John, I am confused. You should be able to hear very clearly in quiet settings in spite of your loss, which is moderate to severe/profound, with well fitted hearing aids. You don’t even need top of the range aids. Any decent mid range aid from any of the 6 major manufacturers would do the job. That said, you have good phonaks. Are you sure the programming is good? Have you had an REM test. Do you use soundrecover/frequency lowering?
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I don’t think it’s feasible to off load the processing down to the phone then upload it back to the hearing aid because there’d be too much latency for the data transfer back and forth in real time. Furthermore, hearing aids must be standi alone and mfgs can’t expect everyone to have a smart phone to handle the processing in the first place.
John, I find it strange how you are struggling with your good hearing aids.
I wear top of the range Phonaks and hear very well. My loss is also worse then yours.
Are you sure you are programming them right? I would get a REM test preformed.
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If I remember correctly, he has a lot of problems being able to tolerate the hearing aids. Not finding them much help and finding them intolerable is a vicious circle.
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Heathy hearing solve coctail party problem by brain controlling outer hair cells to amplify/mute sounds your brain wants/dont want to hear.
In other words if you want hearing aids solve coctail party problem you would need them connect to brain which is not possible with current technology. Also i think you will need more sensitive microphones.
There is some hope for near future in machine learning/Ai which should be possible to only amplify human voices. Researchers alredy do that but for now procesors to fit hearing aids are not powerful enough
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Don’t know if the sound quality of aptX low-latency is good enough for high-quality HA sounds but it’s a BT compression standard owned or originated by Qualcomm that has only a 32 ms latency. aptX - Wikipedia
An additional thought is that possibly in a re-envisioned world that the HA’s need only be high-quality speakers in your ears. And maybe they could even be (lightly) wired, like earbuds if that conquered the latency (and also battery life problems). Something like Bose Hearphones…. Maybe for most except the very active, the HA battery and processor and microphones could actually be in a necklace that you wore around your neck. You could have a much bigger battery and much faster processor and the necklace could contain an array of microphones all-around, front, sides, and back.
Also (back to the phone as a processor), if the phone could both listen and process speech and the communication with the HA’s were simply one-way - playing the phone sound to your HA’s only, that would cut the latency issues in half (only going phone to ears, not back-and-forth) and maybe aptX low latency would be good enough but you’d lose the advantage in microphone placement that evolution has given your ears. But according to previous Wikipedia “research” that I did, humans can actually make do with an audio latency of up to 125 ms before things like lip sync issues start to kick in. Qualcomm unveils aptX Adaptive to provide high audio quality with low latency And see Abram Bailey’s original post at the top of the linked thread. The Wikipedia article on aptX does not have any info on aptX Adaptive, Qualcomm’s latest Hi-Fi codec version, the point of Bailey’s post.
According to this Engadget article, aptX Adaptive is simply the fusion of Qualcomm’s aptX HD and aptX Low Latency standards: aptX Adaptive Bluetooth audio delivers low latency and high quality (and I think aptX Adaptive requires BT 5.0)
Glucas, I agree. I should be able to hear clearly with the aids i have. I read here frequently where people have gotten aids and are thrilled with the performance. I envy them their success. I think perhaps part of my problem is that I have lived with my condition for so long, it might not be possible for anything to be done. The Audiologist who performed my hearing test, the results of which are posted, told me she didn’t think I could really be helped. She said to forget about anything above about 3 KHz and try to get at least some hearing back in the 2 to 3 KHz range. The old standard for telephony for understanding voices was 300 Hz to 3.3 KHz. I have lowered the gain of my aids above 3 KHz, but couldn’t tell any difference. And, yes, I have had a professionally fitted set of aids. Returned them because they didn’t help.
That’s a real bummer John, I feel for you. I hope that something comes along. I am guessing there must be further complexities at play here, i.e. it’s not just a case of amplifying those frequencies on your audiogram in order to bring clarity. I have to admit that a lot for me goes on in the brain i.e. I make assumptions about what people are saying based on context, as opposed to really hearing them. Of course, that doesn’t work when I listen to german - which can be a god awful experience!
Perhaps just like folks who have outfits they wear for different occasions, with OTC HA’s coming along, something such as I describe in the quote above could be an relatively inexpensive OTC solution but maybe better than HA’s because of its processor and battery power when used in difficult signal-in-noise situation, i.e., a noisy restaurant or a cocktail party. So it could be worn then for its special processing power but ordinarily not to be so encumbered in other more everyday situations where the cacophony or multiple voices were less of a challenge, regular old hearing aids because of their unobtrusiveness and lightness would be the device of choice. Maybe in the future it would be good to get away from the idea that a single HA device can do it all and recognize that in special situations, an important meeting, get-together, or other social occasion, you need to bring the heavy (literally and figuratively) artillery.
Interesting ideas and I’ve often wondered about offloading processing power to a smartphone. For now, the best “heavy artillery” for what you describe is a remote microphone, with Resound’s MultiMic and Phonak’s assorted Roger variants being well thought of. Basically solve the problem by increasing signal to noise ratio by moving microphone closer to speaker. No need for a ton of cpu power to figure out what speech is.
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I would point out the “for now…” qualification. Especially for Dr. Cliff’s praise that the Roger Pen is the best auxiliary speech-in-noise aid there is when he did his review and works with ~any HA with the right connector, I was tempted except for the price to get one - I plan to get a multi-mic, also supposed to be good for ReSounds. But then with these devices, you can have a problem with placement and your movement, etc., as well as it’s not so cool at a cocktail party to come up to someone and point your Roger Pen at them.
I wonder if anyone has compared the listening and signal-in-noise power of the most premium HA’s to an Amazon Echo. I have a second-generation Echo Dot. It’s ability to pick out speech in noise is absolutely astounding. It has a SEVEN MICROPHONE FAR-FIELD ARRAY. Don’t know if the mics in HA’s qualify as far-field arrays. I guess they do: Microphone - Wikipedia
But seven mics must be a lot better than two or four, whatever is in HA’s. That’s the sort of microphone array I would envision around the HA necklace that takes off from the Bose Hearphone concept - plus the additional processing power to go with it in the necklace or elsewhere on your body or in your clothes that you can’t pack in HA’s due to limitations in their size and battery power, etc., ……
I’m guessing Amazon Echo’s power needs are magnitudes greater than hearing aids. A great deal of the problem is trying to make super small and not require much power. Heck, one of our forum members has a PSAP that he’s had for awhile that streams regular BT to them. However, they’re big and require a lot of power.
Jim,
eBay…
Get you a type 2 receiver and a Roger pen. Look on eBay. I picked my set up for $300.
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Thanks for the tip. I like the idea of the multi-mic because when you lay it down, it becomes omni-directional. Have you used a multi-mic and if so, what do think of it? Not hearing conversation a couple people down at a table in a noisy restaurant is part of my HA loss and I was hoping the omni-directionality of the multi-mic would solve that, if folks don’t mind having the multi-mic plopped in their midst!
I also picked up my Roger System for around $300. It also came with 2017 serial numbers I was lucky.
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Dr. Cliff’s latest YouTube video is about the Roger Select. Sounds like the ReSound Multi-Mic but maybe even better and, with certain conditions, Olson says that the Roger Select will work with “almost” any HA. Sounds like the kicker is that you either have to be able to fit a Roger receiver on the bottom of your HA or you have to have an HA with a telecoil if it’s not a Phonak or related HA.
Anyone tried the Roger Select vs. the ReSound Multi-Mic??? Dr. Cliff doesn’t not mention that little thing called price - perhaps another one of those “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” deals.
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From what I’ve seen, every piece of the Roger system costs as much as a hearing aid 
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With apologies to efigalaxie and anyone else concerned about the potential negative effect of OTC on the quality of HA’s and the enjoyment of great professional treatment, maybe if MFA from Google and OTC together ever really get rolling, there will be great Multi-Mic/Roger Select-like devices available at a much lower cost.
When Amazon can make and “give away” Echo Dot as low as $30 on sale - and these have excellent 7-microphone far-field arrays that can pick my voice out of a very noisy environment with the AC, the refrigerator, the Jenn Aire stove top exhaust, etc., all running, there is hope that if the market expands due to OTC bringing a higher volume of hearing device purchases that the cost of remote microphone devices will come down a bit.
Besides my previous remarks of how the cost of personal computing has dropped since the pioneer days with orders of magnitude increases in CPU speed, RAM, and disk storage, I remember the reel tape recorder my Dad had back in the 1950’s.
Dad’s tape recorder was about a foot square and 6 to 8 inches high. Cost him $800 in the '50’s, which would be equivalent to $7,000 to $8,000 in today’s U.S. dollars. Forgotten when it was but just before solid-state devices (the iPod, etc.) came along, you could buy a cassette recorder for $30 or $40, if my foggy recollection is right.
So hopefully, a similar microelectronics cost revolution will come to remote mics that work with HA’s. Except for proprietary transmission protocols, there shouldn’t be anything terribly special in the remote microphones that’s not already being employed by folks like Amazon in their much less expensive ambient AI devices (which can be battery-powered, too, - you can buy an attachment on Amazon that will convert your Dot into a portable device that doesn’t require AC and will run for hours).
Bonus wild idea here: One really cool thing about AI assistants is their ability to identify who’s talking. It would be great if someday that technology could migrate to HA’s and you could tell your HA’s or remote mic, “listen to Jenna” and in a restaurant conversation with a bunch of people yakking away around a table, your device would know what Jenna sounds like and use the microphone array to tune in on what Jenna is saying and drop other conversations more out of your hearing. So it’s an interesting idea that the ambient computing AI revolution might actually be a driver in development in HA’s. Devices that are too small for a screen or a keyboard, you can still talk to, either directly or through Alexa, Google Home, or …. So all the billions and billions of dollars to tech research and production going on with ambient AI for picking up and understanding speech, including in noisy environments, may have considerable HA spinoff. Maybe Amazon’s FIRE HA is just around the corner?! <<<just kidding!>>> (my joke is on the Amazon Fire Phone).
That is a very interesting idea!
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Interesting, yes, and, maybe not so wild.
The iFocus 360 program does track ‘an individual’ as you move around them/they move around you. Difference: It tracks the ‘strongest’ voice, not ‘one of many of equal strength’ you have specified.
[System: Rexton/KS7 hardware, Siemens/Sivantos software]
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