My Adventures With Oticon's Random Reboots Come to a Close

Hearing Aids
41

It’s worth noting that the audiologist’s loaners that I was using (these were rechargeables) until I got my warranty replacements were also rebooting randomly.

And you’re telling me that I experienced it happening to three different Oticon units, including rechargeables, and it’s not a manufacturer defect and that it is due to the fault of my hearing loss? Hmmmmm…

These are just a few of these threads and posts…

https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/opn-1-for-service-anyone-had-these-issues/43772/3

42

I have several connect clips and my connect clip I got way back with my OPN1 aids works great with every set of Oticon aids since OPN.

43

Thanks! I had no problems with the Connect Clip.

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44

If you have a consumer protection department in your state it might be worth it to touch base with them.
The audiologist may relent because they might not want the hassle.
Maybe they can switch them to the Xceed.
Don’t know if that will work for you.
I’ll let the experts way in on that.

45

Thanks! But I don’t want the Xceeds again. I bought the Xceeds, and went back to Phonak Naidas.

46

Ok. Got it.
Still might be worth a shot.
Explain to the Dept how many aids you’ve had.
Might get your money.
Good luck.

47

You know as well as I do that one’s hearing loss, no matter how moderate or severe, can never be used as a blame for anything. You can try to put words in my mouth, but that’s going to work. It’s the fault of the Xceed being an ultra power hearing aid not designed properly for the power it needs to amplify, and this probably exarcebates the frequency of the random reboots specific for the Xceed. So the cause (NOT the “fault”) of the situation that you find yourself in, not due to your fault or your hearing loss’s fault, and the poor response of your audiologist and of Oticon, is to be blamed here. That’s why I said “shame on your audiologist and shame on Oticon for not doing right by you.”

But it doesn’t support your conclusion that all the other Oticon hearing aid models therefore are also craps and have bad build quality or QA just like the Xceed. It also doesn’t mean that if the Oticon OPN or More used to have random reboots as well, then it would be any kind of vindication to your conclusion that all Oticon aids are crappy. Hearing aids are very complicated devices that can be subjected to random reboots not much different than with computers. At least Oticon did release firmware updates that eventually minimizes and alleviates the frequent random reboots for the Opn and the More, to a level where an occasional reboot (which is a fact of life) is much more acceptable.

It’s too bad that whatever they did to fix the OPN and the More didn’t work on the Xceed. The more reason to believe that it’s power related → not any excuse in anyway, but not justifiable enough to make people believe in your far reaching overall conclusion that Oticon simply just makes bad products that everyone should stay away from. People will use their own anecdotal evidence to decide for themselves what to think. But if you have suceeded in scaring away non-Oticon users into never touching Oticon aids, I have no problem with this success either, because the way Oticon and your professional didn’t do right by you make them deserve it. But I won’t agree to join in your chorus that Oticon is a bad HA mfg from the product point of view because my personal experience says otherwise. But I won’t dispute what you shared that Oticon fails to do right by you from the sales point of view by not offering you a full refund, and I say “shame on them” for not treating you right.

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48

I’m certainly not here to drive anyone away from trying Oticon. If they want to, as I’ve always maintained, more power to them. What I am simply saying is I made several mistakes along the decision-making process, that I fully realize. But, that, if I knew more, and if that new audiologist had answered my questions to the affirmative when I asked - “should I stick with Phonak?” I would have stuck with Phonak instead of wasting a year and $5,000 on a hearing aid that was not fit for my loss. Said audiologist also seemed to believe that it was one of the only ones available aside from Phonak that would fit my loss.

Anyway. They simply didn’t work for me. And I’m the one that finds random reboots unacceptable in a $5,000 product. But I also feel that education is part of the solution - the more people who are aware of these random reboots, perhaps they will find them sooner and save themselves the hassle that I had to go through a $5,000 mistake to realize. That’s my only goal here.

49

I have Phonak and now Naida for many years, i am severe. Phonak can be the best but they need to improve few things 1) sound quality - they went on conversation listening, but surrounding sounds left behind. the sound it too digital, the old Naida semi linaer was better real sound. 2) the bluetoth connection is disconnecting too many time and very slow to re connect. the app is not impressive compare with others.
3) they drop out the 675 batteries, although we need more power now and the 312 batteries needs to be replaced too often. yes you can go rechargeable, but this is another big issue for servers as they need the HA all times). with reliability, i never had even one fault for over 15 years of Phonak (unless i did something stupid as leaving the batteries in too long)

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50

I just want to comment on the original topic of frequent reboots. I have worked as a firmware developer for several decades and have a pretty good understanding how reboots typically happen.

For those who haven’t heard the term ‘firmware’ before, that’s the software that runs on devices that typically don’t have a user interface such as a screen or keyboard. Hearing aids fall squarely into this category.

Firmware often needs to run for long time, and it is paramount that it never gets into a ‘stuck’ state where the hearing aid becomes completely unresponsive.

Since software/firmware bugs are a fact of life, devices such as hearing aids contain a hardware feature that’s called a ‘watchdog’. It’s basically a countdown timer, that automatically triggers a reboot after a certain time, maybe one second. To prevent rebooting, the firmware has to continuously restart the timer before it expires.

If the firmware gets stuck, the timer will quickly expire, and the hearing aid will reboot.

In all likelihood that’s what happened with Codergeek’s Oticons.

Now, it’s possible that Codergeek’s unique setup might have forced a the firmware to run with parameters that are unusual. This might have exposed a bug that leads to the watchdog countdown timer expiring and the hearing aid rebooting.

But it’s still a bug that Oticon’s internal quality testing didn’t catch!

Now, one can argue that whatever bug this is, it would have been hard for Oticon to catch this bug because of Codergeek’s unusual requirements.

Maybe this is true. But the following is also true:

How much internal testing a company does is a business decision. Testing requires internal resources and costs money.

Every company tries to automate testing as much as possible, but setting up automatic tests also requires engineering resources.

So companies have to decide between a) spending more money on testing and thereby lowering their profit margins. Or b) doing less testing, which risks reputational damage due to customers receiving a poorer quality product. Ultimately this will also lower their revenue and profiit.

In conclusion: I don’t think we should let companies off the hook if their products reboot. That’s a bug and they need to improve their quality control.

And if a company sells a product that offers CROS and UP, then it’s absolutely reasonably to expect it to work.

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51

Wow. Very interesting insights! Thanks for sharing them.

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52

Thanks for sharing your insight on the firmware bug causing reboots. I absolutely agree with you that no matter how you slice and dice it, it’s still a bug and the company fails Xceed users by not fixing it. And the warning should be that “nobody should ever buy the Xceed hearing aid model from Oticon ever again until they can successfully resolve this bug for the Xceed”.

But it shouldn’t be “nobody should ever buy any Oticon hearing aid models again because of what happens with the Xceed and how Oticon cannot resolve that issue for the Xceed”. They did resolve the random reboot issue for the OPN and and More, and while it might still happen on the Real and the Intent, it has not become a recurring enough issue that draws any negative attention to those models.

This is no excuse for Oticon, but it’s likely that the volume of OPN and More and Real and Intent that they sell far outweighs the volume of the Xceed sales, so they put in more priority to solve the random boot issue much more seriously on those popular models than they did with the Xceed. Again, this is not an excuse, just an explanation of why. So I would fully advocate for all users to boycott buying Xceed HAs from Oticon ever again. But I personally still would continue to buy the RIC Oticon models like the OPN and Real and other subsequent ones with confidence, because the RIC models haven’t had to suffer the same fate as the Xceed model.

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53

Great explanation, that’s certainly one potential failure mode here: probably the most frustrating for the user.

Hardware issues, like receiver/amplifier overloads and battery decline are seen in the industry too. The CROS presents extra demands in this regard; due to the extra signalling and processing for binaural signals being handled by the one set of processors.

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54

Is the OP self programming those aids?

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55

This doesn’t matter. With the assistance of my audiologist, the only adjustments I made up or down was by 2dB to remove the quietness of background speech and the muffleness of my own voice. Any adjustments I would have made were inconsequential to the problem considering it happened in both quiet and noise.

The random reboot issues happened out of the box for 8 months since I got the hearing aids in January, 2024 with the audiologists’ own settings prior to my own self programming, and I maintained the settings from the hearing aid otherwise through my minor adjustments.

The warranty-replacements were also audiologist-programmed and still had random rebooting issues with those settings.

My audiologist was also well aware of the rebooting problem I was having.

56

I still believe it has to do with pushing the power level to close to the limits. I have worn the More1 aids and still have them as a second level backup. I haven’t had the reboots since the last updates that I got. Yes the early release firmware did have a few reboots but nothing serious. I have even had a couple of reboots in senic I got my INTENT1 aids last June. But none since the latest firmware update in December. The companion app has been noted to cause aids to reboot in the past. But since the companion app for android has had tje always connected option those reboots have gone away. I use the beta app with my backup aids and the official companion app for my INTENT1 aids. Today I am wearing my backup Real1 aids with absolutely no issues. Tomorrow I will be wearing the More1 aids for their monthly exercise of the batteries.
Some ask why do I even have backup aids, simply I cannot hear any speech conversations without them. And yes aids can need service. I never go too far from home without my backups.

57

I think what @wtolkien shared is the most likely root cause. It’s a bug that Oticon didn’t catch, and still hasn’t caught fully, otherwise why would it be present in many other models in the same company brand? We have to consider all the evidence, including the fact that Oticon published software updates addressing this very issue. Clearly, they have had enough of a problem with them to address them in their software development circles.

Hmmmmmm.

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58

With software everytime a programer fixes one bug there are 100 or more still not fixed, and for every bug fixed at least one other bug is created and normal a lot more than one. I am retired now but I use to troubleshoot hardware and software as well as doing quality control inspections of both hardware an software. I was qualified to do development, design, and even create the software but chose the more challenging troubleshooting.
I understand high technology, I know what to expect and what is acceptable and what isn’t. I scream wolf only when it should be screamed. Am I too easy on bugs? The programmers, developers and hardware engineers always called me a hard you know what.

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59

I appreciate your level of understanding and contributions to this thread too, @cvkemp. But I think that it’s worth mentioning that unless you have had direct hands-on working within Oticon’s specific development team, none of us are qualified to admit what bugs exist or not. Because we don’t have that specific level of trade knowledge. And even if we did, there are likely NDAs in place preventing employees from discussing trade secrets. We can infer what’s going on based on what’s public knowledge, and that’s two things:

  1. Oticon’s reboot issues are enough of a problem they had to address them in the software updates with a specific line item that made it through Scrum meetings and development sprints,
  2. There are multiple brands impacted by this particular bug, even though there are several that may have made it through production without such bugs and completely problem-free, such as yours.

And I think the fact is that both situations can be true - there can be a bug that Oticon simply didn’t catch in engineering, and there can also be the situation they are being pushed to a level that reveals the bug. Either way, paying $5,000 for devices on my side should result in a device that 1. lives up to the advertisement, 2. Is free of bugs for at least the duration of the first few years of ownership.

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60

Some thoughts regarding the theory that high power levels are the root cause:

First of all, hearing aids are super low power devices. They have to be. They run for a long time on super small batteries.

Rechargeable hearing aids have a battery with a capacity of around 20mAh. For comparison, a typical smartphone has about 4000mAh. In order for hearing aids to last for an entire day, they need to limit their power consumption to something like 2 milliwatts. That’s 10,000 times less than the speaker on your TV which might output 20 watts.

So let’s say that when UP hearing aids cranked up the max, they are 5x more power-hungry than regular aids. That’s still only a tiny tiny amount of power. There is no transistor that could not handle this amount of power. There is no battery that can not output that amount of power.

Of course, ultimately this is only speculation. But @codergeek2015 did state multiple times that the reboots happened in a quiet environment as well, which supports my point.

To @Volusiano’s point, I agree that the conclusion should not be ‘don’t buy Oticon’.

Software bugs happen and are unavoidable.

But as I said before, bugs are always an indication of how much (or little) a company decides to spend on quality control. If they happen more frequently, then there is a point where I think bugs reflect poorly on the entire company and not just a single product. This is a general observation and I’m not saying that Oticon is at that point yet.

And for the record, I wear ReSound/Jabras and they have bugs as well. Maybe that’s for another thread.

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