Philips HearLink 9030 observations (new Costco aid by Demant)

Hearing Aids
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I’m not reading the marketing. I’m looking at what they do.

I wear Opn 1, which is much more similar to the More than the Philips is, and I chose Opn after trialing a handful of other hearing aids. Yes, they’re similar in the sense that all hearing aids are similar. They help you hear better.

I don’t believe that SpeechRescue and Sound Map are in fact doing the same thing. Regardless the key difference between these 2 hearing aids is that the Philips is directional and Oticon More is not. Anyone who thinks they’re going to have a similar experience with these 2 hearing aids is missing that.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that what Philips is doing with their HearLink 9030 is vey sophisticated. For the money, it’s a great option. When it’s time to retire my Opn 1’s, I’ll probably trial them because the cost:benefit is to great to ignore.

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And your source for looking at what they do? There is very little info available on hearing aids that isn’t marketing. I agree that they have a different approach to noise reduction, but I personally see a lot of similarities. @Abarsanti made the switch from Oticon Opn to Phillips and my take of his observations (detailed in this thread) is that the Phillips were an improvement over his Opn. Just looked at the source I was going from and I believe they both use Multilayered Transposition as their approach to frequency lowering. I’m not able to confirm because all I see from Phillips is that they offer Frequency Lowering, but Bernafon and Sonic used a similar approach to Speech Rescue. Anyway, my basic take is that people pay way too much attention to the supposed differences between hearing aids.

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Have you read this entire thread?

Member @Abarsanti is very experienced and knowledgeable about hearing aids. He has shared great information about these particular hearing aids. You can trust what he has posted.

Good luck

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No, Abarsanti did not say that the Philips were an improvement over his Opn. He said the following:

“Good sound quality, ON PAR with the Opn . . .”

“They perform better than the Opn ON DIRECTIONAL MODE.”

“. . . it’s possible I’m forgetting what the Opn sound like . . .”

“I’ve not tried the newer Opn More . . .”

To whatever degree that the Philips 9030 might be better than the Opn, we’re comparing their latest generation to an Oticon from 2 generations ago. Who cares? No one’s buying choice today Is HearLink 9030 vs Opn. What matters is how it compares with the More which Abarsanti is understandably silent about.

The only place where he said Philips is better than is on directional mode. Duh. HearLink 9030 is a directional hearing aid. I hope it’s better at speech in noise. That’s it’s wheel house; that’s what you buy it for. But that still doesn’t tell us if it’s better than the More even in that same function because the More is an upgrade over the Opn.

Bottom line is that a customer buys the Oticon More for a different kind of listening experience than what Philips is providing. That’s the key in making this choice.

Again, I like what I’ve read about Philips 9030, but it’s not doing something similar to what Oticon is doing other than that in a general sense both are trying to improve the listener’s hearing.

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We’re obviously playing semantics and if your original question were “How are the Phillips similar to the Oticon More in how they handle Speech in Noise?” I wouldn’t have bothered commenting, but that wasn’t your question, although by your comments, it’s clear that’s what you meant.

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I was responding to Bluejay, who said about the Philips HearLink 9030:

“It’s a nice hearing aid, similar to the Oticon, only just sold at Costco.”

I still haven’t heard from Bluejay, to whom I addressed my question. Instead you jumped in. I’d love to hear from Bluejay to see what HE meant because he gave the impression - at least to me - that Philips is simply a rebadged Oticon, rebranded for the purpose of selling at Costco, which it is not. It is a very nice hearing aid in its own right by all appearances, just different from Oticon.

BTW, you’re misquoting me. I never asked how they were different in handling speech in noise.

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I said if you’d asked that question instead I would not have responded.

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My personal take is that because Philips licenses from William Demant and Oticon is a daughter company of William Demant, they share many features, including the hardware accessories infrastructure (like charger, batteries, TV box, BT streamer, etc).

I downloaded the HearSuite 2 programming software and have been able to verify that the frequency lowering used on the Philips is the same as the Oticon OPN/S/More, which is frequency transposition and frequency mapping.

In reading the Philips 9030 whitepaper, it also looks like it uses the same feedback prevention technology that was introduced in the OPN S and carried over to the More (the OpenSound and MoreSound Optimizer).

So yes, you can say that the Philips and the Oticon OPN/S/More share many similarities. But I believe the core technologies between them are not the same. The More uses DNN as its core AI technology in its MoreSound Intelligence, the OPN S does not have AI and its core technology is the OpenSound Navigator, the Philips 9030 uses the AI-Noise Reduction.

The Philips AI is similar to the More AI in the sense that it uses DNN training by feeding a lot of speech-in-noise sound samples to train the system to learn how to remove the noise. Then it compares the results against the same speech with no noise used as reference data. If the difference is large, the AI-NR is tweaked to minimize this difference, then another speech-in-noise sound sample is introduced through the AI-NR system again, repeating the process, until the AI-NR is tweaked pretty good enough at reducing the noise accurately on its own. So in a sense, it does use DNN to train the AI-NR to remove noise from speech. The whitepaper said that they use hundreds of thousands of sound samples to train this system. How is it different than the More DNN approach? I believe that the Philips AI-NR is much more narrowly focused to solving just the speech-in-noise problem and is trained only to remove noise from speech.

The More DNN on the other hand takes a much broader approach of sampling 12 million sound scenes (not just hundreds of thousands of speech-in-noise sound samples like the HearLink 9030), then train its DNN to break out these sound scenes to discrete sounds, then train its DNN to learn to balance all the sounds together so that it reaches the optimal balance. In doing so, it has the ability to manipulate the sounds and rebalance them discretely, and this flexibility allows more options given to the users to decide how aggressive or less aggressive the rebalancing needs to be, and how aggressive the noise suppression needs to be to prioritize speech.

In other words, the More implements the DNN on a much larger scale (12 million sound scenes) and much higher abstract level (complete sound scenes as opposed to just speech in noise sound samples), so that it can manage the whole environments to be consistent with its open paradigm. On the other hand, the Philips HearLink, while also uses DNN AI, implements it on a much smaller and more focused scale (hundreds of thousands of speech-in-noise sound samples) to attack only the speech-in-noise issue. In this process, it does not embrace the open paradigm the same way the More and the OPN S do, but it’s still very effective at solving the biggest issue most users have, speech-in-noise.

I read back on Tony’s (@Abarsanti) last post on his 5 week update, and he said that the HearLink sound quality is on par with the OPN, but his HearLink speech in noise perform better than the OPN speech in noise on directional mode. This is to be expected, although the OPN focuses on the open paradigm and helps clean up speech, your brain hearing still has to deal with all the noise around the speech, so it must learn to focus more on the speech, while the HearLink uses superior DNN AI to remove noise from the speech, and also does not embrace the open paradigm, so in its Fixed Directionality mode (block out the noise, which is different than the open paradigm’s “clean up the speech but don’t block the noise”), it’s much more aggressive to remove the noise there than the OPN’s Fixed Directionality mode, AND on top of it, the users’ brain hearing no longer has to put up with the (now blocked) noise. But the More is 2 generations after the OPN, so there’s a good chance that the More’s approach to noise suppression using the DNN can yield better results than the OPN’s older technology of noise removal from speech through rebalancing everything as opposed to the OPN’s “just clean up the speech but can’t rebalance like the More”.

So I would not say that the Philips HearLink is the same as the Oticon More because their core technologies are different although their auxiliary technologies (feedback, frequency lowering) are the same, also same accessory infrastructure.

It’d be best to acknowledge that the HearLink is a very worthy HA without everyone keep trying to compare it to the More and say that they’re really the same. They’re not the same. They maybe very similar on the peripheral, but they’re different inside the core.

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Thanks, Volusiano, for clarifying this issue in such detail. Much appreciated.

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I have three weeks with the Philips 9030, and a week with the Oticon More 1, There is no comparison. I can hear in noise much much better with the More. Also, I can hear soft sounds much better. I had the Philip adjusted three times. They are in different leagues, especially in noise. The only thing the Philips does better is that it uses the hearing aid microphone for phone calls, but the More requires you to speak into the iPhone microphone.

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I don’t believe the Phillips aid uses the hearing aid microphone for making calls. Unless it’s a setting I haven’t found, I speak into my phone when making a call, which is exactly what I want to do. Otherwise I would have opted for the latest Costco aid.
I’ll be picking up the pair of Jabra aids I ordered on July 1st and look forward to comparing the 2 sets.

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Yeah, I thought only Phonak does that so far (speaking into HA mics on calls) and not requiring a streaming device for Android phones.

But if the HearLink 9030 is anything like the Oticon aids, you can use its version of the Oticon ConnectClip streamer for phone calls (even on iPhones) and you can leave the phone in your pocket and just wear the ConnectClip around your neck or clip it on you in front and its mic will be used for phone calls.

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I’ve been wearing the Philips Hearlink 9030 for over 1 month. Your iPhone can direct phone calls directly to your hearing aids while your phone is in your pocket. In fact I had to do some research to be able to turn off the hearing aids automatically connecting to phone calls. Settings-Accessibility-Hearing Devices-Audio Routing-Call Audio…Select “Never Hearing Devices” to stop the Hearing Aids automatically answering the calls or select “Always Hearing Devices” to have all your iPhone Calls go directly to your hearing aids.

The Philips HearLink 9030’s handle phone calls reasonably well for the hearing aid user but several callers have commented about having occasional difficulty hearing me.

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Yeah, but what we’re talking about here is not an issue of how to route your incoming calls, automatically or to your hearing devices or not.

The question is, if you have an incoming call, and the iPhone in your pocket or purse routes the call to your HAs, do you then have to get the phone out and speak into the phone’s mic for your phone calls for a clear conversation? Or can you just leave your iPhone in your pocket or purse or whatever and not worry about your iPhone mic being obstructed from picking up your voice (being in your pocket or purse and all) because the HearLink can pick up your voice from the HA’s mic and not from the iPhone’s mic?

Maybe callers complain about not hearing you well is because you leave your iPhone in your pocket, so its mic still picks up your voice, but being in the pocket makes the pick up of your voice less than clear.

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i keep my phone in my purse which for some reason isn’t ever within reach. My solution has been to pretend I’m Dick Tracy (for those of you who remember him) and aim my voice at my Apple Watch. Works great and the folks on the other end report that the transmitted audio is great. I should admit I’m surprised when my watch rings and vibrates and indeed it takes a few seconds to realize the phone is nowhere in sight and I can answer the call with the watch. Works well for Apple people and there’s probably a similar Android solution.

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Well, there’s intent, and there’s semantics in the word “similar” that was used.

To the folks who called out the comment “It’s a nice HA similar to the Oticon, just only (that it’s) sold at Costco.”, they saw it for its intent, which was to imply that the HearLink is “equivalent” to the Oticon More, but sold at Costco for a much cheaper price.

This implication has been used many times before in other threads on this forum, often times by Costco HIS’s who told their patients as such, as reported by forum posters. The opposition from the folks who called this out was mainly against the intent, because they’re not equivalent, because the cores are different.

But because the word “similar” was used in the comment, it created the opportunity to dissect this word to its literal meaning to divert away from the original intent in order to justify the comment. This is what fueled the dispute.

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Thanks for your clarification and for being a welcome peacemaker. (FWIW, I agree with your analysis.)

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I’ve commented to many people who say a Costco hearing aid is “the same as” another hearing aid that it is similar, but not the same. One might get less of a reaction if one replied that yes, it is similar, but then point out differences rather than say it “is demonstrably false.”

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@MDB: That’s good advice. Thanks. I’ll take it.:+1:t2:

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inexpensive Bluetooth keyboards on Amazon.