Yesterday my audi told me that the Oticon rep had requested a personal meeting with him next week. The audi said that that might indicate that Oticon was about to release new HAs. I checked, and the current Oticon Intents were released in February of 2024. This would seem to me to be a very short time interval between new product releases. Has anyone heard anything about new Oticons?
This is of interest to me because I am in the middle of a trial of Phonak Infinio Spheres. I trialed the Intents, and they were a slight improvement on my current Mores, but not enough to justify the out-of-pocket expense of buying them.
My audi has been unable to get trial Spheres from Phonak, so I bought them outright in December in order to take advantage of an insurance benefit in calendar year 2024, with the proviso that I could return them for a full refund within 45 days. Now I have been switched to a new insurance plan, and I was pleased to be told that I could get another insurance benefit in 2025.
The Spheres are a major improvement in speech-in-speech-noise, as I expected them to be, but they sound unnatural to me. When I put on my Oticon Mores I feel like the world sounds normal again. The best of both worlds would be the natural sound of the Oticons with the background noise reduction of the Spheres.
I am hoping that new Oticons would give me that. I’m wondering if Oticon is speeding up their product release cycle in order to keep up with Phonak’s speech-in-noise breakthrough.