GN Resound Omnia Bluetooth issues

Hearing Aids
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I know this has been discussed quite a bit recently, but a lot of it was buried in a Phonak v Resound thread and I’m not sure where else.

But @jim_lewis gets the prize for imparting lots of information, so I am tagging him here.

I have been using Resound Ones for a couple of years and once Apple had sorted out their initial release mess with iPhone 12 Pro firmware, it’s been pretty well perfect for me. I could leave my phone anywhere and pick it up later, with both the phone and the Smart 3D app connecting more or less instantly.

But I decided to try the Resound Omnias with my iPhone 12 Pro (which is on the latest firmware). All the issues that @jim_lewis describes in multiple posts over the last few weeks immediately visited themselves on me. Sometimes I can get things working again by restarting the Resound App, but this morning the only way was to restart the hearing aids. As Jim says, sometimes the app doesn’t think there is anything connected to the iPhone, even though the iPhone clearly is connected to the aids and sometimes both the phone and the app have totally lost contact with the aids.

If you keep your phone with you, near the Omnias then all remains connected. But what I don’t understand is that Resound knows how to do this stuff, as the Resound One demonstrates and the Omnia has been out for nearly a year now and its Bluetooth performance sucks! Come on Resound get your act together!

Anyway for the time being the Omnias are demoted to being my backup aids and I’m using the Ones again.

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Sorry to hear you’re having trouble, too. The “upside” of your problems is that it shows it’s not worth turning in my Omnias to see if a different set somehow avoids the problem. Since Oticon users have reported iOS 16.x connectivity issues, too, Apple may at least have some responsibility. I wonder if the One vs. the Omnia difference is a BT 5.2 vs. a BT 5.3 issue? Will be interesting to see what happens when iOS 17 rolls out (not too far away now). My Quattros had no connectivity problem with iOS 16.x and a brand new iPhone 14 Pro Max.

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I have not updated to 16.4.1 and am not having connection problems, with one exception a few days back when I had to reboot the HA’s. Probably the only incident in a month or so.
My phone (iPhone 11, 16.3.1) is always on the desk when I turn on my aids in the morning (disposable batteries).
I will have to go in and have a feedback problem resolved in the left aid.

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Yes this seems to be a plan, but it doesn’t suit me to do it that way and my point is that I didn’t need to worry about it until I swapped the Ones for Omnias.

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New to the forum, but not new to HAs. Two weeks ago, I was fitted with Resound Custom Omnia (9) and so far, have no bluetooth problems when connected to my iPhone 13 mini (16.4.1a). I’ve been wearing them ~ 16 hr/ day with about 2-3 hr streaming on average. Time will tell, but so far, so good. No problems with the Smart 3D app either. I’ll report back if I start to notice anything going south. Not sure how this performance relates to the RIE Omnia models but supposedly the same chip, etc., just a different form factor I was led to believe.

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Do you own an iPad and is it close to you when you are having issues? The iPad may be grabbing the connection from the iPhone. Turn off Bluetooth on devices when you are not streaming.

Jordan

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Thanks. Yes I know all that and there is only one iPhone paired to my Omnias.

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I have the very same issues. Sometimes it is the left or right only or sometimes both. Both are connected on startup but get lost during the day. You only discover this when trying to use the app when needed or noticing a test or cal indication in one ear only, In my instances the ONLY way to reconnect is to restart the aids. IPhone XR iOS 16.5.1. Ready to change brands again.

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I find similar except that occasionally it’s the app that has lost the connection rather than the phone. You can easily check by pressing the iPhone power button three times, which brings up the hearing devices menu. If both left and right are showing there then you can just stop and restart the Resound Smart 3D app, which takes only a couple of seconds to do.

But if one or both are missing, then you have to restart that or both hearing aids. This doesn’t take too long, but it is very annoying!

This doesn’t happen with my Resound Ones which always manage to reconnect themselves without intervention. And it shouldn’t ever be necessary to stop an app to make it work properly. That behaviour in an app is highly deprecated by Apple.

Basically Resound has incompetent software designers currently. The Omnia has been out for nearly a year and they really should have sorted it out months ago.

This is with an iPhone 12 Pro with IOS 16.5.1 incidentally.

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Thanks I first restart the app to no avail.
They are not shown when checking phone with Triple click and need a full restart. I also believe when one is lost they lose their connection to each other. Rubbing your finger over the aids will show a large difference in sensitivity. I think these are a B grade product compared to my previous Phonak M. I went to Omnia because of MFI it was getting annoying with. Phonak and BT Classic wanting to connect to everywhere. If these were made for I Phone they do not keep current and hide behind their providers leaving them to deal with the complaints. Too much $$$ for a “professional grade” product.

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Actually I don’t think that is true. The Bluetooth connection between the two Omnias is nothing to do with the iPhone or the Smart 3D app.

How the two aids handle volume changes depends on what is set in the aids at fitting, but normally the two aids will stay in synchronism with each other. The fact that you hear one aid bleep with a significant delay compared to the other is quite a reliable way to tell that only one aid is connected to the app!

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@david.hendon. I find the same thing on connectivity. If only one HA is connected to the smartphone, when you change programs, the connected HA bleeps a confirmation tone and shortly afterwards, presumably by a synchronization relay signal from the connected HA, the disconnected HA changes programs and bleeps an acknowledgement, too. If this doesn’t work for anyone, it’s possible that the HCP “disconnected” the between-HA’s link in the fitting program (IIRC, there is such a settings option but I’m not sure why anyone would want to use it).

Not sure for @Vee why there should be a large difference in sensitivity between HA’s, unless the disconnected HA is not following settings changes for the connected one. I’m usually in All-Around program mode 99% of the time and the only way I ever notice that either HA may have disconnected from my smartphone is when I go to use the app. The disconnected HA hears sound the same as the connected one for me. Maybe the less sensitive HA for @Vee is broken?

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Yes ear to ear communication is the HAs and nothing to do with the App, in smartfit the HAs can be configured differently in tone beeps and loudness, jim some people have quite a difference between ears and this is one of the reasons you can separate the volume control from each ear, of course this can be achieved with a remote control as well, I’ve noticed up to 3sec delay for the changes.

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Actually the link/unlink button in SmartFit just means you can make changes to one side without those applying automatically to the other too. It’s important if your hearing loss is quite different between your two ears, as mine is!

I see @tenkan is saying much the same as me!

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@tenkan and @david.hendon. I guess in my relative ignorance of HA fitting, I thought the linkage mainly applied to program changes and environmental processing such as noise cancellation to make sure both HA’s were on the same page. I think I presumed this because even with the linkage turned on (HA’s connected), gains applied to one ear do not automatically transfer to the other ear.

I forget how I’ve managed to do it, but sometimes, in spite of the linkage, one ear(HA) in the Smart 3D app will still be stuck in streaming mode or a different program, and the other ear(HA) will have made the switch. When this has happened to me, it shows up in the Smart 3D with the main Home screen split in two with different labels on each side of the middle!

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Hi Jim

Well it does do that actually, so I‘m not sure why you aren’t seeing that. And annoying it can be if you forget to unlink them and find the tweaks you have made to one ear have been applied to the other as well. I have noticed in the current release of SmartFit that you can unlink them in one program and it’s then in the lap of the gods as to whether it will be linked or unlinked in the next program you select. So you have to check each time.

Also whether you re-link them before saving or not, it doesn’t make any difference. They are still showing linked next time you connect to them.

Yes I have seen this too. It can be quite hard to make it see sense, although killing the Smart 3D app and restarting it often sorts it out.

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Hi @jim_lewis

Have you tried IOS 16.6 yet, released a few days ago? I have in my iPhone 12 Pro and on the face of it I am hopeful that Apple have at last fixed the Bluetooth issue that meant your Omnia losing contact with your phone if you move far away from the phone and requiring a restart of the Omnia to fix it. It’s early days but so far it seems pretty good to me.

Best

David

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@david.hendon! Unfortunately for me, iOS 16.6 is not the fix for the “iPhone separation.” But we have different phones (after years of my wife’s hand-me-downs, I finally got a new phone last fall, an iPhone 14 Pro Max).

Your post that I’m quoting inspired me to invent a new test system. Anyone trying this at home, be sure no one else in your family uses the microwave while you’re about it!

It’s a pain to try to figure out how far and how long you have to be away from your phone to trigger the problem. Microwaves are “Faraday cages.” The power-generating equipment inside is surrounded by metal or metal mesh (in the microwave window) designed to prevent any significant amounts of radiation from escaping and cooking you instead of the food.

I tried putting my iPhone in our microwave for 1, 2.5, and 5 minutes. Five minutes in three trials was guaranteed to cause at least one Omnia 962 to lose BT contact with my phone. But the results on re-establishing contact varied for each 5-minute isolation in the microwave.

In trial one, both HA’s lost contact. Waiting one minute did not allow them to reestablish contact with my iPhone. But turning BT off and on again through the Control Center BT button worked.

In trial two, both HA’s lost contact again. But within a few seconds of removing the phone from the microwave, both HA’s spontaneously reconnected, and the Smart 3D app functioned normally to change program settings.

In trial three, only the right HA lost contact. Waiting a minute, turning BT off and on again, or rebooting the phone did not re-establish contact. Only rebooting the HA worked to get it to reconnect to my iPhone.

Now that I have a decent test system, I’ll try to see what happens if I go to even longer iPhone isolation times.

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You are indeed a man after my own heart Jim. I will await your further results with interest.:+1::disguised_face::thinking:.

In case anyone reading this wonders about the microwave oven that Jim mentions, the reason it works is that although Bluetooth and microwave ovens use different frequencies, they are not that different. A microwave oven is designed to not let microwave radiation out of the oven for safety reasons and that’s why it works highly effectively to stop your phone talking to your hearing aids using Bluetooth. So ideal for the test Jim describes.

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consumer ovens work around a nominal 2.45 gigahertz (Wikipedia), i.e., ~the same frequency range as BT and Wi-Fi.

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