#15

@cvkemp , @SamuelH: I suddenly fell into the latter group this morning. Don’t know why.

#16

I remember when I first got my OPN, I tried the Directionality Settings and set it to Full Directional and expect it to perform like the traditional beam forming approach, but didn’t find it to aggressively block out noise behind and on the sides like it should. This Full Directional setting should be basically what the (now called) Speech Booster works, blocking sounds from the sides and behind to let you focus in front. This Full Directional setting has been available from the OPN to the OPN S to the More and the Real just the same. In the OPN and OPN S, it’s part of what Oticon calls the OpenSound Navigator. In the More and Real, it became the Spatial Balancer that’s part of the MoreSound/RealSound Intelligence (see first screenshot below).

It made me curious and I did some experiment. Usually in a Full Directional traditional beam forming setting, there’s a phenomenon where a floor noise can be heard when it’s quiet enough for you to notice. So I looked for that floor noise in the Full Directional mode in a quiet place, and sure enough I did hear it. I sat in front of a fan (to act as a noise source) on a rotating office chair and as I rotate the chair, the fan noise is attenuated when it’s behind me or on the side, and sounds normal when it’s in front of me. However, it’s not like it’s aggressively attenuated; I can still hear it, albeit not as loud as when it was in front of me. It may be that Oticon doesn’t like to do aggressive beam forming attenuation to keep things consistent with its promoted open paradigm.

But nevertheless, despite this experiment proving to me that the Full Directional mode works as intended, it still does not seem to be aggressive enough when put in real life use. When I’m in a noisy cafeteria, toggling between Open Auto and Full Directional programs didn’t seem to matter much to me.

I will offer a theory below as to why it’s effective in some cases but not in other cases. My theory is based on the fact that Oticon uses a Voice Activity Detector to detect multiple speech cues and make an exception in its MVDR beam forming strategy and void null directions attenuation where the Voice Activity Detector senses speech in the back or the sides. This may be the culprit as to why Full Directionality mode doesn’t always work aggressively (see more text in the third screenshot below that talks about it from an Oticon whitepaper). If you’re in a restaurant environment where there are speeches detected behind or to your sides, it lessens the effectiveness/aggressiveness of the Full Directionality beam forming to allow you to hear those not-in-front speeches, hence the integrity of the beam forming is compromised.

In the second screenshot below, in Figure 3, you can see that Oticon employs the 2 mics on each aid and the front mic is set to omni-directional and the back mic is set to a back-facing cardioid pattern to create a noise model to be attenuated from the omni-directional pattern. However, in Figure 4, you can see that the presence of the speaker in the rear left opens up that field a bit to allow that speaker to be heard, but effectively lessens the attenuation of the 2 cars’ noise. In theory, you would think that the Full Directional mode should disregard this rear left speaker, and only takes him/her into account if the Directionality Setting is in Neural Automatic. But apparently if Oticon doesn’t fully disregard that rear left speaker and still gives weight to his/her presence despite the Full Directional setting, then that would explain why it wouldn’t work out so well in this case. But if there are no rear or side speakers presence, but only other kinds of noises, then the Full Directionality mode may work better. So this is probably why it works sometimes and not other times for some people, and even differently for the same person in different situations.

The third screenshot below is some explanation of how Oticon makes exception to allow access to multiple speech cues. For sure initially at least in the OPN and OPN S, this feature is strongly weighted in favor of the open paradigm. But perhaps somewhere down the line in a firmware update for the More, Oticon might have decided to give favor to the Full Directionality model and give access to multiple speech cues less weight, hence the observation by some users that a firmware update seems to make the MoreSound Booster (now simply the Speech Booster) to work more effectively.

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#17

Thanks for that explanation @Volusiano! If I’m understanding correctly what its saying, think that makes my different experience at different restaurants make sense. The first restaurant was set up with tables very close together in long rows. So I was seated at a table, with tables directly on either side of me - one side especially close. So I was sitting with someone quite close on either side of me, with my friend in the same situation on the other side of the table. All of these people were having separate conversations, so even though MoreSound Booster was turned on, maybe my HAs were not truly blocking out the other voices because they were perceived as close enough that I could be trying to hear them. However, in the second scenario, the tables were sort of randomly placed around the restaurant at different angles so although there were lots of people around and LOTS of noise, all of the voices other than my friend were far enough away that they blended into the noise, if that makes sense.

#18

I think SpeechBooster is made for Oticon Real only, and this switch cannot turn on MoreSoundBooster or OpenSoundBooster in older Oticon models Opn(S) (and Xceed) and More.

#19

OK, your observation seems to be consistent with my guess/theory then. If the voices are blended in instead of being distinct, I think they’ve then become what folks call babbles now instead of speeches. The babbles are considered part of the “diffused” noise that permeates all around the room and around you, and it is present and blended into the front as well. If you were trying to focus on the speech in front and there’s no speech behind or to your sides, this diffused noise is still also present with your front speech.

In the original OPN and OPN S, Oticon devised a unit called Noise Removal to take care of this diffused noise (see the screenshot below). The Analyze and Balance modules is part of the Spatial Balancer in the More and Real (as seen in the blue image in my previous post), and in the OPN/OPN S, the Noise Removal model after them removes the diffused noise (by subtracting the Noise Estimate from the omni-directional sound scene). In the More/Real, instead of using the Noise Removal module that was used in the OPN/S, they replaced it with the DNN that does the Neural Noise Suppression.

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#20

I think SpeechBooster is just the renamed MoreSoundBooster which is just the renamed OpenSoundBooster. As far as I can tell, it’s not anything new and fancy that didn’t exist before the Real. The only 2 new features in the Real are the Sudden Sound Stabilizer and Wind & Handling Stabilizer. Oticon never advertised the SpeechBooster as a never-seen-before new exclusive feature in the Real.

I would have thought Oticon would have renamed the Booster feature to RealSound Booster to be consistent with its renaming convention from before. But perhaps the name RealSound Booster implies that its previous XSound Boosters were FakeSound Booster, hence the rename to SpeechSound Booster to avoid any possible implication of FakeSound Booster.

#21

@Volusiano: I LOVE reading your posts, MrV … They’re so … Exact!!

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#22

Haha, thanks @SpudGunner . Knowing your humorous spirit, I bet you probably love the mention of the FakeSound Booster the most, heh? :wink:

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#23

For my it makes no difference with the sound booster. Everyone has different type of hearing loss. We are not able to see @samuelH audiogram for more comments.

Thanks @Volusiano for his wonderful and detail explanation. Thanks @SpudGunner (Jim) for his hilarious comments.

#24

I have the Xceed 1 UP and have turned it on or are you talking about something else?

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#25

If you have both Companion and On apps - try switch on SoundBooster in Companion app, and you will see that (More)OpenSound Booster in On app will not turn on simultaneously. So I think that SoundBooster is for Real only. I tried SoundBooster in noisy situations for my Xceeds, and feel not any changes. But OpenSound Booster in On app really work for me.

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#26

When it’s activated (supposedly) cars behind me still sound just as loud. I like the 360 degree experience, (and I like to hear cars coming towards me!) but there are circumstances when it would be good to be able to turn it off.

#27

@SamuelH → Was there speech in front of you when you activated the Booster? I wonder if Oticon decides to put some smart in there to only aggressively engage the Booster beam forming when there is speech going on, instead of just blindly beam form 100% all the times when activated, even without speech going on?

It’s interesting that the experience is so wildly different between people, and between different model versions of the Booster, and between different versions of the Firmware.

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#28

I personally believe that that is what happens, I can forget to disable the MoreSoundBoost and go to the trails or just be home and never notice it is enabled. I can be home and my wife say something from the kitchen which is behind where I am setting and I can hear her, then if I turn around to face her I can hear even better what she is saying.

#29

A good example - in a quiet pub the other night, with two friends sitting close together around a small table. The two other people in the room were sitting about 20 feet behind me, but their talk drowned out anything my friends were saying.Turned on Moresound Booster - no effect at all, the sound from behind was just as loud. This is just the situation where I would really want it to work. Very frustrating, especially as it does seem to work for many other people.

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#30

Does the MoreSoundBooster change to SpeechBooster for the Real HA’s or is that an Oticon ON app change?

#31

This example seems to be consistent with my theory that voices in the back or sides overrides the front beam forming because Oticon wants to preserve speeches all around you. In your case, it was a quiet pub (without a lot of noise), and the voices behind you were loud. So they wouldn’t be considered babbles/noise, but distinctly clear speeches. I guess at least speech preservation is consistent with the newly name SpeechBooster, except that sometimes there are speeches not in the front that you really DON’T want to hear.

I remember reading an educational presentation from Donald Schum (when he was still a VP at Oticon) talking about how he thinks multiple speech cues can help with brain hearing because it allows users to train their brain hearing to differentiate between the different speech cues from different people talking around you. His point was that multiple speech cues help the brain discern the differences between the voices and learn to filter out what they don’t want to hear and focus on what they want to hear → good for brain hearing acuity training. So Oticon might have chosen to do this (to give priority to multiple speech cues from anywhere in the environment) because of this observation from their research that it helps “train” the brain. Unfortunately, by doing so, they would be disregarding the fact that for folks who haven’t been able to train their brain to this level yet, they will find it overwhelming.

What Oticon should really do is to offer users two options: 1) the SpeechBooster as is (with voice priority from anywhere), and 2) the FrontSpeechBooster that gives priority to FRONT speech ONLY regardless.

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#32

@Volusiano: Exactly what I was about to suggest, MrV … Exactly!

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#34

I don’t know where the story came from that it boosts the sounds from the front, but yes, it’s more plausible that it boosts speech. If I want the front boosting I need to ask my audiologist. Presumably the intention is to mitigate the effect of the Oticon strategy of giving you all the sounds from 360 degrees round, which is great when walking down the street but not so great in conversation. My example is more of a speech in noise situation, where the direction of the relevant sound is crucial, and needs to be handled by the appropriate setting. Many thanks Mr V - that’s really helpful, just the kind of help I was hoping for when I opened the topic.

#35

The story that the MoreSound Booster boosts the sounds from the front came from Oticon, of course.
See the video on OpenSound Booster below. The second screenshot is the snapshot of that video at 1:04 minutes where they clearly say it reduces sound from the back and sides (implying that the front is not as suppressed).

There’s also a MoreSound Booster video but it was not as explicit about “how” noise is further suppressed. But I’ve never seen Oticon say anywhere that MoreSound Booster is any different than OpenSound Booster, so the obvious assumption is that it’s simply a name change. The third link below is the video of the MoreSound Booster for reference.

If you want a customized program that should be the equivalent of the MoreSound Booster, you can ask your audi to give you the built-in Speech in Noise program, max out on the Neural Noise Suppression values and set the Directionality Setting to Full Directional. That should be the same idea, but you’d never know if Oticon does something else differently in the MoreSound Booster than what I just suggested above.

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