I picked up a pair of 9040’s a month ago and while they are generally a significant upgrade to my 5 year old Otiicon S2s I’m getting no improvement whatsoever from the hearing-in-noise program. That isn’t to say they don’t perform better in noise than my previous aids. When I compare the general program to the hearing-in-noise I struggle to discern any difference. Someone on another thread mentioned a ‘pure noise “ program and recommended it over the hearing-in-noise. For me as with many others the ability to enhance speech clarity in noisy environments is the holy grail of HAs. These 9040 are an improvement in that regard, but not when comparing the one program to the other. Does the program itself need to be tweaked or is it a once-size-fits-all? Any thoughts are appreciated.
I would tend to agree with you. I also have the 9040’s and was in a crowded restaurant recently, I too felt the “speech in noise” program not that great and in fact thought the general program best. I do not see a “pure noise” program in the fitting software??
My guess is that your audiologist didn’t set the aids up correctly to lower the background noise. I would be seeing jy audiologist about the adjustments. I have both the More1 aids and the Real1 aids and I haven’t had any issues with speech 8n a noisy restaurant and I have severe hearing loss. But something else to thing about if you have domes and not custom ear molds then you will have a worse experience with noise, most specifically ifnyou have open domes.
Go back to your technician for adjustment. Yes, programs can be “tweaked” and often/usually are, by knowledgeable technicians. Most modern programs have variability in the “forward” pickup. The ‘hear in noise’ and ‘restaurant’ settings depend on narrowing the ‘cone’ of pickup facing front, as opposed to side. Sounds like you need yours narrowed for more emphasis on the ‘forward’.
The “noise” program in Philips HearSuite does exist but is intended to make wearing aids more bearable when you are in a loud environment - I think it reduces the gain across the board. So I don’t think that’s what you want for speech understanding. Speech in noise increases the gain specifically for the speech frequencies and may also change the directionality, but if it’s not working for you then as mystuart says, each specific feature of the program can be adjusted by the fitter. I have the 9040s and tried the speech in noise program (default program with no specific adjustment by the fitter) twice in a restaurant. The first time I thought it did help; the second time I actually felt the same as you, that it wasn’t any better than the general program. I haven’t investigated further or tried to adjust it more specifically to what might help me. Here are all the programs that the fitter has access to (there’s another telephone one that wouldn’t fit on the screenshot) - the aids can have a maximum of 4 programs simultaneously and the fit of each program can be adjusted by the fitter.
Go back and have them adjust the hearing aids. Have them set up three of your four programs with different settings to see if one setting does the trick.
Have one program directionality setting set to dynamic directionality. The second program set to adaptive directionality. The third program set to fixed directional.
Set all three programs as follows:
Set the Sound Map Control Transition to very high.
Set the Noise Reduction setting to high.
Set the Speech Clarifier to high.
Try the Comfort Control setting at medium.
Talk to your HCP about the other two settings in the dynamic directionality settings,
If this doesn’t help, then try one of the other two brands. I know the Jabra has three settings to adjust the focus of the directionality. I don’t have the programing software for Rexton so I don’t know what adjustment are available.
There is nothing wrong with this scenario. It just means that your General program is working out quite well for you. It’s simply possible that the noisy environment you were in was just not noisy enough to make a difference whether you use the General program or the Hearing in Noise program. Maybe you need to be in a much, much worse place with very, very loud noises before you can discern a difference.
If you find yourself mostly in noisy environments that the General program is good enough for you and there’s no discernable difference compared to Hearing in Noise, then count your blessing that you now can remove the Hearing in Noise program and replace it with another more useful program. Afterall, you can only have 4 programs available.
I see your point. I should have said in my post that I felt that the general program did not improve my hearing in noise appreciably compared to my OPN S2s. The test involved sitting directly in front of the speaker at a restaurant over a two hour lunch and the place went from almost empty and quiet to crowded and noisy. During this time I switched back and forth from general to hearing in noise at least a dozen times. Additionally, I changed the volume and the treble on the EQ in the app.
In many other ways the 9040 are superior to my old HAs. I won’t get into that since it’s not the topic of this thread. This may be a case of inflated expectations since there is quite a lot of hype about the AI and the ability of the technology to improve speech understanding. Even with the speaker directly in front of me at a distance of 4 feet or less I still was losing word recognition. Back to your point, Volusiano, maybe this is as good as it gets. Then again, maybe not.
Ah, OK, if it’s a comparison between the Philips 9040 vs the Oticon OPN S2, then that’s a different thing. Although the Philips derives many technologies from the Oticon aids, I don’t think it prescribes religiously to the open paradigm like the Oticon aids do. So maybe there are tweaks you can try with the parameters in the 9040 to help you take advantage of this “less openness” to hone in even more on the directionality aspect to help you focus on the speaker in front.
Below is the screenshot of the Philips HearSuite 9040 Speech in Noise program, followed by the screenshot of the General program, in the SoundMap Noise Control window. As you can see, the Transition, the NR mode, the Speech Clarifier, are all set to their max values already for the Speech in Noise program screen. Really, the only other thing left you can try is to force this program to have Fixed Directional instead of Adaptive or Dynamic Directionality. This will enable the beam forming to focus toward the front to help give you get better SNR from the front speaker.
You can compare the relevant noise control settings and how they are different between these 2 programs in the 2 screenshots below.
I’ve heard from some folks who upgraded from the OPN S to the More, which supposedly has a new DNN AI, and they still don’t notice much improvement between the 2. Of course there are also others in the same boat but they do notice improvement. You upgraded from the OPN S2 to the 9040, and the 9030 and 9040 uses the same Noise Reduction AI, but they’re not the Oticon DNN AI. So if there are folks who don’t notice much difference between the OPN S and the More, it’s not far fetched to think that the 9040 might not give you a noticeable improvement from the OPN S2 either. After all, the OPN S2 is akready a pretty good aid to begin with. The addition of AI doesn’t necessarily guarantee to leapfrog the performance of an already very good aid.
I want to thank everyone who took the time to help me by responding. I’ll use this information when I go back to Costco to deal with this specific issue and, of course, I’ll comment on the outcome of any changes that are made to the hearing in noise program. In the meantime if anyone has more to add I’m “all ears”. Best to all, Don
For reference, below is the screenshot of the HearSuite online help, specifically on the SoundMap Noise Control section. At near the bottom is a short description of the Speech Clarifier.
I had seen that, and it doesn’t provide much info. But for anyone else interested, I note that you posted Philips’s complete, informative answer over in my Speech Clarifier thread that I linked in my previous reply here.
As the OP I said I would follow up on my experience with the 9040. The issue was related to the hear-in-noise program that was not adding any value for me. This was only one aspect of concern for me, but for the sake of focus, I only raised this single issue in my original post. By the time I got back to Costco I realized that the large size of the hearing aids was a problem I could not get around. They simply did not fit well behind my ears due to the shape of my skull. I never had this problem before but then again these hearing aids are bigger than the Oticons I bought 15 years ago. It’s hard for me to get past it, especially wearing glasses. So back they went. I hope all the good information provided on the thread will be put to good use for someone else. In the meantime, Rexton Reach was released on 3/12 and are expected to be in Costco this month. (That’s what I read somewhere and can’t confirm.) The hearing aid specialist at Costco, (not the first one who dispensed the 9040), recommended the Rexton bi-core as he said that his experience with other customers was very positive for hearing-in-noise due to having two chips, one that deals with voices and the other with environmental sounds. It sounds good, but it’s all about implementation and personal experience. I did not buy the Rextons at the time when I realized that the current generation being sold now is already over a year old. I found out the next gen, “Reach” were released 2 days ago according to Rexton’s American corporate HQ in New Jersey. I don’t know much about Rexton/Signia having been an Oticon user for almost 20 years. If they don’t work well for me I have one option left, Jabra. I don’t like to abuse trialing HAs and have never before returned any hearing aids until this time. But, that’s what the trial is for so what the heck. And though Costco provides hearing aids at quite a good value, it’s still a chunk of change and hearing is a top priority and should be optimized to the extent possible. Unfortunately, my word recognition is poor and that may be the limiting factor regardless of hearing aid brand or model.
I assume that you meant to say 5 years ago, not 15? The Oticon OPN S was only released in March 2019.
I know that you said that you returned it because it was too large to fit behind your ears comfortably. I just wondered if you’ve tried to make any adjustment to the noise settings in the 9040 to see if the speech in noise situation has improved or gotten better for you compared to the OPN S or not?
I meant 15. I still have them and they’re smaller than the 9040. I never had the fitter try to adjust the hear-in-noise program because, as I said, I couldn’t get past the size. Part of this is due to skull shape. I have a protrusion than gets in the way and actually caused my ears to stick out. I’m not vain about wearing hearing aids. I really don’t care if they don’t look good, but it’s uncomfortable to have the ears protruding. It’s mostly about the thickness than the length. Tiny size variations can make a big difference,
I haven’t been able to find much online about the Rexton Bi-core or the newly released Reach.
I don’t know what MT or T after classroom means. Nor M and MT for phone.
M is for Mic, T is for Tcoil. It indicates whether the program of interest is set to pick up the sound from the Mic or from the Tcoil or from both.
Sometimes a classroom may have an induction loop installed to broadcast the audio that can be picked up by the Tcoil. So you can set up the program to pick up either the sound through the air into the mics, or the sound converted magnetically into the induction loop that can be picked up by the Tcoil.
Same with the phone. If you use a traditional telephone handset that has a speaker on the handset, that speaker is emanating a magnetic field that can be induced onto the Tcoil of the hearing aid to be picked up by the Tcoil. Or you can set up the mics on the hearing aids to pick up the sound from your phone’s speaker that travel through the air.
When I went back to Costco the fitter there told me that due to my poor word recognition I may not find the hear-in-noise or similar programs to be useful since there is no correcting for distortion. My empirical belief is that is wrong. I have better comprehension of word sounds in quiet environments and a program that would eliminate ambient noise should help. The fitter wanted me to try the Rexton bi-core but when he told me they were already 1-1.5 years old I passed. I went home and researched the Rexton. What little I found was not very positive on them . The last option, having already returned the 9040s, was the Jabra which is what I was leaning towards when I went to Costco. (The fitter being keen on Rexton was why I didn’t get the Jabra at that time). However, in terms of chip and basic technology level, the EP20 is the same EP10. So now I’m waiting to see if anything new arrives any time soon. In the meantime my Orticon OPN-S has lost volume function on the right which means I can’t turn it up. Any idea when Jabra may put out a new EP30 or other upgrade?
Not sure what you mean by lost volume function on the right, if you’re saying that the button for the right aid doesn’t work anymore, you can workaround this using the Oticon phone app or the MFI interface (if you have an iPhone) to make changes to your volume.
I have no idea when Jabra would release a next model like an EP30, but there’s a good chance that Philips will release the next model 9050 in the next few months through Costco, because the Philips website has already announced this new model, and the Philips 9040 model was released a few months after the Oticon Real was released, so Oticon just released the Intent, and the 9050 which has the accelerometer like the Intent hopefully will follow suite at some point.
The Philips 9050 is supposed to have a more improved AI Noise Reduction functionality compared to the 9040, beside the accelerometer sensors which are used to interpret how to vary the speech in noise reduction based on guessed intent of the head movement. So if you can make do with your OPN S for a little bit longer, I think the Philips 9050 would be worth waiting for to try out.
I’m not sure what the heck your Costco fitter is talking about either, for saying that hear-in-noise program doesn’t correct distortion. What distortion in the first place? And where does the distortion come from? We’re just talking about getting better signal to noise ratio to help improve speech clarity over noise here. Who’s talking about any kind of distortion? You’re right to call BS on that.