation of directionality and noise reduction (NR), which has traditionally been uncoordinated, they can help improve the speech-in-noise listening experience much better. They also devised a 3-prong strategy that apply to both directionality and NR: 1) make the activation automatic, 2) make the system adaptive, and 3) apply a multiband design to the system.
Automatic activation
a. For directionality: when background noise starts, SPiN Directionality engages the directional mic, and returns to omni mode when the background noise stops.
b. For NR: for noise that has not been attenuated by SPiN Directionality, SPiN NR comes in and remove them. SPiN NR is a fast-acting modulation based digital NR algorithm that detects temporal characteristics of the sound, its modulation rate and depth. Signals with a high modulation rate are desirable (speech) where as signals with a low modulation rate are undesirable (noise). SPiN NR is automatically activated to preserve speech and reduce noise.
Adaptivity:
a. For directionality: SPiN Directionality constantly alter the internal time delay between the front and rear mics to adaptively change the polar patterns in response to spatially dynamic listening environments (i.e. noise sources that are moving relative to the listener). Based on the level and location of the noise source, SPiN Directionality uses null-steering to select the polar plot with the best SNR in each frequency band.
b. For NR: SPiN NR uses extremely fast time constants to efficiently respond to rapid fluctuations in noise and attenuate noise even between the smallest speech pauses and preserve speech down to the phonemic level.
Multiband design:
a. For directionality: SPiN has independent directional systems in 16 different frequency bands (compared to 4 bands in the past). This provides enough resolution for isolating and suppressing noise from different directions across the frequency spectrum with extreme accuracy. This multiband design also allows the low-frequency input to be preserved by staying in omni mode for low frequencies while permitting directional responses in the mid and high frequencies.
b. For NR: SPiN NR works in the same 16 frequency bands as SPiN Directionality to synergistically identify noise of varying spectral content and reduce gain in the narrow bands where noise is detected.
To decide when to activate SPiN Directionality and SPiN NR, Sonic added a third component to their SPiN Management system called SPiN Engage. It’s simply a mechanism to allow user control of when the onset activation of SPiN Directionality and SPiN NR will occur, based on the SNR level set forth by the user. It offers 3 help settings: High help will cause an immediate onset of SPiN Directionality and SPiN NR to rapidly put an emphasis on the speech signal. Medium help is associated with a higher SNR threshold onset to delay the activation of these 2 systems. Low help will raise the SNR threshold onset further to retain maximum auditory awareness of environmental noise.
The SPiN NR gives you 4 values: Off, Low (3dB to 4.5dB), Medium (4.5dB to 7.5dB) and High (6dB to 15dB) for (min NR to max NR respectively). But note that attenuation is only as much as needed. It is not always at the max attenuation.
SPiN Directionality freely adapts the microphones anywhere from omni to fixed directionality in all 16 frequency bands. It has 2 settings. High Performance setting allows the system to adjust to the narrowest directionality pattern available. Medium Performance limits the system to a wider directionality pattern.
I’ve done quite a bit of background preparation for the Sonic Enchant 100 review as seen above already. And I’ve worn the Enchant for 6 days now. I think I’m ready to provide a full review of it. If there’s anything new I’ll discover in the remaining week or two I have it, I’ll add to this thread later.
The first thing everyone probably wants to ask is: “Well? Is it the same as the OPN?” The unequivocal answer I can give is an emphatic “no”. But what does “no” mean? Does it mean it’s not as good as the OPN? Or better than the OPN? Well, I would say neither. “No” here simply means not the same.
Let me elaborate. We all know that the OPN operates based on a new “open” paradigm. The Enchant, on the other hand, operates very much based on the conventional paradigm, in my opinion. What do I mean by conventional paradigm? I mean the traditional directionality approach using microphone beam forming pattern for noise blocking of surrounding sound, and typical noise reduction algorithm to detect the difference between speech and noise to suppress noise and preserve speech.
So does this mean that it works the same as many current hearing aids on the market? I would guess probably so. But I haven’t had a chance to try any other current hearing aids on the market except for the OPN 3, so I can’t say for sure exactly. It does seem to work very similar to my old pair of Rexton I had from Costco before I went with the OPN 1. But it seems to do it a lot better.
How does it do better, you may ask? Well, if you had read through the details of the previous posts about the Enchant technologies, that’s how it does it better. But that’s in theory. How does it translate to actual experiences? I can provide some examples of how it feels different than conventional in practice:
As I’m typing here on my keyboard, I have a little mini table fan pointing at my iPhone 7 Plus being charged wirelessly on a Qi charger. Because the wireless charging uses induction loop, it’s not efficient and generates heat, not something you want to impart on the iPhone because heat is any electronic device’s enemy. So I have a mini fan pointing at the iPhone/charger while it’s charging to blow the heat away and keep the phone cool. Not to stray from the original point too much, I can hear this fan loud and clear while I type because it’s only a couple of feet away from the Enchant (if even that). If I stop typing to compose some thoughts, about 5 seconds later, I can tell that the Enchant noise reduction kicks in and reduce the fan noise noticeably because it considers my typing as non-noise signal (probably mistook it for speech because it’s a modulating signal), but a few seconds after I stop typing, it detects only the steady fan noise and nothing else. So it determines that it now has entered a noise only environment without speech, so it automatically starts reducing the gain on the fan noise noticeably.
This is just one example. Another similar example is in the bathroom. If I leave the water running in the sink, after ceasing to do whatever sound making activity for a few seconds, I can hear the Enchant start attenuating the running water in the sink noticeably.
But that’s in quiet environments. In more busy environments, I don’t hear NR kicking in and out as noticeably, because there’s always something else going on. But what I notice is still an overall comforting lack of noise or very mild static noise, while other discrete sounds can be heard around you, including speech.
What this is saying is that the Enchant’s overall SVP strategy to preserve the accuracy and clarity of speech (or non noise sounds), combined with its SmartCompress technology compress the right things (like speech) and reduce the gain of noise, along with the SPiN management trio of SPiN directionality, SPiN Noise Reduction, and SPiN Engage, are working very well together and effectively to offer an automatic and adaptive adjustment to varying listening environments all the times.
I don’t notice the SPiN directionality switching as much, but sometimes there may be a very faint hint of it when sounds transition from sounding “open” to less “open”. There’s no low frequency internal microphone static noise heard or noticed at all because their multiband third leg on the SPiN 3 prong strategy (automatic, adaptive and multiband) keeps the directionality omni at the lower frequency bands to avoid gain roll-off there, as discussed in the previous post on SPiN management. Or it’s also possible that this is due to the Soft Noise Reduction feature that attenuates the mic noise.
I took the Enchant through pretty much the same environments I took the OPN 3 through, at home, outdoors playing tennis, riding motorcycle, at a busy restaurant. The only thing I didn’t get to do with the Enchant is to go on a long trip in my noisy mini van. But I suspect such a trip would be a very nice experience with the Enchant since it does NR very effectively on static noises like fan noise and road noise. I’m just unclear on whether I’d be able to hear conversation from the 2 rows behind me as well like I can with the OPN or not. On the motorcycle, the Wind Management feature seems to work just fine. Actually better than the OPN 3, and about the same effectiveness as the OPN 1.
As for noisy restaurants, this time we went to a local CheeseCake Factory on the busiest night on Friday evening, and I expected it to be the worst noisy restaurant environment because of its open/high ceiling design where the acoustic of the room gets plenty of space to bounce around, creating reverb on everything, from talking to the clattering of silverware, etc. And it lives up to my expectation of a noisy place with lots of reverb.
How did the Enchant perform at the CheeseCake Factory? Very admirably. The reverb level at the restaurant is toned down significantly, the noise reduction is very effective, and speech clarity is great. I was able to understand everyone talking at the table. The only time I had to turn up the volume a notch or two is when my little soft spoken niece said something (the Enchant doesn’t have the Soft Speech Booster feature that the OPN 1 does). But once the volume is up to the right level, I was able to understand her just fine. The overall experience was very pleasant and far from overwhelming because the Enchant did a great job of toning down the overall noise level.
Did I bring along my OPN 1 to do a side by side comparison against the Enchant? Of course I did. And how do they compare? As expected, the OPN lets a lot more noise coming through. The reverb characteristic of the room is preserved (I can hear a lot more reverb on the OPN 1 compared to the Enchant). I can also hear competing speeches at tables around me more as well. But does that interference with the speech understanding at my own table? Not one bit. I could understand everyone at my table just as well as I could with the Enchant.
Before I give my final opinion between my OPN 1 and the Enchant 100, let me review the key features between the 2 side by side. I won’t run through an exhaustive list, but let me just say that just about any major features the OPN 1 has, the Enchant 100 also seems to have. From MFI to Speech Rescue LX (Sonic calls it Frequency Transfer, and it seems like exactly the same technology with the 10 configurations and with varying intensity levels of the lowered sound), to Tinnitus Sound Support (which I don’t know much about because I don’t use it), to Transient Noise Management (called Impulse Noise Reduction by Sonic, which is loud sound control to remove discomfort of sudden, loud sounds without sacrificing audibility of speech), to Clear Dynamics (Sonic calls it Extended Dynamic Range, 113 on input mics for better live music listening experience), to Noise Management, to Twin-Link (Sonic calls it Dual Radio System), to same IP68 rating, to Wind Management, to Bass Boost in the OPN (called Low Frequency enhancement in the Enchant, for Phone or TV Adapter).
A couple of things not in both models is the Soft Speech Booster feature is in the OPN but not the Enchant. Soft Noise Reduction (to reduce mic noise, useful for clients with normal hearing in the low frequencies) is in the Enchant but not in the OPN.
Despite the myriad of similarities in functionality between the OPN and the Enchant, obviously shared technologies due to them being sister companies, the core digital processing and the core hearing paradigm of the two couldn’t be any more different. I won’t rehash the two core signal processing technologies here. The Enchant ones were summarized in the previous posts in this thread already.
But the end user result and experience is this: the OPN sounds a lot more natural, almost like you have normal hearing (even if that’s wishful thinking, that’s how close you’ll get to the normal hearing experience again). You hear everything, from the sounds you want to hear, to the sounds you don’t want to hear. You even hear the natural reverb of your voice bouncing around when you sing out loud in a room. You hear the natural reverb of a high ceiling place like the CheeseCake Factory, with its cacophony of all the sounds made in the room. But the bottom line is that I also was able to hear speech with clarity just fine.
With the Enchant, it’s a very different hearing experience. It’s nicer and quieter, even a bit more muted and subdued. The Enchant makes every attempt possible to automatically and adaptively minimize any kind of static, non-modulating noise for you. And on the other hand, the modulating sounds (inferred to be speech since that’s all you can classify them) are treated promptly and amplified accurately with clarity preserved as much as possible. I found both the OPN 1 and the Enchant 100 to work well for speech clarity in this very noisy and reverb"y" place.
If you are one of those people who finds the experience of the OPN too overwhelming for you, especially in noisy environment, and you can never get used to it, and you would rather have the comfort of minimal noise while still understanding speech well, then you’ll probably like the Enchant a lot.
I guess I can close this review by making an analogy. If normal hearing is analogous to normal sight, and the aid is the eyeglasses, then the OPN experience is probably like watching a movie through a pair of 3D glasses on a high def TV. You get to see a third dimension of the visual scape. And the Enchant experience is like wearing normal eyeglasses on a high def TV.
The OPN will give you that third dimension of all the extra richness of the natural sounds to you, and if your brain hearing can handle it, all that extra and natural richness and spatiality of the sounds would be very much appreciated and desired by your brain. But if you find all that richness TMI (too much information) and overwhelming, a cacophony, and would rather not train your brain hearing to hear anything else except for the meat of what you care to hear (speech and basic noises), then the Enchant is for you.
I think it boils down to comfort hearing (the Enchant) vs active hearing (the OPN). One is not necessarily any better than the other, just different strokes for different folks. You decide which one you like better, that’s all.
For me, I’m too far along on the OPN train that I’m used to and want to hear everything the OPN can offer to my ears. It gives me that feeling like I can almost hear normally. The Enchant seems like a constant reminder to me that I’m wearing a hearing aid because I can tell that the HA is zipping in and out trying to mute and quiet things actively for me. For example, when I yell out loudly (often in tennis games), I can hear the Enchant trying to attenuate gain immediately afterward momentarily. I think this is the automatic/adaptive directionality changing from omni to directional when it detect speech, then back to omni after speech is gone. Of course I can loosen the programming parameters up to lessen the attenuation effect, but even in the Music mode with no noise reduction or compression going on, the soundscape is somehow just not as full as with the OPN.
Somebody asked me to comment on the fact that the OPN 1 only has up to 9dB max attenuation on its noise reduction, while the Enchant 100 has up to 15dB max attenuation on its noise reduction. Can I tell that difference in my review between them?
I think my answer is that it’s irrelevant because they’re two very different types of noise reduction systems so it’s not apple to apple comparison anyway. The OPN has a noise model built -> a very key differentiation that makes the OPN noise reduction more intelligent and easier to implement and very successful (like how noise cancellation headphone has a separate noise model to help it cancel out the noise easily), while there’s no noise model built for the Enchant. The Enchant makes the assumption that noise is any un-modulating signal, a much more simplistic assumption.
So the noise they’re reducing is not really apple to apple in the first place. On top of that, the nature of the “open” paradigm still preserves the noise and only reduce it when speech is present. The noise is restored to full audibility when speech goes away. The Enchant, on the other hand, reduces the noise only when speech is not present.
Here’s a scenario base on a time scale:
OPN -> Noise model built -> speech present and tainted with noise (OPN uses noise model to clean up tainted speech) -> speech goes away and no NR applied, brain is expected to tune out this noise.
Enchant -> no noise model -> speech present and tainted with noise, but tainted speech is preserved because the overall signal is modulating -> speech goes away and NR applied, brain doesn’t hear too much of the attenuated noise.
The result is that the brain will hear cleaned up speech with the OPN but will hear tainted speech with the Enchant when speech is present. The brain may have to work harder with the Enchant when speech is present because speech is still tainted with the Enchant.
When speech goes away, the brain hears less noise with the Enchant and hears full noise with the OPN. But the brain is expected to tune out the noise by the OPN when there’s no speech. Meanwhile the Enchant (not the brain) attenuates the noise when there’s no speech.
Different effects on what the brain hears or does not hear and what the brain needs to tune out or does not need to tune out.
This past week I’ve been wearing my Smart V’s (which I still like) after wearing a pair of OPN 3 for a month. What I immediately notice is the program changing when the sound environment changed. Not bad but noticably different (less natural) than the OPN’S. This review gives me the impression enchant would give me similar experiences.
Which summarizes just what I had hoped would be the reason I chose to switch from phonak to the New OPN way of thinking. As usual, nice review.
Impulse Noise Reduction seems to work OK (I can hear my tennis ball pop dampened a little when it’s hit).
You can control Soft Noise Reduction independent of Wind Management.
I can definitely hear my keyboard when I type. But on my OPN, the keyboard sound is more full with more details heard. On the Enchant, the keyboard sound is heard but it’s more dampened. Similar to when I’m walking with my sandal on tile flooring. With the OPN I can hear more “shishing” (the sound of sliding it on the floor), but with the Enchant, it’s less pronounced. This is very typical with the overall experience between the OPN and the Enchant. You hear more details in the sounds with the OPN, less details with the Enchant.
This past week I’ve been wearing my Smart V’s (which I still like) after wearing a pair of OPN 3 for a month. What I immediately notice is the program changing when the sound environment changed. Not bad but noticably different (less natural) than the OPN’S. This review gives me the impression enchant would give me similar experiences.
Which summarizes just what I had hoped would be the reason I chose to switch from phonak to the New OPN way of thinking. As usual, nice review.
The one different thing about the Enchant is that it doesn’t have automatic program change between its program 1, 2, 3, and 4. But it is similar to the OPN in that its Universal P1 program will scan the environment continuously to detect speech and noise (or lack of them) and adjust automatically and adaptively in 16 bands to impart NR or adjust compression ratios accordingly in each of the 16 bands. So I pretty much only use the Universal P1 program 99% of the times without needing the other 3 programs. So I don’t detect program changes due to environment changes because it’s in P1 the whole time even with environment changes.
But you’re right about guessing that your experience with your old probably being the same experience as with the Enchant. That’s the same thing I found between my experience with my old Rexton and the Enchant, except that the Enchant is more automated and smarter and more aggressive in controlling noise and clarifying speech. It’s basically a much better version of the traditional HAs as we know it, but still using directionality and NR the same way, albeit automatically and adaptively and in 16 bands.
The Enchant has the following built-in programs, even though you can probably stay in the Universal P1 program most of the times: Noise, Speech in Noise, Music, SmartMusic (for live music/concert), Classroom, Entertainment, Automobile, Airplane, and various phone modes (manual and with tcoil).
what about speech from distance and speech from tv/phone without stream and mid accessory? seems dampaned or full understandable?
I’ve watched TV with it sitting maybe 15 feet from the big screen. I need to turn up the volume a notch or two but speech is understandable, not too dampened. Of course this is in a quiet room.
As for live speech from a distance, like in a classroom or lecture environment, I haven’t had a chance to be in this mode, so I can’t say. I would expect that I may have to turn on the volume a few notches but will probably make out the speech OK.
The OPN 3 has the Soft Speech Booster LX feature (all OPN models have this), but the Enchant does not have a soft voice booster like the OPN. So you may have to increase the volume a little bit to pick up soft voices with the Enchant while the OPN should be more automatic on this.
As suggested by Volusiano I have been reading up here and online and have tried to find info on the Sonic Enchant 100. Assuming that it is a 100 power receiver. Does Sonic have a 105 receiver RTE model available, haven’t found it yet.
