Fitting Assistant: Oops, you’re right, of course.
Yes, HearSuite has an updater.
I may have the installer in the recycle bin on my PC at home. I’m away and won’t be home for a week.
1 Like
Just saw it and thought it was interesting~
None of this is true.
China has a huge population, but only the greatest potential for hearing aids, not the largest hearing aid market, because of the impact of people’s perceptions of hearing aids, and the fact that they can’t afford them …
The biggest hearing aid markets are North America and Western Europe, as you should be able to see from the annual public sales figures.
Reverse engineering hearing aids is not a reality, in fact there have always been IC design companies that offer generic hearing aid IC kits and development tools, which make it easy to design hearing aid hardware, and there is no need to reverse engineer the hardware side of the equation at all.
I believe that the top 5 hearing aid companies do not design and produce their own hearing aid ICs, but rather customize ICs from IC companies to meet their requirements.
In fact, the core technology of the top 5 hearing aid companies is not in the hardware, but in the hearing aid algorithms that have been accumulated through decades of research, which is what the Chinese companies are unable to reverse and surpass.
The top 5 hearing aid companies have production lines in China, some from more than two decades ago, but the Chinese government doesn’t care about hearing aids at all …
In the Chinese brand six brands together with the brand monopoly position, some Chinese brands also used to launch their own design of good hearing aids, but the Chinese market for their brand and price recognition is not high, sales are very few, and now they basically turned to the Chinese market to sell from the 5 big hearing aid companies products labeled from the hearing aids.
Some Chinese brands have been selling their hearing aids internationally for years, but they avoided competing in the major markets of the Big 5 companies’ brands, so are less known, and in recent years some of the newer companies are mainly producing and selling OTC-like products.
BTW, you have so many misconceptions about China, not only in hearing aids. 
@kevels55 @Volusiano
3 Likes
I do have it. What is the recommended site to upload it to?
Demand they DO DESING their own chip, but they dont manufacture they probably dont have enough volume to justify- my guess. . I remember they announced this when the Velox platform was launch.
I suspect Sonova does the same, as per the others you can even buy hearing aid chips @ sound design
even Genie 2017 have a fitting assistance - in fact even the otiset had fitting assitant
The Oticon Polaris chip is indeed designed by Oticon (WD) and fabbed by TSMC. Here is a link related to the launch of the More line.
https://esg.tsmc.com/en/update/innovationAndService/caseStudy/31/index.html
It is fabbed in 28nm which is about 5 generations from leading edge (First produced in 2011) and does not require EUV machines and is significantly cheaper to design/manufacture (Less mask steps).
I would with high confidence predict the Oticon Mores and Philips 9030 share the same Polaris chip, and the Oticon Real and Philips 9040 share the same Polaris R’ chip set. It would not make economic sense to have different chip runs. I would go even further and expect the PCB boards of the two are identical. I think there are minor differences are in shell/button, and different firmware, but the fundamental software must be the same given the chipset contains the DNN processor.
4 Likes
I’ve had an extensive look online and cannot find a single difference between the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 hearing aid and Philips HearLink 9040: I’m talking features/specs/options, physical appearance, accessories, software (both fitter and user), etc etc. - well, nothing other than extensive rebadging/re-skinning and of course renaming of features. Can anyone prove me wrong?
3 Likes
Nope. I think you are correct. I think it was @Neville who said that the Phillips was more like the Bernafon range than Oticon. @Volusiano also said the Oticon Real was not a good comparison after examining the specs. We know that Phillips is a reboot after a long hiatus in hearing aids, and they were able to produce a complete product line out of nowhere. Others have said that the Demnant/Phillips relationship is just another way for Demnant to extend their reach. It would be no surprise at all if it’s a complete white label.
4 Likes
Did you find any mention of the Sudden Sound stabilizer feature in the Bernafon Alpha XT 9? I read through its brochure and I found mention of the Wind & Handling noise feature, but I didn’t see anything on it that mentions the sudden noise feature.
The Philips 9040 has both of these features. So if there is indeed no sudden sound feature on the Bernafon, like there is on the Philips, then we can’t really say that they’re exactly the same just rebadged. The Philips would have this one more feature in this regard.
I have the Philips HearSuite programming software but I don’t have the Bernafon programming software, so I can’t really vet to see if they’re exactly the same like you claim or not. But I don’t have enough interest on the Bernafon to invest the time to seek out its software to download, so I’ll take your word on it if you say so.
I believe Bernafon refer to it as “transient noise” in their marketing material.
Maybe,
“. . . the new Smart Noise Reduction within Hybrid Noise Management has been trained by machine learning to apply the correct amount of noise reduction to specific situations. Hybrid Balancing supplies the Noise Balancer and Speech Balancer tools to adjust the contrast between speech and noise.”
Different vocabulary. Who knows what it means? No mention of a DNN in Bernafon materials. No direct mention of AI other than the machine learning comment. See the link for more details:
The first screenshot below is the Philips chart for its AI Noise Removal from its technical whitepaper. Noisy speech input goes into the AI-NR block, and less noisy speech comes out at the observed output. In the training scenario, this observed output is compared against the “Speech alone” ideal output and the differences are fed back into the AI for learning adjustment to make future noise removal incrementally better.
The second screenshot is from the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 marketing brochure. It clearly said that its Smart Noise Reduction feature generates cleaner speech signal through machine learning.
So the 2 common factors between the 2 aids’ brands are that it’s based on machine learning, and the learning is trained to generate cleaner speech output by removing the noise from it. The diagrams don’t look the same, but at least the wordings have some commonality in it.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ah OK, thanks. I must have missed it.
The Oticon OPN, OPN S and More has a Transient Noise Management feature. It was indeed to help reduce the sudden sounds. But the Real must have had a newer/better similar feature which they named the Sudden Sound Stabilizer. In the Oticon Genie 2 software, if the Real is selected, the Transient Noise Management option disappears, making way for a new window called the Sudden Sound Stabilizer.
So it’s entirely possible that the Bernafon has the new Sudden Sound Stabilizer feature, but it keeps the old name Transient Noise Management. The Philips 9040 calls it SoundProtect against wind & sudden sounds as seen below.
2 Likes