Thought I would post another ongoing update on my Infinio Sphere’s. Thank you everyone for all your kind comments and feedback. As I have mentioned many times, I don’t work for Phonak and the only reason I post all these detailed comments on this forum is to try and help other people by sharing my experiences, etc.
I’ve read through all of the other threads people have posted on this forum regarding the new Phonak Infinio Sphere’s. Some of the comments are kinda odd IMHO. There seems to be two camps of people. One group (like me), is finding that the new Sphere AI chip is giving them breakthrough hearing in very noisy settings. The other group doesn’t seem to notice any kind of difference. I can’t understand this at all. I’m almost wondering if a portion of the second group has their Sphere’s setup incorrectly, or has the wrong power of receiver/domes installed or maybe the Sphere AI only works well with people with more closed fittings. The other thing it could be is that people with certain types of losses or poor word recognition scores don’t benefit as much. I guess we will know more over time.
I just spent six days in Florida with the Sphere’s. Once again, they were awesome at the airport and on the airplane. They performed extremely well in a whole bunch of very noisy restaurants. I took them swimming in the pool (obviously I didn’t dunk my head) and I had no issues chatting with other people in the pool. Battery life is fantastic. I almost never end the day below 50% so the whole battery anxiety issue that I had with Lumity has completely gone away. The only issues that seem to come regularly are:
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For the first time in my life, I can hear better than other people with normal hearing in a very noisy restaurant. Sounds like a good problem to have but the net effect is that after the Sphere AI chip removes 10db of noise, the restaurant sounds less noisy than it really is (for me only). I end up talking too quietly (because deaf people tend to worry about talking too loud) and other people can’t understand me. Silly issue but just throwing it out there.
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The one scenario that seems to mix up the Sphere’s is sitting in a very noisy restaurant where there is a speaker mounted on the ceiling directly above you blasting music. Whenever there is noise and music, the AutoSense tends to get confused and switches back and forth between the Sphere program and the Music program. Solution is to force the hearing aids into either the manual Sphere or Music program depending on whether you want to enjoy the music or talk to someone at the table. It’s not really a big issue but it’s important to have these two programs setup as manual programs. Bear in mind that music will sound like crap in the Spheric program and speech will sound like crap in the Music program. I guess life is full of choices.
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My wife and I like to exercise at night by walking along the beach on the Hollywood Broadwalk. It’s a pedestrian only walkway in the Fort Lauderdale area that has the beach on one side and restaurants on the other. It was very windy last week and AutoSense was very quick to activate the wind reduction program to counteract the wind coming off the ocean. Wind reduction aggressively gets rid of the noise from the wind blowing across your hearing aids but it really cuts down on speech comprehension. No issue if you are walking alone but it really messes with conversation when you are walking along the beach with someone. In retrospect, I should have opened the app and played around with the program settings when this happened but I will ask my audiologist for his advice on this issue during my appointment on Monday.
I’m going to end my trial and buy these hearing aids next week. The Spheric AI program and improved battery life compared to Lumity are game changing (IMHO). As others have mentioned, the Sphere’s are still a tiny bit buggy. I’ve noticed they do restart on their own from time to time, you do get the occasional Bluetooth drop off (which I think is caused by surrounding radio interference from other devices) and the Phonak app still has the occasional weird behaviour. That being said, these hearing aids work for me and most importantly, I no longer have to stress when heading to a noisy restaurant or other venue.
And…apologies to the person who keeps asking me about using the Sphere’s in a movie theatre. Still hasn’t happened. Will get to it soon.
That’s my update.
Jordan
). The first image in the following post shows that within Target fitting software, there is wide latitude in the Sphere I90s for how much directionality they will employ and how aggressive Sphere noise reduction will be. Both the bubble (I) information tooltip and a Phonak Audiology Online course on the Infinio line (focusing on the Spheres) say that the fitter need not worry too much about the exact directionality setting or the strength of Spheric noise reduction, that the user can vary those to some degree in the MyPhonak app. If you click on that first image to enlarge it to full-screen and zoom in on the icon at the right end of the top line, you can see it favors hearing what’s straight in front of the user. That preference is maintained to some degree whether you’re in more all-around listening mode with the slider placed all the way to the left and just much more accentuated when you’re in Ultra-Zoom mode with the slider all the way to the right. Most humans look in the direction of what they want to hear best - as well as the natural social instinct to look to show the talker you’re paying attention. The natural pinna effect of those with normal hearing amplifies sounds in front of the listener in mid to high frequencies 4 to 10 dB more than sounds behind the listener. Just as I experienced in the Apple Store on 11/23, hearing conversations to your side or behind you can be distracting in some situations, and in others, it can be beneficial. So why not have the ability to have some control over that in the MyPhonak app? When several people talk simultaneously close by, it’s hard for even a normal-hearing person to sort things out. It’s great to have help from one’s HAs if one wants.
