I ordered a Hi-pro from Aliexpress on Thursday the 28th for $199 plus shipping. It was shipped on Friday the 29th and I received it exactly one week later on Friday Oct 6th. What amazed me is that it was still in Hong Kong on Wednesday and I had it in my hands 2 days later in Michigan.
Now, I’m all set.
Apparently my package has arrived but I won’t be able to see and try it until the end of the month.
How about you guys…Volusiano, gkumar, TRY?
RussF: That is amazing delivery speed. I’m into 7 weeks now and still waiting for a package from China. I recently waited 3 months. It’s infuriating. It’s not the sender either.
My package just came today. I’ve been able to get everything up and running and working! Special thanks to @pvc for his PM help with suggestions initially when I got stuck due to the com port issue. Basically the MiniPro has to be between com port 1 to 4 or else the Genie 2 software won’t see it. Mine was assigned to com port 6 and I had to go to the device manager and change the Hi-Pro com port assignment to 1 and then it was found by Genie 2.
I was able to set up 2 programs, one for my set of 105dB receivers and the other for my set of 85dB receivers, under 2 different users. I made a mistake of adding a few mask values from the audiogram and it messed things up but after removing it and just have the AC and BC values then it works out great!
I must say that this self programming experience is SO MUCH better than having to rely on my audi to do it for me. Genie 2 is also very easy to use, with the online help to guide you through the options. In hindsight to everything, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy HAs online in the future and do my own programming in a heartbeat. This should be the way of the future.
That’s a great report Volusiano. Really looking forward to getting into the programming.
So the cables…were they red and blue or just plain? Just curious. Of course it doesn’t really matter.
Have you found yet that you’ve been able to improve detail from what the audi last left you with?
Interesting about the mask values.
The CS44 cables were red and blue at the connector end. The Flex Connect cables look the same. I struggled a little bit with which way to connect the 2 together because they’re so small and fragile and I can’t see the connectors very clearly even with reading glasses, and I didn’t want to force it unless I know I had them lined up right. But I looked it up and found an example. Basically you need to line them up so that the tail of the CS44 connector and the tail of the FlexConnect are at 180 degrees.
Yes, I mentioned that I created a new user profile from scratch for my set of 85dB receivers (I’m wearing them now instead of my 105dB receivers just to see how they compare). Originally in the fitting with my audi, for some reason she had to run the feedback analyzer and enabled it because I experienced feedback. But this time I didn’t have to and still have no feedback. There were some settings I was not aware of like to increase the bass on the receiver for Phone and TV streaming mode, which she never mentioned to me.
Also in the original fitting with the audi, for some reason I experienced distortion on the high ends on my right HA (with the HF profound loss) on the 85dB receivers before but now I don’t with the default, don’t know why. Bottom line is my audi had to do fine tuning on the volume balance and a bunch of volume adjustments at a few frequencies before until I was happy. But now everything seems to work just fine and actually better at default without much fiddling around. So it’s kind of the opposite of the process. Normally you’d expect to fiddle around after the audi’s default programming, but in my case the audi’s fiddling made it worse and I put it back to default and it was better. But nevertheless, in the end I’m happier with my own setting than the one the audi had for me. It also goes to show how easy the Genie 2 programming software is that it seems to work well right off the bat without much fiddling around. But I’ll still fiddle around with the options because I’m sure I’ll want to change this and that.
As for the mask values, below is my audiogram. If you noticed on the right ear, it has a couple of values (40 and 60) in the Mask Oppos field, whatever that means. The Genie 2 audiogram template has the AC and BC and below it is “m” field. I assumed that it was the same as the “mask oppos” field so I entered in those 2 values. But it totally messed up the simulated insertion gain. So I removed those 2 values from the Genie 2 audiogram and everything start looking and working much better.
They have red dots for visual alignment. They also have cutout sections for physical alignment. Scroll down to the closeup pictures in Programming the Oticon Alta Pro miniRITE But yeah, they are miniaturized!
Yes, thanks to that exact picture you mentioned in the thread which I found, I was able to connect them with confidence. I kinda knew they had the cutout section and visual cue for alignment but for the life of my eyesight I could not pick up these visual cues even with my reading glasses.
The FlexConnect contact end seems bent out of shape a little bit after a session with a number of connections. Hope they’re not too fragile and still work fine after several connections despite being bent out of shape.
Thanks for the great detailed experience Volusiano.
I use readers too but for close-up small detailed work I use +4 power readers. I’ve not seen any stronger readers than that.
At least hearingclub or whatever they’re called has the flex cables for $20.
That little bump on the FlexConnect at the end of the 3 contact strips, does it line up with any kind of indentation inside the battery door, I wonder? I just pushed the Flex cable as far in as I could. But usually in the process of closing the battery door, you have to kind of use both hands sometimes to do it and the Flex cable may slip out a little bit. So it makes me wonder if the purpose of the bump to help the cable stay in place somehow.
The purpose is to limit the amount of ribbon travel into your hearing aid. The bump stops ribbon travel at the proper insertion length.
I see. I found that I was able to push the bump to the inside of the door as well if I have the door open far out enough. Now that I know this, I’ll open the door just a slit to slip the cable in without letting the bump slip in as well.
One other thing to comment is that there are a few ways to find out which com port the Mini-Pro is assigned to. I took the route of downloading the Hi-Pro Install CD content then install it and run it to have it tell me if it has the right com port assignment or not. Then if not, I had to click on an online link which tells me to go to the Device Manager under Com port to find the Hi-Pro device and look inside its properties to change the com port assignment to the right one.
Well in hindsight now, that step about downloading and running the Hi-Pro Install CD content can probably be skipped if you already know that you can just to straight to the Device Manager to verify it and change it if necessary.
I figured out the reason for my confusion with the Mask Oppos value. If you look at my audiogram above, the Mask Oppos is right below the AC/BC fields on the template.
If you looks at the Genie 2 audiogram template below, they have UCL (Uncomfortable Loudness Level) below AC/BC (Air Conduction/Bone Conduction) values. The use the O and X for AC data points, < and > for BC data points, and m for UCL data points. So “m” here is just a special character that denotes the UCL value, but the parameter is UCL. But I mistook the “m” symbol for UCL here to be the “Mask Oppos” in my audi’s audiogram template. That’s why I added in the 40 and 60 Mask Oppos value in the wrong (UCL) field, resulting in and error in my Genie 2 audiogram.
Hi, are you sure that your payment went through?
The first credit card I used they didn’t want to accept without more information. Maybe something to do with security on the card. I don’t know. After a couple days I tried a different card and they accepted payment from that one immediately. My package went out real quick after that.
RussF: It seems there’s a misunderstanding. I ordered the programming stuff from Buyhear and apparently it has arrived. They take Paypal. Took about 4 days once they sent it which was 2 days after I paid for it. There was a delay for them to get stock. Which really sucked because I COULD have had it in my hands this past Friday if they had had stock earlier. ( or if they had sent it out the next business hours after I paid for it perhaps too )
The 7 weeks (I lied…I got it at 6 weeks) is for a whole other kind of order for something entirely different. I mentioned that because Aliexpress is in China and my other order came from China. It seems Canadian customs clearing mail takes a ridonkulously long time to get through for things from China.
I guess I did misunderstand.
Hope your equipment arrives soon as I know it is a pain waiting for something you would like to have.
I had another good example of detailed improvement from the last setting I had to share here. Transient Noise Management is a feature on Genie 2 for the OPN to suppress sudden loud sounds with fast recovery to preserve audibility. Based on the last session, I changed it from Medium to High because I figured who wouldn’t want to protect against sudden loud sounds, right? After all, that’s what the technology is there for, so why not use it and set it to the max? It couldn’t hurt, since I don’t like to hear loud dishes banging in restaurants or when washing dishes at home, or loud water sounds in the bathroom, etc.
Well, it turns out that after I changed it to Max, when I played tennis yesterday, I started noticing that the pop when the tennis ball got struck sounded a bit more muted. Normally I don’t like sudden loud sounds from my HAs, but this is the one sound I like to hear in its full glory, because it tells you how well the ball was struck and whether it was in the sweet spot or not. Had I not have my own programming device, I wouldn’t have been able to experiment with this to find out when to set this parameter to Off or Low instead of High. So now I set it to Low in one of the programs that I’d use for tennis, where I also turn off Speech Rescue so I don’t have to hear annoying crickets and birds chirping outdoors so I can concentrate better on my game.
Another example: the 85dB receiver is a little under power for my high frequency loss, so it tends to be over driven in the 4KHz and up range, and I can hear distortion sometimes when it gets overdriven. My audi used to fix that by reducing gain on the high frequencies. I now found a better way to fix it: with Speech Rescue turned on, it gives me the option of leaving the lowered sounds alone in the original high frequencies as well (so you have both the lowered sounds and the original sounds). But I chose the option to turn off the original sounds because that’s in the range where the distortion occurs. Since I can’t hear the original sounds and only hear distortion there anyway, I can now turn off the original sound because I already have the lowered sound. That would be something that I’d never know because the audi would never have told me it could be done. Heck, my audi probably doesn’t even know that it could be done herself, let alone tell me about it. But because I have the programmer now, I’m beginning to discover such available options myself for use.
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Volusiano,
please tell us more of your experiences, it help us for programming with OPN. I also tried the OPN1 miniRite (85db) and got the same experience with plopping sounds like claps or hitting a tennis ball. Every automatics was set off.
In the other thread you wrote about Noise Removal module. Did you hear the same when you speak and clap your hands in the same time? Clapping your hands without your voice it sounds unnatural, but while speaking and clapping the claps sound natural. Do you hear sounds like glass or bells with vibration at the end? Or could you hear wavesounds like 1khz (www.onlinetonegenerator.com) not consistently clear? I hear it distorted or uneven. Every kind of automatics and feedback managers was set off, tried with VAC+ and NAL2, but I hear loud sounds pulpy.
Soon I will test the OPN PP BTE.
Volusiano, You make an excellent point about the audi not knowing about it. I would think it’s the very rare audi who really knows the full capabilities of multiple programming systems. Even if one doesn’t want to self program, I think it’s worth getting the software so one can explore the software features (if one is so inclined)