Yeah. I think it can only be by word of mouth, but whose mouth? It’s difficult to pay a lot of credence to a bunch of 5 star reviews on Google. I am not being unkind, but if 90% of those people have mild and uncomplex losses, and are happy with improvement, they leave a good review. Serious, asymmetric losses, cookie bite losses are more challenging. Optimising and taking somebodies hearing further is more challenging.
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Well glucas! That was a dissertation with MANY points and experiences I can relate to. I so appreciate your taking the time to write the thesis, then re-write it, and include the very helpful screen capture for the Roger settings. FABULOUS!
I can probably relate to at least one experience in each section, lol! Our experiences are indeed quite similar, too. I had the Oticon Alta Pro followed by the OPN, and only jumped camp when Oticon delayed the ConnectClip - no way to stream with those new OPNs at the time! Since then, I’ve been a happy Phonak camper (Audeo B-Direct, Marvel, Lumity Life). I could possibly have juiced more out of these Lumity Life aids IF I had the myPhonak app. But I refuse to get it cuz it only works with ONE pair of Lumity Life aids. Since I swap my TWO (redundant) pairs of Life aids out every other day, I’d be forever “forgetting”, de-installing, re-installing, naming and yada yada every other day. I don’t have time for that. At least my Samsung phone lets me connect both sets of aids in BT; myRoger lets me use 2 mics with different names.
It’s the SHORT rechargeable battery life AND difficulty understanding speech in loud places that inspired me to try out the Oticons. It’s just my bad luck that I got a FREE trial, so with no skin in the game, the audi is not inspired to spend any quality time with me.
Your comments about boosting the mids is VERY interesting! My whole life I’ve wanted more bass; and I know that I need the higher freqs for speech comprehension, but I’ve actually tinkered with the Companion app to boost mids in the General and Speech in Noise programs. I’ll see how that goes! I wore these Oticons to the gym today, and even over the clatter and clunking of comic book characters pumping iron, I could pick up fragments of conversation from a couple standing about 12’ away, who weren’t even facing me. What I like about the Oticons (even with poor setup) is that they have REMOVED a lot of non-essential sound for me.
Streaming music with them sounds phenomenal and better than the Phonaks - it’s crisp, clear and lacks no frequencies. Phonak is a bit muddied by comparison, but I can’t compare live music until/unless I get a dedicated music program, cuz live music or hifi sounds excellent with the Phonak Lumity Life.
Music and loud places are just 2 of the LONG list of things - as you say - we want optimized for sound. I do better sitting anywhere in the car now than with my Marvels, and at home - with high ceilings and reverb! - I’m somehow able to lean in to what I’m hearing and make MUCH better sense of what’s being said with the Phonaks. I honestly think they helped boost my word recognition score the other day by about 15% over 2 years ago.
I totally get what you’re saying about BTEs. YES, I’ve tried them on 2 occasions years apart, but was so allergic to the custom mold I had to give up. My right ear started to sting just from wearing the Oticon clear (and sticky!) double domes. I finally decided to swap those yesterday for the smoke gray ones I use on my Phonaks. My ears are doing better, but right ear still stings a bit. The Oticon speakers are CHUNKIER than the Phonak’s, so it HURT jamming that into my right ear each morning. I noticed that after swapping the domes, the sound is a smidge less CRISP, but that clarity didn’t seem to help me comprehend what was being said in many situations. More than the Phonaks.
In sum, here are my comparison thoughts on Oticon vs Phonak
Oticon PROS
- BATTERY LIFE - IS KING! I can go way longer with these than the Phonaks. Probably pushing 24 hrs!
- PHONE APP - Companion app actually helps, and gives me power to adjust things on the fly along with many other actions I can take using it.
- LOOKS - Cosmetically, the ear wire is superior and fits fabulous - no baggy loop sticking out.
- MUSIC - streaming to my phone sounded VERY good - better than Phonak
Oticon CONS
- TRIAL - is a bust unless/until I can get quality time to modify settings and set up programs. Audi seems uninterested in making this work for me, even saying the goal of Remote settings is for patients to NEVER come in to the clinic again. This impacts the most basic issues: sound quality, speech comprehension.
- BT STABILITY - it simply isn’t here for whatever reason! It’s a total cludge to pair + connect to my laptop, and every day I go through a yada yada to get it connected to my phone - I have to do that upon rising or the first call will come in NOT streaming. OBTW, hubs just called and not only did aids NOT stream, neither of us had any audio. He kept calling 3 times, till I finally replaced these with my Phonaks and … call came thru streaming beautifully. Go figure.
- FIT - the chunky speaker and gummy tip on it are PAINFUL to put in; ears are stinging after a few days
- NO STEREOPHONICS WITH PHONES - no program to enable stereophonic sound in both ears even when not using BT on phones.
EDIT: 5. CHARGING BASE - it has NO cover (so dust can get in there) and it’s not a portable charger that can last 2-3 full charges in between being plugged into a wall.
Phonak PROS
- SOUND - Rich, full sound with programs set up for noisy places, music and stereophonic use of phone.
- BT - ROCK SOLID stability! Calls sound FABULOUS and I can easily and reliably pair + connect to my Android phone or MacBook Pro laptop.
- ACCESSORIES - Roger mics are totally transportable, I just have to tinker with the settings.
- SUPPORT - dedicated audi who goes the extra mile for me and has made the Phonak Lumity Life aids the best ones for me.
EDIT: CHARGING BASE - I like that it’s sleek and has a full cover so no annoying night-lights as it sits on the nightstand. Also, it can be unplugged and used to charge aids up to 3 times.
Phonak CONS:
- SPEECH IN NOISE - Ironically, normal speech in person or on a phone is excellent! But use the aids with or without the Roger mic, and speech in noisy places is still MY HOLY GRAIL.
- BATTERY LIFE - pathetic at just 17 hrs max per day use. I don’t feel comfortable traveling with these on long int’l trips at all.
- EXPENSE - I forked out a LOT of dough for the 2 redundant pairs of aids and the 2 redundant Roger mics. If I want the new 312-battery version, MORE DOUGH has to go!
Sorry for my own long reply … but you raised so many good points, and I owe it to the Forum here to sum this comparison experiment up. I will likely return the Oticons, wait for the Costco release and try my luck at a future date.
EVER hopeful for sound perfection!
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Mids & Highs on Phonaks.
I know. The dreaded APP.
My Phonak App (paired to your hearing aids.)
Start up. (Mine is Automatic Program)
Adjust Program
Adjust Calm situation
(Automatic)
EQUALIZER PRESETS (three arrow)
Adjust the pitch of the sound
Use the pre-adjusted settings for
quick access
Default Comfort Clarity
now the fun starts! touch phone - three little arrows
Equalizer adjusts the pitch of the sound!
Bass Middle Treble slide UP to increase Middle Treble to get what you want!
OR
Touch CLARITY Check Equalizer: Middle is inceased ONE
Treble is increased TWO
Back to Adjust Calm Situation
Save as New This saves the program Name it and you have it!
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Thanks for your response. Great to have the shared experience. It looks like you need to wait until Oticon solves the bluetooth issues, or Phonak improves the speech in noise performance, or you can improve it with adjustments.
Despite all the issues, a solution might not be too far off. Imagine if Oticon and Phonak were to merge!
I am still undergoing my trial of the Naida Lumity SP and will report if I think there are any really substantial improvements in noise. But I want to keep an eye on the Oticon Intents as I know that’s killer tech, so will watch out for your on-going trial and the other user reviews of it. Good luck.
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Ok, this will show my ignorance, but that is already pretty well known here 
When you talk about the MIDs being too high or low in the original post, are you referencing the frequencies or the mid dB level? That was an extremely interesting post!
You are by NO means ignorant, as I’ve saved a few of your posts to refer back to. 
I am referring to the middle frequencies in between bass and higher notes on the spectrum.
It was maddening cuz I’d boost the mids on the Oticons and be able to hear SOME speech better, but then I’d still struggle with figuring out what other folks were saying. Room acoustics matter a lot here, too. And goes without saying CROWDED noisy places are the worst.
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If front beam forming is employed, the room acoustic indeed really matters. Front beam forming to focus on front speech, as a technique employed by many hearing aids, is only effective if the room acoustic does not produce a lot of reverberation, like a room that is very large, and particularly with very tall ceiling as to bounce sounds around too much. The other conditions for front beam forming to work well is that the speaker you’re trying to listen to is not further than about 6 feet from you, and the noise has to be from your sides and your back and not also from the front. Of course you will hear speech in front well, but if the other folks who are talking but are not in front of you, you will not hear them well.
Did you find whether the Oticon Intent 1 any better in this respect? The idea is that the DNN should rely less on directional frontal beam forming to improve speech. It uses a different way to reduce signal to noise ratio contrast on the surrounding speeches.
However, one challenge that you have is that your hearing loss is in the severe to profound range, and is quite flat across most frequencies. This make the wide dynamic range compression very, very tight, with little room to maneuver. Below is an example that explains what wide dynamic range compression looks like. But imagine that your impaired range of hearing (the vertical red plane on the right side) is extremely narrow, even much narrower than what the example here is shown. Yours is actually in between about 80 or 90 dB to 120 dB, or only 30 to 40 dB of range. In contrast, the normal hearing range as seen in the left red square has a full dynamic range of 120 dB.
So you have only about a quarter of the dynamic range of what a normal hearing person has. This does not leave much room to discern acoustical differences between the various sounds. In your case, all the sounds get crammed into a quarter of the space (compared to a normal person), so they compete fiercely with each other for your attention. It makes it at least 4 times harder (if we’re being linear here, although it may not be linear and might be even worse) for your brain to be able to discern the differences between these sound characteristics and be able to tell them apart, because much of the nuances of the differences are lost by being squished in together way too much.
An analogy is that instead of being presented with a big canvas of a picture, now the canvas has shrunk to a quarter of its size. If there is only a few things on the canvas, you can still probably be able to make out those things OK if they’re shrunk to a quarter of a size. But if the canvas is a very busy picture with hundreds of items on there (analogy of a noisy places with hundreds of different competing sounds), if shrunk to a quarter size, it’s going to be much harder to focus and discern enough to be able to identify all the hundreds of those items individually, because it becomes more like a bowl of spaghetti on a much smaller canvas.
So in some respect, the front beam forming to focus on speech in front only might still be the best way to help with your type of hearing loss, because at least there’s only 1 speech in front painted on the canvas for you to see, while the other speeches are faded out. The Oticon open paradigm might just introduce just way too many pictures on that tiny canvas that no matter how clear they can make those tiny pictures out to be, it might still just be way too much details on a tiny little canvas for you to discern between them.
Hope this helps explain the challenges that your hearing loss faces, and maybe why something as good as the Oticon Intent may still not be able to surpass the approach that the Phonak hearing aids can deliver for you.
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I was passenger in my Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. speech in noise.
I didn’t know the driver was talking to me. Looked at the app. Speech thing was pencil lead thin.
Widened it. Increased volume. Hit CLARITY on the App. Adjusted dynamic to change compression. Adjusted background noise suppression. It helped.
But I was in deep you know what. It’s a Jeep thing
Clarity increases mid one notch and highs two notches.
Many truths here! I wish my audiologist had explained it as well as you. Instead, they perform the rote hearing tests, recommend a brand of aid, and then don’t want to prepare me for the almost inevitable disappointment when the aids don’t do what I’m wanting them to do!
I totally get the analogy of a compressed painting vs my compressed band of hearing! Imagine a Georges Seurat pointillist painting compressed to a single band! It would look so abstract that it would be near impossible to recognize “A Sunday on Le Grand Jatte”.
That said, I will give you an example of how I’ve adapted to the Phonak Lumity Life aids (after 1.5 yrs of “training”): My husband and a guy working on our home theater system are talking about 15’ from me - in the house with HIGH ceilings. With the Lumity Life aids in, I can hear every word said and contribute throughout the conversation from that distance. Next day, the 3 of us are standing 3-5’ apart. I have the (completely lame) fitted Oticon Intent 1 aids in and catch maybe 60-70%. It is incredibly frustrating! I KNOW these Oticons can do better, but I’m powerless to make that happen cuz I don’t have an audi with passion who wants to make a “miracle” happen.
That kind of speech incomprehension was annoying. But during my 3-day trial, I’ve also had never-ending issues with BT connectivity throughout the day. Today, I couldn’t even answer a call! Neither me nor my husband on the other end had ANY audio at all. After 3 call attempts back and forth with the Oticons in, I swapped into my Phonaks and immediately, the call went thru like normal. Instantly. Maybe it’s the version of BT on my Android phone?
There is a huge DOWNSIDE to BT unreliability, cuz that is one of my strongest points with streaming my Phonaks to the Android phone. I can hear ANYONE with ANY kind of accent, even if they mumble or we have a terrible connection. Today - another case in point. I called Phonak Customer Support to ask about the myPhonak app. The person who answered the phone was almost completely unintelligible her accent was SO BAD. Yeah, I’m honest! I actually laughed out loud at the absurdity of someone who can’t speak English at a HEARING AID company talking to a cinderblock-eared person who is me. But then, I powered thru and gadang got the job done cuz I hear fabulously on the phone with the Phonaks.
If I can’t get that kind of confidence from another make of aid, I’d best hang on to what I have and wait for the day when someone knowledgeable and PATIENT can fit me with Oticon. I don’t doubt that the aids can deliver on sound quality, but the issues with streaming spooked me. I am not going to give up my utter confidence in that arena by switching aids for something that works half the time. I’d run scared from the phone - and I’m not used to that. I always offer to make calls for other people cuz I know I can hear exceptionally well on my phone.
I found that the Oticon Intent 1 I trialed cut out a LOT of ambient noise - so it should be better, but the fitting was completely lame, so I ended up getting very clipped and muted speech. The audio quality on my phone was muddied and volume too low. (streamed music sounded FABULOUS, oddly!)
I finally realized that I was trying to jam a square peg into a round hole with the Oticon 1. I don’t blame the aid. I blame the trial. That’s why I’ll return these aids on Monday cuz I don’t need 2 weeks to taunt me when the trial was set up to fail from the get-go.
I feel very fortunate that with my snake-belly audiogram I can do so well in nearly every situation. But put me in a giant gathering or a loud, rowdy restaurant and I’ll just grit my teeth and count the minutes.
I always appreciate your technical analysis and analogies! The facts are welcome.
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The longer I live the more I chalk it up to roll of the dice, a bit of due dilligence, then go meet the person and let your GUT guide you.
As for referals? LOL!! I know of NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON who wears aids and can recommend an audi. My mom wears them but lives 3,000 miles away. Um. Let’s see. That’s it! Yep. No one else I know wears aids. So it’s a lonely slog. We may as well look on Planet Mars. I’m pushing 70 and NO one in my circle of family or friends wears aids. They don’t even NEED to wear them. And I’d know, cuz I’m a 35-year pro in the game here.
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I go into work. We have experts. I ask them. We have 150,000 kids in 260 schools. Talked to the Audi yesterday. She has one hearing aid. Seldom uses it. I said I used to do that. Now I wear mine from 7:00 am to 11:30 pm.
The hearing instrument specialist is really helpful. Recommends Phonak strongly.
@Michael_Phonak
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Hi, You can have your audiologist set an android phone to receive calls in both HAs.
My Music is the best music programme I’ve heard. You can read the Oticon white paper on it at WDH01.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon/main/72873uk_tech_paper_music_programme
Regards,Roy
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Thanks for that tip Roy254! Cuz it was ultimately the Android BT issues that made me stop the trial after a few days. I appreciate that link to the white paper but when I clicked on it, I got an error message “That document was not found”.
I’ve only skimmed the thread
but it seems like the Oticon’s are manual program switching only. That is firmly in the Cons column for me.
Back when I trialed the Oticon Opn, I would say that the app was superior to Phonak’s app, and the aids were better in some situations…such as wind…
But the Phonak Autosense was a game changer in my experience… I NEVER have to touch the aids after I put them on. Probably in large part due to proper set-up for the various programs that it automatically switches between.
Anyway, I was hoping to see that Oticon had something like Autosense but sadly it doesn’t seem to be based on what I’ve read here.
Do the oticon aids at least work with Android now? They didn’t back when I trialed the Opn’s…
I think you’re totally missing the point of why Oticon aids don’t even need something like Phonak’s AutoSense in the first place. That’s because you just simply don’t understand the Oticon approach to program change like many people don’t → and the approach is that there is really no need to change programs with Oticon aids most of the times in the first place.
Starting with the OPN model already, the Oticon aids is designed so that the user only needs to be in the General program, and if the environment changes, the Oticon aids will just adjust the noise reduction level to match with the change in the environment, all in the same General program.
Phonak’s AutoSense feature, prior to the Lumity model, detects a change in the environment and automatically changes from its default program to another program (like a Speech in Noise program, for example), so that the noise reduction parameters as set in that Speech in Noise program can take effect.
So you see the difference now? Oticon aids stays in General and changes noise reduction parameters to match the environment (not changing programs). Phonak aids instead changes programs to match the environment. Two different approaches to solve the same issue → need more noise reduction when the environment gets more difficult.
While you indicated that you’re happy with AutoSense, I’ve heard from many others on threads in this forum who don’t like to see AutoSense hunting back and forth between programs too often too much.
What does Phonak do now with their latest Lumity model??? They now design the Lumity to sense the environment and adjust noise reduction parameters in the General program without switching over to another program (like Speech in Noise). Oh, wait a minute, Oticon has already done this right from the get go with their OPN model, all the way through the Intent now. And Phonak is just beginning to do that same thing with their latest Lumity???
To provide a little bit of history for context → originally with the OPN, Oticon did not provide any other built-in program. That was because the intent (not the new model name, just the word intent) was that just the 1 General program was enough to deal with all environments, because noise reduction values can be automatically adjusted in the General program as the environment changes. Nevertheless, Oticon still made available up to 4 programs total, just in case the users want some kind of customization for the other 3 programs. However, users (like you) still didn’t understand this new nuance, which Oticon HCPs didn’t do a good job explaining to their patients, so Oticon got criticized heavily for not offering any built-in programs at all. In fact, the lack of understanding about this got so bad that people began to have a bad perception of Oticon aids being inferior to other brands. So a year later, Oticon finally succumbed to the pressure and started making built-in programs available to the public.
Many Oticon users will tell you that they use the General program 95% of the time, even in noisy places. Oticon users who manually switch between the General program and other built-in programs made available by Oticon (like Speech in Noise) simply do it because they don’t understand the new use model of the Oticon General program, and thought that they had to do it the conventional way.
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I believe the primary difference between Phonak and Oticon is that Phonak chooses to have several programs within AutoSense 5.0 that can be used to program/save the various program settings. I find this method to be more intuitive and understandable.
Oticon chooses to have one “General” program but it too also has various environments that are used to save the program settings. They just choose to try and present it in a method that is more “understandable” to general public and HIS. For instance, they use “Personalization Questions” or ACT to set some of the program settings. They also have fewer environments “Easy” and “Difficult” that are used to store the settings. With Intent they added “accelerometers” to further adjust program settings within these environments along with speech and noise levels. Note that Phonak had already been doing this for quite some time.
The issue I have with Oticon is there is no way to determine what “Environment” the system thinks you’re in as opposed to Phonak where you can use the App. Oticon has added this ability in the Genie Reporting Tool but it is primarily designed for the Audiologist to determine how much time the user spends in each environment and to look at conversation activity in each environment. It also appears that Oticon defines three environments for this reporting “Simple”, “Moderate”, and “Complex”.
Personally, I wish that Oticon would include a method of determining the “active” environment on their app if for nothing else I could determine that the sensors are working and possibly gain a better understanding of when the program settings are being revised.
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I would like to make some clarification to some of the things said above so that people don’t get the wrong idea that the Oticon environment setup is too simple.
It may seem like they only have 2 environments, but that’s not true. The Easy and Difficult are just the 2 extreme groupings they use to let the user decide on how the user wants to classify actually up to 5 environments → Very Simple, Simple, Moderate, Complex and Very Complex. See the screenshot below for reference. It lets the user tell Genie 2 which of the 5 they think are on the Easy side and which are on the Difficult side.
But even the 5 environment classifications are just symbolic. It doesn’t imply that there are only 2 set of parameters for Easy and Difficult, nor does it imply that there are only 5 sets of parameters for the 5 classifications. If you look at the Neural Noise Suppression values for the 2 groupings, that is just the maximum noise attenuation that Genie 2 lets the user choose. It does not mean that they are the only 2 fixed values that are going to be applied.
The Oticon aid will actually evaluate the current environment and applies the appropriate value to deal with the noise estimate for that environment, and this is not just 5 fixed values for the 5 environment classifications. It can be at a very fine granularity and it is continuously adjusted. The scanning and analysis of the environment is done 500 times by the Oticon aid over 24 different frequency channels, and the noise estimate is calculated and the noise reduction is applied accordingly. I remember reading, however, that they don’t want to change the noise reduction value more often than 2 seconds. So unless there has been a significant enough change in the environment for more than 2 seconds, the noise reduction level is kept intact.
As explained above, although the environment grouping as seen in Genie 2 may appear to be binary (Easy or Difficult), or the environment classification as seen in Genie 2 may appear to be quinary (a system of 5 digits), in reality, it is at a much finer granularity than that. In the Oticon whitepaper even going way back for the OPN (see the screenshot of the wordings below at the bottom), Oticon has very clearly stated the transitions between simple and complex environments are not points on a line, but rather continuous and smooth. The writeup below in the OPN whitepaper explains the difference between how the configurations of the system can be infinitely continuous and smooth, versus the “mode switch” operation of other brands’ aids where the potential audible artifacts of mode switches can be heard.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Oticon engineers in the development stage of the aids can get access to detailed data on exactly where in the environmental scale their aid’s noise estimator fall into so they can monitor how accurate their noise estimator is. And like you, I would love to have access to that real time information as well, if nothing then just to satisfy my own curiosity. But I also fully understand why it makes no sense and can cause a lot of confusion and even misunderstandings and even wrong conclusions if Oticon decides to put such complicated and unnecessary information into the hands of the users.
Sometimes, less is more. What matters to the end user is to prove that the hearing aids work and work well. It just muddles the water too much and can even be detrimental to arm the users with an excess amount of unnecessary information, like what kind of environment the hearing aid thinks it is in. What if the users don’t agree with the Oticon determination of what kind of environment it is, simply because the users don’t have enough insight into the logics and calculations that go into this determination that might explain and justify it? There are just more landmines that can do more harm than good to share this kind of detailed information unnecessarily.
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My Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s switch programs using auto 4. I don’t know what program they are in unless I use the APP.
If I use the APP myself it tells me what program Im in if I adjust the program. Once in, it’s locked in that program.
I’ve finally learned that two reports help me understand setup better. My hearing aid practitioner sometimes provides Target Owner Report and Target Pro Report. No other audi did that, and I wish they had.