I see anything outside of the frequency adjustments as being automatics.
Crunchy to me means that the top end of voices is not smooth, but sounds distorted and possibly over modulated. I can understand them just fine, but the voice quality is not pleasant to listen to.
Okay. Thank you, Jeremy.
The Virtual Outer Ear has Aware, Balanced and Focused for the More 1, and only 1 configuration (Balanced) for the More 2 and 3. This basically models the Outer Ear for the case of the Simple environment configuration. It’s really no big deal to miss the Aware and Focused. You hear more around you with Aware, you hear less (and more in front) with Focused. The Virtual Outer Ear is how to filter sounds before sending the sound scene signal into the DNN for processing, in the case the environment is classified as “Easy”. In the case the environment is classified as “Difficult” by the user, the Virtual Outer Ear is not used. Instead, the Spatial Balancer (noise reduction of well placed noise sources) is used for Difficult environments.
The Spatial Balancer was already covered in the previous posts. It’s an important MVDR beam forming functionality that would help attenuated well placed noise sources. The More 1 has 100% functionality, while the More 2 and 3 have only 60% functionality. It’s not clear what the percentage means. I’m assuming that it probably means the amount of attenuation -> the More 1 attenuates 100% of what it should attenuate, while the More 2 and 3 attenuates less than they should/can.
The Neural Noise Suppression for Difficult/Easy for the More 1 are 10/4, More 2 are 6/2, More 3 are 6/0. Note that these are max levels. It doesn’t mean that the More 1 always get more aggressive NNS than the More 2 and 3. Actually for the most part, they all get the same NNS until more than 6 dB is needed, then the More 1 MAY get more BUT ONLY IF you select more than the 6 dB default that Oticon recommends for the More 1. But if set at the default 6 dB, then the More 1 doesn’t do any more NNS than the More 2 or 3.
The Sound Enhancer has 3 configurations (Detail, Balanced and Comfort) for the More 1. I covered what they mean in great details in a post earlier in this thread. The More 2 only has Balanced and Comfort. The More 3 only has Comfort.
The Spatial Sound gives the More 1 4 Estimators while the More 2 and 3 have only 2 Estimators. Spatial Sound LX is the feature to give the patient a sense of direction on where the sounds are coming from. Without going into the details of what an spatial estimator is, the 4 estimators allow a separation of the spatial cues into 4 equally distributed frequency channels so that you can get more details on the spatial cues if they happen to be in different frequencies. With only 2 estimators in the More 2 and 3, there’s less details on the spatial cues in only 2 frequency bands. I would say this may or may not be important to you depending on whether it’s important to you to know where the sounds are coming from. You do have that with the More 2 and 3, but the More 1 will give you the best spatial cues available.
The fitting bandwidths of 10 KHz for the More 1 and 8 KHz for the More 2 and 3 is not really a big deal, because most of us can’t really hear worth anything beyond 8 KHz anyway. It may only help for those who still have very good high frequency hearing to be able to discern this kind of difference.
The 64 processing channels on the More 1 vs 48 channels on the More 2 and 3 is probably not really significant either. It used to be that 16, then 24 processing channels was plenty good, so I’m not sure if your ears can really discern the details that 64 channels can bring over 48 channels anyway.
Transient Noise Management has OFF/Low/Medium/High for the More 1 and only OFF/Low/Medium for the More 2 and 3. Transient noise management is used to remove discomfort due to sudden loud sounds without sacrificing speech audibility. I don’t think it’s a big deal if the More 2 and 3 can give a little bit less comfort on the More 1 here.
The More 1 has 24 fitting bands, the More 2 has 20, and the More 3 has 18 bands. It used to be that the OPN 1 has only 16 fitting bands. Fitting bands is the granularity of how you can adjust the gain across the frequency range for your Fine Tuning section. I think 16 is more than enough and 24 is overkill anyway.
@Volusiano: I sense that what I’m about to ask can be a bit technical, but could you please say more about spatial estimators?
I am going to say something that may sound strange, I really don’t care how my aids work as long as they work so I can hear and understand speech. That may sound crazy coming from someone that spend his working life in highly technical positions. But it is the truth, when I retired I was freed from the need to know the technical stuff. I am now an artist, and also someone that is trying to accomplish the things I never had time for before.
Yup, that’s great, Chuck, and there’s nothing wrong with anything about that. But - ever since I was a child, taking toys apart and destroying them in the process - I’ve wanted to understand how things work the way they do.
There’s nothing wrong with that, either.
I did that for about 65 years of my life, I guess I finally grew up.
Jim I am.just pulling your leg, if you enjoyed it then do it
Okay. As long as you’re joking. (I used to get punished for doing it).
Read my edit, Jim I was having fun with you.
That’s okay, Chuck. I wish I had gone into something like engineering or technical, rather than the social sciences, where everything is so difficult to measure.
You’ve probably had your fill of technical details - if I had had more knowledge of technical things at the time, I would never have wasted 6 years of being able to hear!
To a certain extent, my curiosity is driven by those Unitron North Moxi Fit 800 that were utterly useless to me, now, as they were for 6 years before . Second tier technology - all the accessories - spare moulds - not worth a damn, whereas I still wear my Moxi 20s as spares to this day.
I would love to understand why those machines defied all attempts by supposed experts to be adjusted so they would work for me.
It’s a long explanation, but I want you to understand the reason for my curiosity: it’s not my More1s. My Mores are magic, and -like you - I’m happy to just bask in the sunshine. But it still bugs me that those Unitrons could never be made to perform like a Big6, Advanced Tier machine should. (Screwed up auto switching was partly to blame, I’m sure.)
I don’t go backwards to ask about them, however. Nobody would want to participate actively in that conversation. (In fact, the name Unitron hardly ever comes up on the site.) But when we discuss Mores, it’s current, and interesting, and I learn about my Moxis by osmosis and deduction.
You’re in a unique situation, Chuck, because you get to enjoy the top tier premium aids from the VAs with quite frequent refreshes, so as long as you’re happy with them, that’s all you care about. I’d probably not care about the details as well if I were in your shoes.
But the reality is that the HA mfgs are playing a game by creating these multiple tiers of HAs and assigning multiple and quite significant monetary differences between the different tiers for people to choose from. So for people to whom money is no object, it’s simple and they just pick the top tier and they don’t care about the details, like how you have it. But for people on a budget but still want to get a premium HA like the Oticon More rather than going for a better value proposition like the HAs at Costco, this forces them to educate themselves on the details between the different tiers so that they can make an informed decision that fits their needs the best and still get the best value out of it.
Unlike me who’s a techie who enjoys understanding these things, I think most people are probably like you who don’t care to know as long as they work. But unfortunately, they need to know so that they can pick the right tier that gives them the most for their money.
@Volusiano: That reasoning fits my situation rather well. Although our VAC 
will provide me with More3s at no cost, I had to pay an additional $1,500 to get to the More1s. More2s would have cost me significantly less. I still don’t know/understand whether More2s would have done the job.
Since, historically, I’ve enjoyed the best performance from Oticon devices (first Deltas, now Mores) I’m probably going to stay with Oticon next time around, and I’d like to be better-informed about my choices than I was this time.
This thread I why I decided to test max neural noise suppression, transient noise management, and more. I want to see what the More1s are capable of before reverting to defaults if needed
Yes that is so true, but I was taught electronics technology while in the Navy, I did enjoy it while I was in the Navy, but felt like a slave to it after I left the Navy. I thought it would be great to learn computers and even learn to program. I found that I am not a programmer but a great software troubleshooter. My mistake was turning a computer hobby into a full time job. The IT profession is a 24/7/365 job I couldn’t even go to the restroom without a pager or phone. I couldn’t enjoy being on vacation due to someone interrupting it because of the systems being down. The true money for the time worked wasn’t much better than minimum wage. Then if you weren’t working you were having to study and test for the next certification. And the courses, books and the needed software and hardware came out of my own pocket. I sometimes felt like a slave to the technology.
Exactly … I’ve always understood that completely, and such a history would - of course - dampen your enthusiasm for technology in retirement. Your dad was right when he told you to shut the door and not look back.
Unfortunately for me, my lack of knowledge about More technology has already cost me some significant coin.
Sure, basically HAs use compression to help you hear softer sounds louder (through more amplification), but louder sounds not as loud (through less amplification), because generally if louder sounds are already more audible to you, there’s no need to amplify them as much as the softer (harder to hear) sounds need to be amplified.
If you wear 2 HAs that don’t talk to each other, the compression is independent. So if you look at the first screenshot below, you’ll see an example where the sound is coming from the right of the listener, so with no HA, you hear a louder sound on your right ear and a softer sound on your left ear (the person on the top). If you wear hearing aids that don’t talk to each other, the softer sound on the left ear gets amplified more (because of how compression works) and ends up sounding just as loud as the same sound in the right ear, which doesn’t get amplified as much (again, because of how compression works). This situation is shown in the person on the lower left. Because of this, you lose the sense of directionality because the HAs amplify the sound to the same level on both sides.
But if the HAs talk to each other (the binaural processing case in the lower right), the left HA will know that the right HA has a louder level sound, and vice versa, so the left HA uses this knowledge to not amplify its left side sound too much, so that a volume level difference between the two is maintained (it’s called ILD for Interaural Level Differences). This way, the user gets the cue that the sound must be coming from his right side. On the other hand, the person with independent compression (2 HAs don’t talk to each other) in the lower left gets no clue where the sound comes from because there’s no volume difference between the 2 HAs.
However, the volume levels between the 2 sides may differ over a range of frequency, depending on the type of sound. The 2nd screenshot illustrates this, with the pink level (on the right graph) being what arrives at the right ear (and it almost matches to the original sound level in the left graph), and the white level there being what arrives at the left ear, at a lower volume because it has to travel a further distance to get there. It also gives an example of a sound that has a higher difference in volume level at the higher end of the frequency range, but less difference in volume levels at the lower range.
The Estimator is an algorithm that is designed to determine what the best estimate of the overall volume level difference is. I’m not sure what the algorithm does, maybe it’s to calculate the largest difference between the left and right volume through out the frequency range, or maybe the median difference, or maybe something in between. But nevertheless, if there’s only one Estimator for the whole frequency range, then there would be only 1 overall compression difference (or compression “scheme”) applied between the left and right HAs across all frequencies.
But if you slice this frequency range into 4 separately equal bands, then you can have a different estimator for each of the 4 bands, and now you can apply 4 separate compression “schemes” between the left and right HAs in the 4 frequency bands, as seen in the second screenshot. The estimators here are the 4 black vertical lines that represent the overall volume differences (ILD for Interaural Level Differences) between the right and left HAs in each of the 4 frequency bands.
This should help you get even better and more accurate spatial cues because the precision of the estimators goes from being very crude with only 1 estimator for the entire frequency range, to being much more refined with 4 estimators for each of the 4 frequency ranges, resulting in 4 independent compression schemes applied in the 4 equally distributed frequency bands.
@Volusiano: I understand this. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me.
Better sense of directionality is very important to me, so More1s definitely have an advantage there, with 4 vs 2 estimators for More2 & More3.
I just went digging around for information about the North Moxi Fit HAs . I have highlighted the parts that prove why Unitron North Moxi Fit 800 was the wrong device for me, and should never have been prescribed for my needs.
It was prescribed because:
Here’s the screenshot:
Hi,
Not sure I agree with you that The Virtual Outer Ear settings that are missing from the lower tiers are not really important. I originally had them set at Balanced and then went to Aware and felt that it made a big difference in hearing the world around me. Before the switch, I felt everything was muffled. Peaceful, but muffled. I am going to try out the 10db setting in the Difficult Environment neural noise reduction setting and see if it makes a huge difference or not. Not so concerned with the Easy Environment.
@JeremyDC: I don’t understand your perception of this feature. My understanding is that it should affect the directionality of the HA mics, and not their timbre.
