Oticon Neural Noise Suppression

Hearing Aids Manufacturer Support
#49

Just FWIW, I have a client fitted with More1, who was initially experiencing some resolution issues. After a bit if tweakery and REM to make sure we were on target, I pulled that dynamic ‘difficulty’ slider all the way to the left.

In the office she thought they were ok, however in the real world there’s a complaint of harshness to a level of near discomfort. Now, I know all the Oticon marketing spiel says loads about how their AI is clever enough to raise the SNR to +9dB, but from the outside it looks like everything is made louder (overprescribed) and if the AI is good enough to recognise noise sources, it might be able to strip these out.

The risk is, if you go into a coffeehouse environment, ‘all’ the speech is retained in a hugely complex sound field, while the occasional bit of steam frothing is cut out. I’m guessing you’d potentially leave with a bit of a headache; mitigated with the treble-tap on the iPhone home button.

She’s coming back in for a tweak down this week. I wasn’t expecting the More 1 to be ‘More Louder’ on the same gain settings. I ‘was’ expecting it to deal with the sound field better, in order that it picked out the speech (per the SNR claims) within the client’s preferred listening range.

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#50

That’s very true that if you’re in very complex environment where there are a ton of people around such that almost everything is speech, overwhelming anything else that may be noise, then it’s not good either because very little would be suppressed, and if the Sound Enhancer is set to Detail, that will raise the speech volume to even louder.

I wonder if in that situation, the user would turn on the MoreSound Booster in the ON app to narrow the directional beam forming to just the front only would be more helpful than using either the Speech in Noise or the default program P1?

I also wonder if just turning down the overall volume compensate for the increase in gain in all the voices helps, at least to reduce the discomfort of the very loud volume of all the cumulative voices.

Another thing is that if Oticon has trained 12 million sound scenes in the DNN, I wonder how many of these sound scenes are of the type where you’re in a crowded bar or a coffee house, or the hallway of a theater during a break where everyone crowds out to the hallway and talk. And if they have included these scenarios in their 12 million sound scene, what the DNN outcome is like for them.

It’s one thing to be in a crowded restaurant where at least you’re still spaced out enough by table groupings to try manage separate group conversations. It’s another thing to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a sea of people in a tight space like a theater hallway during a break, where everyone is talking at the same time and the ceiling is extremely high and the echoes permeate and made worse by the high ceiling. Heck, I don’t even know how normal hearing manage those scenarios, but apparently they do OK because they’re all talking and listening and the conversations do carry on.

#51

What is this treble-tap? All i have in terms of tone control on my phone are the ON streaming sliders.

#52

In iOS, you treble tap the home button and it takes you directly to the HA mic levels, programs and Live Streamer/Remote mic function without needing to find the App.

It’s like a ‘fast basic remote control’ screen.

Not seen an android equivalent.

#53

Sorry, @Um_bongo - I was confusing treble with the treble in “treble clef” or the knobs on a guitar amp. When I Quacked it, “triple” kept coming up, and the lights went on.

[The language has gone to seed in the colonies!]

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#54

No this is in real life.

#55

In this scenario of a loud coffee house, I use speech in noise with Directional / Focused inputs.

#56

There’s a new feature in the Genie 2 2021.2.1 version called Fitting Assistance under Fitting -> More Tools. Below is a screenshot which show various scenarios for your own voice and suggestions on how/what to adjust to help improve it.

It has other situations, too, beside your own voice with help to make adjustments. Also what’s nice is that you just click on either Right, Both, or Left to apply the recommended adjustment on the fly (if it’s not spelled out, click on the little “i” for Info to display it. There’s also an undo button. Sometimes they also have Additional Solutions as well.

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#57

We had a lot of discussion in another thread that was recently closed about NNS (and other stuff around the DNN and also the differences between the More 1, 2, and 3 tiers) that really belongs more in this thread, and can be helpful to read if one is interested. So I just want to provide a link of that thread here in case anyone wants to read up on it. The relevant discussion on NNS started from thread # 346 (or 347?) with a post from @JeremyDC onward all the way to near the end of the thread before it got closed.

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#58

Yes, @Volusiano, it’s a shame that thread was closed. A lot of interesting stuff came stuff came up for discussion before it got shut down.

#59

I tried to have a tread that gave my experience with my aids, and as much my fault as anything the treat was basically taken away from me and taken over by everything but what I had in mind so I asked that it be closed. And I don’t regret doing so.

#60

Oh, I’m sure you had your reasons, Chuck - we’re only saying that it’s too bad, that’s all.

#61

Yeah, it’s really no big deal about the thread being closed. This is a more appropriate place for that discussion anyway. And if it had been made known right up front that Chuck would have liked to see the discussion moved somewhere else, I’m sure everyone would have gladly obliged.

Although it admittedly took on the tone of becoming Chuck’s documentation of his personal experience with the More throughout that thread, the title of that thread really didn’t clearly make it seem to be exclusive as such. So I can see someone going through the thread like @JeremyDC thinking that it’d be OK to throw in More 1 related questions when looking for answers, and not have it be considered off-topic anyway.

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#62

Welcome to the internet. Posters shouldn’t realistically have any expectation of control over what’s posted in a thread once it’s started. Thread drift is a fact of life, just like in person conversations can be very fluid.

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#63

Yes, I thought it was where I should post since it was a topic about the Oticon More aids. Oh well, I guess next time I will start a new topic or ask if it is ok. That is probably best.

#64

I’m hoping that, somewhere in the near future, we can get the momentum back on some of the technical stuff. I found out unequivocally from reading around some of the things posted, why my poor old Unitron North Moxi Fit 800 never worked for me. They were designed specifically to exclude everything except human speech and that comes straight from the manufacturer.

This was a question that’s being nagging at me for 7 years. So - it wasn’t all poor fitting that was at the root of my dissatisfaction - but it doesn’t exculpate the audiologist because I specifically told her that I didn’t want HAs that operated that way.

So, discussion of the technical aspects of More1s has brought me a better understanding of all HAs, and has reinforced in my mind that Oticon has a different approach. I’m not saying better - just different (in a way that I prefer, but that you may not).

#65

BTW - I had my first “WOW Moment” with my More1s this morning. I dropped in to see my friends - brothers who operate a large car/truck mechanical shop in town. Busy. Loud!

I was talking striper fishing with 2 of the brothers when the guys working on a truck in the next bay fired up the pneumatic impact wrench. The default program on my More1s could not deal with that. (Although I find that it is sufficient for 90% of the situations I encounter.)

I used my trusty Genuine Oticon®️Brand ConnectClip to toggle to the Speech in Noise program. The voices literally popped out of the noise, which was strongly attenuated, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the conversation with my friends.

In this case, I can report without hesitation that the difference between the two programs was definitely in WOW territory.

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#66

So the Untiron North Moxi Fit 800 does not even allow something like a Music program that acts like a wide-open analog HA that minimizes most of the signal processing like compression and noise reduction?

#67

Yes, of course it does, just as Mores have a beam- forming option. But that’s not the core design philosophy.

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It’s only “marketing speak”, but it describes my experience wearing Unitron North Moxi Fit 800, which almost always selected a noisy environment (unbeknownst to me for literally years, because my audiologist never explained it to me!), which prevented me from hearing the non-speech sounds around me that I need to hear.

#68

Yeah, OK. I understand. The Oticon HAs using the open paradigm gives you both an open experience AND speech clarity at the same time. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive like with the Unitron.

Newer HAs can do autosense to hunt for environmental changes and automatically switch back and forth between programs for you, but that’s still not as smooth as just being able to stay in your main program 90% of the times.