If that’s what the stats show, it’s unfortunate for hearing aid patients. This is from Fitting and Dispensing Hearing Aids, Third Edition. The takeaway is in the last sentence.
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@Neville: can you please clarify for me: would you be able to get the Phonak to give me the same SurroundSound type of coverage that I enjoy with my More1s? Is that a “sound”, or a “feature”?
In a quiet situation, sure. Once the various automatic noise reduction/directionality/etc then less so as they all function a little bit differently and the Oticon hearing aids are more of an outliar than most. So I suppose I’m categorizing those as ‘features’ in this case. But when people say that one manufacturer sounded ‘natural’ to them and another sounded ‘shrill’? Them’s just differences in gain at different frequencies either because of the fitting or because of the acoustic coupling.
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I don’t doubt that this can be done through careful tuning. But it’s a one time thing and it’s not scalable as far as I understand. If the hearing loss changes, if the fitting changes, then it’s another quiet hour to retune everything again. You add another program to the fold, and it’s another hour of careful tuning.
And sound quality is a very subjective thing. It’s more likely that someone is used to the sound of a brand and so it becomes THEIR standard to judge the sounds of other brands on. To them, one sound may be better than another, but to another person who’s used to the other sound from the other brand, then THAT sound is better instead. Everyone has their own opinion. And nobody is wrong and somebody else is right because it’s all subjective. But we shouldn’t dismiss that people are just imagining the differences either.
I just think that instead of using the approach of saying “Don’t worry, you can ask your HCP to make brand X/model X1 sound just like brand Y/model Y1 so disregard which brand it is when you make your decision based on sound”, a better approach would be to say “Just give brand X/model X1 a try for the few weeks that is your trial period, and there may be a good chance that you’ll get used to it by then and won’t find it inferior to the other sound that you like better. Don’t just dismiss brand X model X1 outright simply on the basis of you not liking how it sounds.”
Maybe. What I don’t think is useful advice is, “try every brand they are all super different and you have to get it right”. It’s exhausting for most individual users, especially new users. For a lot of new users, I’m not sure it’s even worth trying more than one unless the first one really isn’t working. Down the road when people have more experience, the compare and contrast method for people who like to geek out on this stuff seems more reasonable.
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I understand, and I agree, @Neville. (FWIW, I’ve always thought if the OpenSound paradigm as a feature, and of Oticon as an outlier - neither better nor worse - just different.)
I absolutely agree that the advice above is not useful at all, because all brands are not all super different, and trying every brand is exhausting and you don’t necessarily get the best ROI.
But nobody is saying that on this thread, at least not that I can tell. So let’s go back to the OP here (@habasescu.nicu) who’s only tried 1 brand’ model, the OPN S2, and he’s making conjectures based on what he learned from the other 2 models on this forum, the Oticon More and the Phonak P90. He listed a More’s pro as “Sound is very pleasant and natural”, and as a P90’s con “Sound seems not so pleasant and natural like Oticon (based on users’ reviews)”.
Then somebody (I think @mdb) came along and said “Aids should sound pretty much alike if tuned properly”, and it seems to imply that if the More and the P90 are tuned properly, they should sound alike and one is not more pleasant or more natural than the other".
This is not a false statement at all. But since there’s no standard for what “being tuned properly” really is, because it’s all subjective, it can only imply that “If you like the sound of the More better than the sound of the P90, you can easily have your HCP tune the P90 to sound like the More. So liking one HA’s sound over another HA’s sound” should not be a serious consideration in your selection criteria because it can easily be remedied by the HCP. I just don’t agree with this implication because I think it’s not a practical implication to suggest to people. Yes, it can be done, but it’s not trivial. And you’re also discounting other aspects beside just the tuning.
Instead of saying “Don’t factor in how it sounds as a serious consideration in your selection because it can be fixed via proper tuning to match it up”, I’d rather say “You may prefer one sound over another, but that may just be because you’re more used to the preferred sound. Don’t easily dismiss the other HA just because of how it sounds to you. Give it a try and with enough time, maybe you’ll get used to it and may learn to like it just as much as the other sound”.
The bottom line is that I think sound acceptance is a more practical approach than trying to fix the sound to make it sound like the other HA. In the end, if you still like the other sound better even after you’ve given this sound a try, then OK, at least you know how important that criteria is for you. Then you can decide whether to try to copy the sound, or to just go with the brand that has the sound you like.
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Well, that’s not entirely true. Though, I suppose it depends on whether you think ‘properly tuned’ means ‘sounding nice’ or means ‘optimizing your hearing’.
Yes, we agree. If you have a good fitter, just give yourself some time.
But I suppose what I am also saying is that differences aren’t as great as marketting would have you believe and it IS pretty trivial to make one hearing aid sound like another if we’re talking about ‘richness’, ‘naturalness’, ‘sharpness’ and adjectives like that.
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@Neville,@Volusiano: Neuroplasticity is a marvellous thing. Let me tell a short anecdote in point form:
- I hardly wore my old pair of Unitron North Moxi Fit 800 for 6 years, because I couldn’t get them fitted properly. They made things louder, but I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying;
- In March of this year, I took delivery of a new pair of properly-fitted hearing devices that really worked well for me and allowed me to actually understand speech. I began immediately to wear them for 16-18 hours a day, every day.
- The same audiologist who fitted my new HAs tweaked my old Unitrons (now my spare set), but they were still pretty much useless to me, because I had, in a nutshell, “forgotten how to hear”. (This is the only adjustment made to my Unitrons since March. They were adjusted to my new audiogram, bit - for some reason - I still couldn’t hear very well with those aids);
- In August, a medical emergency obliged me to attend the emergency room of our hospital. My new rechargeable hearing aids needed charging, so I was forced to wear my Unitron North Moxi Fit 800s. The examinations with several specialists were fiascos - everyone was frustrated with my having to repeat everything so could eventually understand their questions. I misunderstood some key questions, resulting in false information being given, and evoking puzzled looks on the part of the attending physicians. When I finally got home, the Unitrons were, once again, relegated to the back of my nightstand drawer;
- Yesterday, I took my new hearing aids back to the shop for a small adjustment. I had a long, relaxing lunch with a close friend, armed only with my heretofore useless Unitron North Moxi Fit 800s. For the first time in the 6 years I’ve owned them, the Unitrons gave me speech comprehension - and in a noisy environment, moreover!.
The bottom line is that the only variable here that could have affected my speech comprehension was the time that I’ve been assiduously wearing my hearing instruments since March, permitting my addled brain to recoup some of the “BrainHearing” skills that it had lost through 6 years of neglect.
So, yes, give yourself lots of time, and make sure you’re working with a good fitter who really cares whether or not you can hear!
From what I understand, “optimizing your hearing” begins with doing REM and adjust the result to target, and the target is based on a chosen fitting rationale, being a mfg proprietary one (like Oticon VAC+ for example), or one of the many standards out there like NAL-NL1 or NAL-NL2 or DSL-v5 Adult, etc. After that, there may be continued fine tuning of the gains until the client is happy enough.
In this entire process, there’s no ONE standard for tuning something properly. If the HCP makes REM adjustments based on NAL-NL2, then it is optimizing your hearing (or tuning properly) to the NAL-NL2 standard. But another HCP may be using the REM Autofit in Genie 2 to adjust REM to the proprietary VAC+ target instead, that’s also optimizing your hearing, but this time per what Oticon deems to be proper by its VAC+ standard. So there are many targets to optimize your hearing to. There’s no ONE way for hearing optimization anyway. It begins with optimizing to a targeted hearing rationale (and there are several), and it ends with optimizing toward the subjective happiness of the client, both factor heavily in the hearing optimization.
So when I say there’s no “standard” to tune something properly to, what I mean by “standard” here is more or less “universally accepted target that is supposed to be the best sounding target without any disagreement.”
Regarding whether HA mfg’s marketing want to have consumers believe that they deliver the best and most natural “sound”, not withstanding noise reduction and the other technology features per se, I have yet to see any HA mfg marketing touting that they have the best “sound” amongst all of them. They do tout many technological things, but I’ve never seen any of them tout that their “sound” is superior than the others. It’s almost always the users who make comments on the forum about how they like one sound over another sound between the HAs. And they certainly don’t get it from drinking the marketing Kool-aid. They seem to form their own opinions based on what they hear for themselves, or based on the collective opinions expressed by others on the forum.
This is great to hear that your Unitrons is now usable for you as a back up pair of HAs. For sure your brain hearing has recovered and gotten more fit over time now, even if your hearing loss remains the same. It’s always better to be present with sound information for the brain to pick and choose from than to starve the brain with too little information.
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Look at Oticon’s home page. Right now it says “Clinical tests show that 8 out of 10 people prefer [More’s] sound quality over two leading competitors.”
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@x475aws: That doesn’t parse as “Our HAs sound the best.” That parses as “People in a study preferred the sound of our HAs.”
Read it correctly, please, before you roll out your Oticon Fanboy Wagon again, to get the pot all stirred up!
Sheesh!
There’s a difference between just “sound” and “sound quality”.
Just “sound”, which is what I’m talking about, is the sound “signature” of the HA brand, which people may describe as natural, tinny, boxy, robotic, full, thin, open, closed, dry, wet (as in full of reverb) etc., which describes the characteristic of the sound, which usually don’t necessarily imply that one characteristic is superior to another. Usually, the fitting rationale gives the sound its characteristics. And you don’t hear people say one fitting rationale is better than another. People may like how one fitting rationale sounds over another, but they wouldn’t say one is better than the other. They’re just different.
Sound “quality”, which Oticon mentioned in their marketing spiel that you pointed out, refer to the “processed” quality of the sound, not the characteristic of the sound. Quality here are less affected by the fitting rationale, but more affected by technology features, like noise reduction/management, input dynamic, feedback control, beam forming, frequency lowering, etc.
So yes, like I said, HA mfgs do tout their technology features that help improve the sound “quality”. But they don’t tout their sound signature as shaped by their fitting rationale being superior to other sound signatures as shaped by other fitting rationales. The More sound quality that Oticon is touting is primarily shaped by the More DNN.
The More sound quality is not the Oticon sound “signature”, which I’m talking about here, which is shaped by the VAC+ fitting rationale. They’re different things.
They’re touting their sound. With support from a survey, yes, but nevertheless they’re touting their sound. So at least one manufacturer does it. Maybe others do too.
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Yes, I agree with that. But “touting one’s product” is essentially different from claiming one’s absolute superiority. All makers tout their products: it’s called Marketing, and (unfortunately) a lot of the claims made by marketers of all ilks, and across all industries are questionable.
It’s the Oticon consumer page. How does that page’s target audience understand it?
This isn’t a dig at Oticon. You said that no manufacturer touts their sound. I looked for a counterexample. For some reason I thought to look at Oticon first, and, bingo, found a sound (quality) claim.
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@x475aws: I fail to grasp how one is supposed to have a constructive discussion based on half-truths, taken out of context.
@x475aws: Context is important. If you’re going to start nit-picking @Volusiano 's contributory posts, at least get what he actually said right.
That page’s target audience doesn’t have to understand it because they’re not part of the discussion on this thread here so how they understand it is irrelevant to THIS discussion in THIS context. But you’re a participant in THIS discussion, and I thought it was clear that everyone has been talking about the sound SIGNATURE, and NOT counting in how the technologies like noise management and other automatic features affect the sound QUALITY.
You can see the 2 quotes below where both MDB and Neville discounted the effect of the technologies on the sound quality as NOT being part of what is being discussed, the sound SIGNATURE. Then even in my quote, I also discounted the technologies as well in the third quote below.
I’ve already clarified enough that we’re talking about 2 different things, the sound signature and the sound quality. But if somebody continues to want to choose to be willfully ignorant of this distinction for an ulterior motive, other than participating in an intelligent discussion, then that’s OK, too. The distinction still matters to plenty of those who truly want to understand.
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