Hi, some measurements are available for Widex Moments. This was done not by an audiologist but by an audiophile magazine contributor. See the following link:
https://audioxpress.com/article/fresh-from-the-bench-widex-moment-mric-rd-hearing-aid
It convinced me not to expect audio quality from my Widex Moments.
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Paul, thank you for sharing… good to great latency when compared to an unknown OTC HA and not exactly a resounding endorsement overall. However, they might be the best hearing aids for music. We just don’t have other results to compare to. Was pleasantly surprised with their extended frequency response capabilities. Thanks again.
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I have the Philips 9050 and was a professional musician for many years. The Philips work fine for me on the “HIFI” setting as programmed by the Costco folks. I have the “double bass” dome with two small pin hole openings and one in the middle which should give better bass sounds, But, When I want to hear the low frequencies much better I put foam rubber ear plugs in the ears with the hearing aids to seal the ears, much like noise reducing ear buds would do. There is the occlusion effect of course where your own voice sounds like it’s in your head, but the lowest frequencies in the music come through much better. I also use the Philips TV adapter to hear TV and works well, again putting in the foam rubber ear plugs for better sound. As noted before the 9050s are capable of going to 10khz but Costco’s programming only goes to 8khz. I suspect manufacturing hearing aids to amplify higher frequencies would be a large problem with most wearers have huge losses at those high frequencies amplification would be subject to huge distortion and the hearer couldn’t hear those frequencies anyway.
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This is what I used to do, and also stuffed small cotton balls in.
I do morning walks on fairly noisy streets, and decided just for sh*t & giggle to put my IEMs in w/out my aids, and WOW! Since they’re deep in the ear canal, they really pass a lot of bass, and I can hear up to 9KHz, so it’s a whole new ballgame.
I had to upgrade my phone, and no HP Jack, so I got a bluetooth Dac/Amp, and it works great.
Good point, it just sounds like distortion when you try to push to high.
You don’t post your audiogram, so it’s hard to know how your loss is, but if you look at mine, you’ll see I’m pretty limited at the high end.
If you click on your avatar at the top right, and scroll to your profile, you can enter your audiogram there.
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Well then, seriously consider the Phonak Lumity Life in 312-battery version. I have the identical concerns as you regarding the Phonak Sphere: bulk and added weight. I have a child’s size head, and with my longer hair, wearing glasses, hats, etc., there’s not a lot of wiggle room behind my ear.
These 312-battery Phonaks (just released last spring) are the smallest, lightest aids I own. And I have older Phonak Marvel 13-battery aids, and 2 sets of the Phonak Lumity Life rechargeables (well I HAD TO BUY 2 redundant pairs cuz the battery wouldn’t even get me through one full day of 18-20 hrs.).
The only caveat I have here is that the SMALL 312-battery Phonaks are NOT (repeat: NOT) water resistant like a pair of rechargeables. I learned that the hard way when I killed one of the speakers last summer after a slathering workout at the gym. DOH on me!
I wear my rechargeables at the gym now, and can’t wait to get home to swap them for the 312s. Sound quality, clarity, speech comprehension - all noticeably better.
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I think Widex could be the best when configured with a profile for music. It would be different from the everyday program, changeable via the button. I played numerous string instruments and thought they did much better with tones and string oscillation at the perfect pitch.
Normally I think the digital nature of the aids is to clean up frequencies and those oscillations are lost. It is too bad that a good old analog hearing aid is no longer made. It could be better than digitizing and cleansing everything with the intention of making it “better”. I don’t think the engineers developing these technologies wear hearing aids and are trying to do what they think is best.
Andy
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Hi Andy, i am 100% agree with you. i was much happier with my old semi analog Phonak naida III with the 675 battery. the sound is good and so the speech. the connection was with the chest unit. the 675 last for few weeks. speech in nosy Enviromint was out of question. hope the digital new ones make some improvement hre
- how can we use rechargable? we must have the hA all day long. another thing is that if a battery fail you cannot repalce it youeself and need ot send for service, so you mudt have back up adis.
- most HA using the same algorithm. so they are all sound the same. i think only starkey or resound use their own algorithm, but from what i see people are not happy with the sound with these 2
i am using HA for about 40 years, i am severe, i have the software and noah link/ compilot and i do the programing myself, which i recommending to anyone who can do it. the system of going back and forward to audi can work as you need to do it 10 - 30 times to get a reasonable result
i am using now old Phonak with 675 battery, i just now try the Signia - with charger for 36 hours. it sound ok but not better than the Phonak.
the Signia charger is with contact - not wireless so expect problems, the Bluetooth connection of the signia is vary good with iPhone.
phonal bluetooth is not stable
Interesting - I’ve had just the opposite experience with my Rexton Reach - super super tinny and hollow sounding - compared to my 5-year-old Kirkland 9’s.
Of course I realize hearing aids will never sound as good as “headphones” as they are only designed to reproduce mids and esp highs - but man I am quite dissapointed - I figured 5-year-newer HA’s would AT LEAST be as good - but they are actually a big step down.
I am going back for a tuneup in a few days, and I’ll mention the extreme tinnyness - maybe an adjustment can be made.
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It’s baffling how variable people’s experience with HAs is. Before I took the plunge myself, I was nervous about getting them because I’d read about and heard so any people disappointed with theirs. A friend of mine got his first set of HAs at Costco last summer and he reported that music sounded “tinny” and so bad that he listens to music without them. Once I got my HAs, I told him about my experience listening to music in the “music” program with mine, and he said his HAs didn’t have a “music” program.
I searched for an audiologist who was knowledgeable about HAs and what audiophiles look for in listening to music (they all say they are but a few questions weed out the pretenders). I ended up buying the most expensive HAs recomended to me (the Phonak L90s), but I was extremely pleased with them once I got them. No tinniness at all. They sound crisp and transparent. In fact, now that I’ve been wearing them for about 6 months, I often forget that I’m wearing them entirely. My brain has become so acclimated to them that sometimes I worry that they’re no longer working. But they are. All I have to do is to listen to an 8kHz tone on an online frequency sweep generator to confirm that they working. I’ll set the volume so that a 1kHz tone is just a few dBs above my hearing threshold and then switch to an 8kHz tone: if I can hear the higher tone, my HAs are working like they did when I first got them.
As contented as I am, obviously they don’t restore my hearing to where it was 20 years ago. I used to hear tape hiss and weird recording anomalies in recordings that I now can’t hear with or without HAs. I am now simply oblivious to frequencies above 10kHz. And there are a few pockets below that where my hearing plunges into near-deafness. Fortunately, they are narrow-banded pockets.
And the Phonak L90s can get overloaded in the treble and sound distorted (an especially prominent tambourine in a recording, for example). I think this is because to get my hearing between 6kHz and 10kHz up far enough, the HAs’ amplifiers are pushed almost to their limit. It doesn’t happen often, however. And when it does, I turn the volume down.
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Thank you for posting your experiences!
The AirPods Pro2 are probably by far the least expensive option, although for some discriminating listeners $$ is not a concern.
For DIY applications, perhaps they are also the most user-friendly?
Their downside, IMHO, is their limited battery life.
We’re interested to know your further comments about the Apple offering …
Thanks again!
Best, Bob.
Hi Larry. Fellow audiophile here! Yes, success rests with the audiologist taking an interest in optimising for music, and appreciating that some of us don’t actually want it via grainy pitch-wobbling Bluetooth!
Like you, my choice is to listen via hearing aids, from good speakers, or of course live from a delicious non-amplified orchestra or choir.
This being impoverished UK, I rely on a pair of obsolete national health Phonak M70, but daily murmur my gratitude to a keen and kind young audio who took the trouble to give me lows down to 40 and highs to my 4k cutoff - and no further, to obviate ‘pumping’ by very high inaudible sounds. Probably a touch of audiophile language helps, if it doesn’t irritate. You and I won’t just comment ‘It sounds tinny’.
She welcomed the dialogue and said her formal training did not visit music at all…
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There are other options available to you.
Deciding that the NHS might not be the best place to get specialist tuning of a hearing system potentially isn’t the biggest leap of logic you’ve made: especially if you’ve already spent a few grand on your Hi-Fi.
Haha! Fair comment, Umbongo. But ‘a few grand’? Me? Charity shop: Technics CD £20, recycled Cambridge amp, two BX5 ‘Hafler’ rears eBay £100, analogue Realistic delay box recycled, two car-type sub-amps + power supply £60, two huge Mackie chassis to build man-shed subs thanks to my son, likewise two JBL 10-inch chassis used as open-back main speakers.
Good sound? Well, in an early recording career, I was ear-trained on all kinds of programming via big BBC-designed LS5s… and I think my system sounds at least as good, perhaps more impressive even! Doors visibly shake on organ pedal.
Yes, it called for a fair amount of sawing up timber and cutting holes… but effort was further rewarded by a neighbour giving me about 150 gorgeous CDs. To the music lover, deafness is a curse of course, worsened by low budget, but - justification I hope for this long response - I feel it can be a driver as well.
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Thanks so much for that!
Just based on subjective listening, I expect that my Phonak Audéo Lumity L90-RL’s ring a lot more on impulse, and have similar comb effects in frequence response to the Widex Universal. It’s like living in a tube. My old Resound LiNX Quattro 9’s were even worse - especially if any of the automatic features were enabled.
The hard thing about all this is that 8-12Khz is where we start to really lose high end as we age, and that’s still also the toughest range for an HA to reproduce properly. So often, we see a boost at 3-6K or higher that make people cringe when they first hear it. It’s unmusical.
I’ll look for similar articles.
Thanks again,
=seymour=
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Yes Bob, the AirPods pro are very user-friendly for DIY adjusting. And battery life and appearance (people think I’m not listening to them when I’m wearing them) are the main downsides.
Despite these downsides, AirPods Pro 2 could be good hearing aids for someone with hearing thresholds <45 dB across all frequencies. Gain seems to be limited, at least at the frequencies where i need it most (1 kHz - 4 kHz); my aided hearing thresholds with the AirPods at those frequencies is around 30 dB. For comparison, aided hearing thresholds are around 20 dB with my prescription hearing aids.
I also think AirPods Pro 2 require unnecessary tweaking to the Apple-generated audiogram for hearing loss that’s worse at certain frequencies. The AirPods were giving me gain at frequencies where my hearing is closer to normal (<500 Hz, > 6 kHz), whereas my professionally-programmed hearing aids usually leave those frequencies without any gain. So the sound wasn’t balanced and was missing midrange until I made a fake audiogram with 0 dBHL except at the frequencies where I have hearing loss >30 dB. Now the sound is balanced, just not as loud as with prescription hearing aids.
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user490, regarding Earlens hearing aids, I think they’re most valuable to people with moderate to severe hearing loss at frequencies outside the typical hearing aid frequency response range. Earlens can give significant gain above 10 kHz and below 500 Hz, unlike most (all?) hearing aids. Also, since they use induction rather than sound, they don’t create feedback, and as a bonus to music lovers, the sound isn’t affected by the comb filter effect.
Since I have cookie-bite hearing loss, the benefits of Earlens didn’t match up with my needs, other than the great sound quality for music.
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I also have cookie bite loss so this feedback is particularly relevant. Did you find the roughly 5dB of loss due to the lens to be meaningful? I can see that small difference being meaningful especially in a noisy environment.
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The 5 dB loss was only present when I wasn’t wearing the Earlens hearing aids, and I wore them almost all the time. But yes it did make it harder to hear if I woke up in the middle of the night, or if something happened while I was in the shower or swimming and not wearing the hearing aids. I’d guesstimate that my unaided ability to understand speech improved by 25+% just by having the lens removed. That said, I don’t think everyone is affected by the lens on the eardrum in the same way I was; from what the audiologist told me, some people’s unaided hearing wasn’t affected at all by the lens.
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How many times did you need the lens removed and put back? It sounds like a bit of a hassle even if near one of their specialists. Were the drops annoying? Any discomfort from the lens?
What made you want to try it? It’s very expensive.
I had to go in for appointments every 6 months. They didn’t remove the lenses every time; usually they’d just remove earwax and maybe slightly move the lens if it wasn’t in the perfect spot. They removed the lens once every year or two to do a hearing test without the lens.
The drops were a little annoying because they affected my hearing even beyond the 5 dB from the lens itself. I’d guess another 5-10 dB for an hour or two after putting in the drops. I put them in just before going to bed so it wouldn’t affect daily life.
No discomfort from the lens; I had no idea it was there. But I had to wear swimmer earplugs when swimming; otherwise the water-in-ear feeling you might have after coming out of the water (usually just a few seconds) would last an hour or so and would affect my hearing significantly.
I tried it after watching the first Dr Cliff review of the system. He mentioned that the sound quality with Earlens is theoretically better than any speaker-based hearing aid can achieve.