Hi Sonya, I don’t have first hand experience with wearing the Sonic Enchant 100 so I can’t give you any testimonial about it. I think Chatteremail (a forum member here) has had a chance to try it, and he also wore the OPN1 before, and he was really impressed with the Sonic Enchant 100 equally. You may want to PM him for more details if you’d like.
What I know about the Sonic Enchant 100 is only through reading their marketing brochure and some of their white papers. Because Sonic is a sister company of Oticon and Bernafon, all of whom have the same parent company Williams-Demant, there’s speculation that the Enchant 100 has the same technology as the OPN. However, while the look of the hardware and specs are the same, the marketing and white paper description of their processing technology don’t seem to be the same technology as the OPN to me. I think that’s why they’re $1000 cheaper than the OPN1.
It doesn’t make sense for Williams-Demant to take the OPN technology and port it over to the Enchant line and undersell it for $1K cheaper. That would just be shooting their own foot for nothing. As a few years go by I can see them waterfalling the technology down to their sister brands/models, but I think it’s too early for them to be doing this just yet because there is no next generation OPN release on the horizon yet.
But if the Sonic Enchant technology is just as good as the OPN technology as Chatteremail seems to think, I think it’s definitely worth checking it out.