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!
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.
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
@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.
.
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.
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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Exactly. There is a world of meaning in that word “nominal” and that other word “range”. But they are close.
I also tried “iPhone separation tests” of 10- and 30-min duration with my iPhone shut up in either a microwave or a HON steel filing cabinet. Three trials at each time duration.
In one out of three trials at each duration, an HA failed to reconnect. The results were similar to the 5-min isolation test results I described in a previous post above. Waiting one minute, shutting off BT for a minute, or rebooting the phone failed to make the HA reconnect, but rebooting the HA did.
I found an Apple Watch could be used to test the “goodness” of a Faraday cage. When my Apple Watch is set to communicate with my iPhone via BT only, I can’t ping the iPhone via the Watch Find My iPhone button in the watch Control Center (swipe up from the bottom of the watch face in WatchOS 9.x). However, strangely enough, if I switch to communicating with the iPhone via Watch Wi-Fi and cellular, I can ping the iPhone shut up in the microwave. Not sure what’s going on here, especially as the iPhone is in Airplane Mode, operating on Wi-Fi and BT frequencies only. I also found my HON steel filing cabinet does not make a very good Faraday cage by the BT-only or the Wi-Fi/cellular pinging tests if I’m in the same room with the filing cabin. It seems to be a leaky Faraday cage.
Maybe both HA’s reconnecting fully in two out of three separations sounds like an improvement, but I don’t think anyone in the past did statistics on disconnection/reconnection. It could be with iOS versions prior to v16.6, the same relative rate of reconnection held, and we only noticed the reconnect failures. The only real improvement, IMHO, would be when reconnection is always 100% and fully automatic with no special user effort required.
This morning neither hearing aid reconnected after I left my phone downstairs for half an hour and I had to reboot the hearing aids, so it doesn’t seem to be better here either.
I’m planning to get an iPhone 15 Pro when they are released late autumn and of course we will have IOS 17 then too. But I suspect this is a hardware issue in the Omnia and probably not one that can be fixed with firmware, or Resound would have done that already. We may have to wait for the Omnia replacement, which I guess will be summer 2024 (as they seem to be on a 2 year cycle these days).
I don’t have a lot of statistics yet but in 3 or 4 tries, turning off Bluetooth via the Control Center for TWO MINUTES OR MORE seems to work 100% to restore connectivity. Give it a try the next time you lose connectivity between your iPhone and your HA’s. Earlier I was only waiting ONE MINUTE before turning Bluetooth on again, and that doesn’t work very well. TWO MINUTES OR MORE seems to be the charm.
Well I tried that @jim_lewis but it didn’t work. Both aids were disconnected to the iPhone (not just the app) and I turned off Bluetooth on the phone for 2 mins, but they didn’t reconnect. I had to restart both aids and they reconnected normally then, including to the app.
Perhaps when it worked for me, I was only away from my iPhone for a short time. On trial #5, two minutes didn’t work for me, either, and I had to reboot the disconnected HA. I will just keep accumulating numbers and see how well it works on average. When I intentionally disconnected my HA’s by putting my iPhone in a microwave “Faraday cage,” the disconnected HA’s would reconnect ~two-thirds of the time without a reboot. If that sort of probability obtains on average the chance that I could reconnect without rebooting 4x in a row as I reported is ~(2/3)^4 or 16/81 or ~1 chance in 5! I should have thought of that before I enthusiastically posted my “solution!”
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I believe there is no chance to solve the problem with omnias HA, Resound had chosen the cheap or smaller bluetooth antenna which have a very small range for this model. On the other hand, mobil phones producer apple chose now smaller antenna for bluetooth, too. You will be not able to increase the range of bluetooth if you have class 3 antenna.
Maybe the only chance is to wear mobile phone always on your body, for example in a bag on your belt?
There is a new firmware that came from microphone repair recently.
the version is 7.39.2.1 Which is a lot newer than a year ago with launch firmware. What phone do you guys have? It makes a different if you are running an android or iphone.
Yes that’s the firmware I have. I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro on the current version of IOS (16.6) but @jim_lewis who is also looking into this is using an iPhone 14Pro I believe.
It seem like all the problem are from iPhone users and I have no problem with my Android phone…
Yes I think it’s incompatibility between Resound’s and Apple’s Bluetooth implementation.
But it was fine with the iPhone and the Resound One. It’s just the Omnia that is the issue. I suspect it’s a hardware problem that Resound can’t easily fix and can’t correct with firmware.
No, actually the omnia and one have the same radio hardware. II think it is apple… there seem to be a perception that Apple is perfect…