I decided to go with the Oticon more over the Phonak paradise.
I found the Oticons were better in restaurant settings and generally the sound seems more natural to me.
Wind noise is drastically cut, almost to the point that I hardly notice it all now. My first set of Phonaks were awful, the Paradise’s were much better but the Oticon’s are on another level entirely.
I get no feedback at all with the Oticons, my son could hear the Paradises whistling even though the tone was out of my range.
The only negative I have is Bluetooth is nowhere near as good. I have Android and there is no hands free available, all I have is streaming and hearing phone calls through the aids. As @cvkemp says, the app is pathetic. It not only doesn’t do much but also, of I go out of range of my phone, one ear drops. If I want to reconnect I have to stop the app, disconnect from Bluetooth, reconnect and then start the app again. Without the app I just have to tap the phone’s Bluetooth connection a couple of times.
Mind you, I cannot understand why it can’t pick up both aids automatically but there you are. Oticon support is rubbish as all you get is a set script reissued to you if you complain.
They are behind the curve here and should be realising that the public is much more tech aware that days and need more operability.
The problem is that they have backed the wrong horse with the software and now they are playing catch-up.
What really irritates me is when I lose connection by going to a different part of the house and not taking the phone with me, it only ever reconnects to one ear.
Surely it can’t be too difficult to connect to both. Phonak can do it
I have the More1 and IPhone13 and as long as I am with our 1900 sqft house I am not having connectivity issues between aids and iPhone, but if I have the ON app and connect to my TV adapter then I loss connectivity to the app and usually the iPhone, but since deleting the app I am not having the same connectivity issues.
Phonak is the only company in the HA industry who decided to create a special chip (SWORD is the name) to enable standard legacy Bluetooth support in their recent models (the Audeo B, Marvel and now Paradise). None of the other major HA mfgs decided to take this approach, but instead decided to stick with an intermediary streamer device for standard legacy Bluetooth support until some kind of industry standard (like ASHA) for Android comes out to be rid of the intermediary streamer.
But the bottom line is that it was a choice they made. I’m sure if they wanted to do what Phonak did, they could have done it as well. But what they perhaps strategically miscalculated is the slow rate of roll-out and adoption and maturation of ASHA for Android phones.
I assume that you know that if you really wants hand-free calls on the More with your Android phones, you can do it with the ConnectClip, except that now you gotta pay for it and wear it around your neck. So Phonak made a bet that full and robust ASHA support will be slow enough that their SWORD chip will allow them to gobble up the market share of Android folks who don’t want to wait, and they’re winning that bet with folks who place more importance on universal BT support with hands-free calls than the performance differences between the aids’ brands/models.
I’m not defending Oticon, just want to point out to you that Phonak’s universal BT support is not the norm and all other mfgs made the same choice as Oticon. So I guess you can say that the whole HA industry dropped the ball on that one except Phonak.
The other point I wanted to make (and made) was that it was not about special technical wizardry that Phonak could do it but nobody else could. It was simply a strategic business decision, not a technical issue that nobody could overcome except Phonak.
It’s not really any different than your decision to go with an Android phone and my decision to go with an iPhone. So for me, I don’t have to buy something to hang around my neck to be able to do hands-free calls with my Oticon HAs.
I guess we can also say then that Android has really dropped the ball on supporting HAs way back then when Apple already supported MFI. And now that Android barely started to catch up with ASHA, Apple is already once again ahead of Android with hands-free calls for HAs. Yet you made your choice to stick with Android phones, and I’m sure for your own good reasons, and I chose iPhones way back because I wear HAs, back at a time when Phonak didn’t have the SWORD chip like nobody else did.
It’s just priorities and decisions and everyone chooses differently.
I disagree the problem is that Google hasn’t kept up with the progress that Apple started about 10 years ago. As an IT Professional I used mostly android or windows, a long with som Linux, I was always pulling out my hair with all the driver issues and issues with software in general causing the OS to crash. I retired in 2014 because of my hearing loss and not being able to troubleshoot fully over the phone due to my hearing loss. My VA audiologist said later that year I was getting new aids and they worked best with the iPhone. Seeing I was retired and didn’t have to be connected to a work system I saids good by to the android phone I had, and got my first iPhone and haven’t been disappointed m doing so. I have since done away with all things windows, Linux. I guess it just depends on you. But my aids come first then I made the decision on how to connect them.
Thank you for saving me the trouble, Allan. I bought the More 1s. Even today, I was toying with the idea of trying the Audeo Life (Waterproof version of the P90). I had read other people complaining about the same things you did about the sound quality. Being a musician, sound is greatly important to me as is hearing everything I can. That said, my hearing is good up to 2k where, due to age, I start to nosedive down to terrible hearing at 8k, so I have open domes.
Anyway, I thank you for underscoring the reason why I chose more 1s. I’m going to hold my cards and stick with what I have. Thank you.
Interesting. I have both (well the KS version of the Paradise) and I also prefer the More 1. This said, I find noise cancellation and wind noise control better on the Paradise. I use the Paradise for biking some 12 hrs a week, and the More 1 for everything else.
Yes, there is massive variability in acceptance and preference of hearing aids. I think what you have to be careful of is assuming there is one outright winner. For a start people have different losses, even if you compare pure audiotone figures from two people’s audiograms, which may look similar, in actual fact one may require a lot more help in background noise than the other.
Then, you have to factor in the quality of the fit and the professionalism of the fitter. There are a lot of competent audiologists out there, don’t get me wrong, but what is difficult to quantify, even with the use of REM is how much more room for improvement there is after a first fit, and even, if an audiologist can achieve this improvement.
I wear Phonak and Oticon aids. I have read your posts and I believe that it is fair to say that one can trial both and believe one is superior. However, when you said that your Phonak Paradise had massive feedback then alarm bells starting ringing. Phonak has amongst the best feedback cancellation in the industry. I can put my hands on the side of my ears with my KS10s (Phonak costco white label) and experience no feedback whatsoever. I have worn hearing aids for 43 years and Phonak for over 30 years within that - and the feedback management in the last 5 years has evolved to the stage where it is not an issue. The Oticon Dynamo aids that I wear (from the NHS) do have feedback. However, that’s down to the programming. I could go back and get them reprogrammed and reduce the gain somewhat but it’s minimal, so it doesn’t bother me.
I can see you have a steep loss in the high frequencies, but as I say, alarm bells are ringing. I would not want to call into question the competence of your audiologist in general, but I would have to question that given my and a lot of other anecdotal experience with Phonak hearing aids.
Just have to chime in about your connectivity issues with Android. I am a Windows/Google person, but am on my second iPhone because it connects seamlessly with hearing aids!!! Thank goodness Apple finally allowed me to choose Google Apps as the default on my iPhone which makes my life much easier. I think you have a choice, the phone whose apps you prefer, or the phone that connects well to your hearing aids - - which is more important??
I think Google/Android has really “dropped the ball” by not adopting a low energy standard for hearing aids long ago!!!
I didn’t say that Phonak had massive feedback. My son picked up the noise when we were in the dining room and I was seated close to a hard wall. The sound was minimal in the extreme.
With regards to audiologists, my first pair was fitted by Specsavers and I really did get the impression that they didn’t know what they were doing.
I have now gone private, at a lot of extra cost unfortunately, but I am getting much better service.
They are very accommodating, to the extent of taking the Phonaks back even though I was way outside of the return gaurantee period.
I think one of the reasons we end up with so much discussion about aids is because the audiologist relies almost entirely on feedback from ourselves when they are fine tuning. Nothing is cut and dried.
I purchased a $1400 pair from Costco (the K10s), which are made by Sonova, the parent company of Phonak. Or maybe Phonak made them directly. I don’t know. You’re right about the wind noise, though. I live in fairly windy location. When I’m on the back porch and it’s windy, I can’t use my aids to talk on the phone because the wind noise is so bad neither I nor the person I’m talking to can hear well. I tried another brand before the ones I bought from Costco and they handled the wind noise MUCH better, though they were appreciably more expensive. I just assumed the Costco ones would handle the wind as well. They don’t.
The Bluetooth in them seems to be as little weak as well. I sit only about 9 or 10 feet from my Sony TV. If I strike the wrong position, the sounds starts going in and out. I’m not sure that it’s the fault of he aids, but I’m suspicious that it is.
No more, I think, than when Whirlpool (for example) has virtually identical washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, etc., with slightly different model numbers that are sold in “specialist appliance stores” and the various “big box stores” so that one can’t take one store up on its “price matching guarantee” against another store.
