I don’t have the Oticon Owns yet. They’re still on order. It’s my understanding that they can have 5 programs, and they sense which one fits throughout the day and switch automatically? With that in mind, I am wondering if the best program for a singer is My Music, or something else?
You need to go to the Oticon website and read everything you can about the aids. Depending on wjat size of the OWN aids you get they can have up to 4 programs available to you or the can only have the default program. That is also true for connectivity it depends on the version of OWN you get to whether or not they have any connectivity. I wear at this time the Real1 aids with my backup aids being my More1 aids. I have 4 programs plus the TV adapter and a remote microphone.
I cannot answer your question about singing as my hearing loss is bad enough that I cannot enjoy music.
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There is a lot there to read. I’m taking it in little by little. Just wondering if someone has already been trying to figure that out by trial and error…
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I have worn aids for 19 years. Most of the time I wore in the ear aids. My first 2 set of aids had no connectivity, no controls for volume or extra programs. I did servive. In 2010 I got my first set of Oticon aids they were MiniRite aids with domes and the first streamer that had the t-coil in the streamer. I hated the domes, and begged for custom ear molds and got them. My hearing improved with the ear molds and the streamer allowed me to have volume control and connectivity to loop systems. My next set was in the ear aids that connected with the streamer pro, Oticon aids. I had connectivity with my iPhone or iPad, windows computers. I had t-coil connectivity to loop systems, and i had a small microphone to hear people at a distance, and i had a TV ADAPTER, and house phone adapter. The volume control was in the streamer pro. My next aids, again Otion were in the ear with controls for volume and extra programs build into the aids, again with the TV adapter, phone adapter and connect clip for connectivity to computers. Then I moved to MiniRite aids with power receivers and custom ear molds. With the same connectivity as before. I cannot servive without the connectivity. I am a highly technical person so do a combination of my own research and learning things about my aids and devices that aren’t documented. But I always start by reading the documentation several times.
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It looks like you’ve been grossly misinformed by your HCP. The Own can only host 1 program and that is it. There’s no option for 5 programs like you were told. Even if it supports more than 1 program, there would only be up to 4 programs available in Genie 2, not 5.
I have tried all 5 sizes of the Own, the IIC, CIC, ITC, ITEHS and ITEFS in Genie 2 as an exercise, and neither of any of those 5 can support more than the one default General program.
In his defense, he didn’t try to sell me these. I walked into his office stating that’s what I wanted based on my own research.
I am looking here and it says there are 5 options for environmental configuration for the IIC. That’s where I got that info.
Yeah, the 5 environment configurations is not the same as 5 programs. As you can see in the screenshot below, it refers to the classification of Very Simple to Very Complex configurations in order to figure out how to divide and set the Neural Noise Suppression max values for Easy and Difficult classifications.
Having said that, I would not worry too much about having only 1 general program on the Own. Oticon aids are designed to work sufficiently well with just a single General program for the most part, so you just give up on having the flexibility of customized setups, that’s all. The General program should work fine for music and also speech in noise as well, so no worries.
As far as your singing goes, even if you had multiple programs option, I don’t think it matters as much on how YOU sound to yourself between different programs anyway. So you don’t need multiple programs to be able to hear yourself sing better in one program vs another.
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Looks good. I’m very excited for these. Automatic adjustment for 5 environments sounds amazing. I wonder which environment will be selected when I’m listening to music and/or singing?
Definitely not the case for me with my Real 1’s.
The general program may not be the most optimal for music, but it’s an acceptable compromise for many people who choose to give up the option of having multiple programs for the option of their choice for the Own. It may not be the case for you, but I find the general program to sound fine with music for myself. Of course a dedicated music program would be optimal, but given the lack of a choice for multiple programs, the general program shouldn’t make music sound terrible.
Given that @snorkelfan did not realize that the Own only comes with 1 general program, I’d prefer to dwell on the positive that it’s not the end of the world to listen to music using the general program with the Own. And I say this based on my own personal experience, not just to cheer @snorkelfan up, and even if it’s different from your personal experience (@x475aws 's).
The hearing aids don’t choose which of the 5 listening environments depending on whether you’re singing and/or listening to music or not. That’s not how it works. The 5 environment classification is for YOU to tell the aids how well or how badly you can understand speech in each of the 5 environments, so that they know how to apply the appropriate amount of noise suppression to help you understand speech better in all environments. That’s all it’s for, to determine the level of noise suppression to apply to help with speech understanding in noise. It has nothing to do with music listening, and nothing to do with you singing or not singing.
When you’re listening to music and/or singing, the hearing aids don’t detect speech activity, so most likely it will not apply any kind of noise reduction to help with speech clarity because there’s no speech.
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Will they use the same gain curves as for speech, including the same compression?
The HAs will use the gain curves of whatever program being selected. In the case of the Oticon Own, it’ll just use the gain curves of the general program. There’s no Speech in Noise program for the Own, so there are no gain curves for ‘speech’ per se.
Generally, the gain curves in the Speech in Noise program are slightly boosted in the mid-range area, at least as observed for my audiogram setup. Beside this, the Neural Noise Suppression on the SIN program is usually set more aggressive than the default program (1 notch higher in my case). Also, the Sound Enhancer for the SIN program is set to Detail from Balanced in the General program.
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I’m glad, but surprised, that singing won’t be detected as speech. It is a voice, after all. I wonder if the “detail” setting for Sound Enhancer would optimize music listening.
I haven’t read anyone ever complain about listening to music with Owns, so I’m hoping that’s because there are no complaints.
I guess it depends on how sophisticated voice detectors are nowadays. In the old days, I think voice detectors primarily looked for periodical sound modulations to interpret it as voice/speech. Nowadays, I’d imagine that voice detectors are probably a lot more sophisticated than before. I think regular speech is probably a lot more monotonous and more even tone than singing, which can be quite expressive and quite tonal by comparison. In addition, singing also tends to carry a much louder voice projection compared to normal speech (unless the speech involves a shouting match or something).
But anyhow, even if modern voice detectors still group singing voices in the same grouping of speech voices, and the hearing aids try to making the singing speech more clear by suppressing the surrounding sounds (if any), then it still shouldn’t be a big problem anyway if the singing speech is now given more presence than the rest of the suppressed sounds.
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If the music sounds good enough with the general program and Own users don’t have a dedicated music program to do a reference A/B comparison between them, then naturally there shouldn’t be much complaint per se, because it’s not like the general Oticon program would make music sound atrocious or anything like that.
My personal experience when I do A/B comparison between my general program for music versus the legacy built-in music program is that the later sounds a little more “open” compared to the earlier. But the earlier doesn’t really make music sound bad at all.
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Judging from discussions on this forum about musicians and hearing aids, in-ear aids with a single program seem like a bad choice for a musician. There’s no flexibility in the coupling to the ear, and any tweaks made to the sole program, to improve usability for performance, may affect speech comprehension.
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The key missing information is: does the program differentiate between singing and spoken speech? If it does, it could be excellent. So far, I don’t know the answer.
That is not the way Oticon hearing aids work. If you want your Oticon hearing aid properly tuned for both music and speech in noise, you will need two programs. If you don’t, you will have to find a middle ground for very different setup parameters… and end up disliking that sort of compromise. As mentioned, it seems the Owns only have one slot available, which might be a major limitation you need to consider. With other manufacturers, such as Phonak and their AutoSense 5.0, the hearing aids monitor the soundscape and switch between a few predetermined automatic programs accordingly.
For most Oticon hearing aids you get 4 slots:
Even for the ITEFS version of the Owns (the largest) there is only 1 slot available (slots 2 - 4 are greyed out):
True. But does AutoSense recognize music reliably enough to depend on it while making (rather than listening to) music?