And the best peer review is us, nothing beats real world unbiased reviewers ; )
Phonak went on a big spend for these so the marketing department can give themselves a pat on the back…
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Square root of 6 is ~2.449. Theoretically, therefore, 2.449 times further range. Maybe they approximated it down to 2 due to physical loss of signal in real world is stronger than in mathematics. 
For radiated power it is CUBE not SQUARE. Power doesn’t radiate in a plane, but into 3d space.
Cube root of 6 is 1.817
WH
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I wonder if a 675 implant battery could provide enough power for AI mode, and how long it would last.
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Microsoft Copilot AI answer on how BT signal falls off with distance:
(reference #1 in answer is official BT SIG site; just the humidity in the air can affect how BT signal strength is attenuated…)
Bluetooth Range on Vimeo
Copilot
The strength of a Bluetooth signal does not decrease strictly according to a simple mathematical relationship like the square or cube of the distance. Instead, it’s influenced by several factors [1]:
Radio Spectrum: Bluetooth technology uses the 2.4 GHz ISM spectrum band (2400 to 2483.5 MHz), which enables a good balance between range and throughput [1].
PHY Receiver Sensitivity and Transmit Power: The value of the broadcasting power and distance determines the strength of a signal [4].
Path Loss: This is the reduction in signal strength that occurs as a radio wave propagates through the air. Path loss, or path attenuation, occurs naturally over distance and is impacted by the environment in which the signal is being transmitted [1].
Obstacles: Obstacles between the transmitter and the receiver can deteriorate the signal [1].
Bluetooth devices, operating over shorter ranges, experience a rapid decline in RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) with distance [3]. For instance, when the value of broadcasting power is 2–4 dBm, the strength of the RSSI signal is around -25 to -100 in the distance ranging from 40 to 50 meters [4].
So, while distance does play a role in Bluetooth signal strength, it’s not as simple as a square or cube relationship. It’s more complex and depends on a variety of factors. The signal is much stronger if the distance the signal has to travel is small [2]. The longer the signal has to travel, the higher the chances of interference [2].
Source: Conversation with Copilot, 8/7/2024
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AIA if anyone has already posted this link. For an impressive demo of the power of DeepSonic AI noise removal, check out the audio player on this Phonak Audeo Sphere web page with AI noise reduction OFF vs. ON (scroll down the page a little bit):
Phonak Audéo Sphere™ Infinio Transform Your Hearing Experience
AMAZING!
Edit_Update: I checked with truhearing.com and in a Live Chat, I was told that the price of the Audeo Sphere 90 would be $2,250 per aid without insurance applied. You have to find an audi or a hearing care center associated with truhearing.com to buy through truhearing.com. They do not sell direct online.
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I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything close to 40 to 50 meters. But I can say my Apple Airpods do a much better job than the p90s.
WH
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For those who have been posting in this thread that there is no peer-reviewed research on the tech in the Phonak Audeo Sphere, I’d like to point out, as @bigaltavista did earlier in the thread, that Phonak (or a related subsidiary) published a paper on DNN processing of noise removal in the journal NATURE, one of the world’s leading scientific publications, in February 2023. That’s PEER-REVIEWED.
A link to the Nature article was posted in a new thread ~simultaneously with publication by Abram Bailey on 2/15/23: Restoring speech intelligibility for hearing aid users with deep learning, and previously referenced in this thread by @bigaltavista Phonak Audéo Sphere - #40 by bigaltavista
Although Abram in his 2023 post didn’t reveal whether it had anything to do with Phonak, I’d like to take credit for making the connection then:
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Speech enhancer is a nice little feature for a lot of people and a feature I have to turn off for some. But I wonder whether the sphere program on the 90 and the 70 will be identical. For example, Oticon throttles the functionality of their opn dnn from the 1 to the 2–will Phonak do something similarly? Do the reduced channels in the 70 impact the efficacy of the AI denoising? I don’t know.
Interesting question. My gut instinct is . . . probably not on average. I think they would regularly activate the music program, but I bet they don’t activate the speech-in-noise program as much as you think. Movies often feel a lot louder than they actually are. They have a lot of sudden loud noises. I’m not sure they actually have that many sustained speech in noise environments that are reproduced realistically enough over surround sound to trigger the SNR programs. BUT, it’s an open question. Next time I go to the movies I’ll try to remember to bring some hearing aids any re-set the data-logger before hand. It would be movie-dependent as well.
Your screen sounds different than mine. I see quite an attractive deep burgandy red (not a shade that I would mistake for blood), a sort of moody-interior-decorating green, and . . . well, I’m not sure how the copper will turn out in real life. Maybe almost a pink-gold.
~$6200 Canadian. That’s decent pricing. But is Truhearing one of those third party American companies that reimburses clinicians peanuts such that you get next to zero coverage for follow-up care?
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From the following truhearing.com web page: How It Works | TruHearing
Ongoing support
We help you successfully adjust to your hearing aids by including one year of follow-up visits with your provider for fitting and adjustments. You also get educational information sent directly to you and a library of support materials.
So, the first year is covered and after that, it’s pay-as-you-go. But with my ReSound Quattros, I had almost a half-dozen issues with my left Quattro. Each time, ReSound replaced the complete HA body at no charge, and the audi said she was reimbursed by ReSound and charged me nothing through my entire 3-year warranty period with the Quattros. In my 2nd year with the Omnias, I’m pretty sure I damaged my left Omnia body microphones by careless, very sleepy cleaning with a Jodi-Vac needle. I volunteered to pay, saying I could see damage under a dissecting microscope. The audi said, “Let’s send your left HA body in for repair.” I lucked out in that ReSound replaced the HA body with a new one. Again no charge from ReSound or the audi. So, with warranty issues, truhearing.com is not involved. It’s between your HCP and the HA OEM. Especially if you are in a big city, you can get a list of truhearing connected providers from truhearing and shop around until you find an HCP you like. In San Antonio, there are both individual audiologists and chain hearing care centers connected with truhearing. As a State of Texas retiree, my Blue Cross-Blue Shield mentions truhearing.com as a source of hearing aids in the hearing aid coverage section. You do have to hunt around on the truhearing website, though, to find any mention of them selling the big-brand HAs. They used to have a database catalog that listed HAs by brand, price, features, etc. Now you have to personally contact truhearing or your truhearing HCP to find out about availability and price.
Hearing Aid Manufacturers | TruHearing
(scrolll down page to see major brands they sell through HCPs - they want to sell their own in-house brand first!).
But that’s all just manufacturer warranty stuff (also, Resound didn’t reimburse the clinician anything–that’s a misunderstanding, it’s not the type of financial relationship we have with manufacturers). How often were you actually in sitting down with the clinician getting your hearing checked, your hearing aids checked, reviewing your day-to-day function? Still annually? Semi-annually, or never? Were adjustments made after the initial fit? Some users don’t need them, but other users need more hand-holding. I’m just curious because on the professional boards I see huge complaints about the third party insurance system in the USA, and from what I gather those patients are not accessing the same care as private pay patients because the clinicians simply cannot afford to provide it at the level of reimbursement they are getting. Some patients are plug-and-play and don’t need anything else, but others do and it seems like the 3rd party insurer forbids balance-billing with the result that those patients who need extra care are just out of luck (i.e. the clinician is not allowed to charge extra and also understandably unwilling to work pro bono). A significant number of American clinicians appear to be moving towards simply dropping all 3rd party insurance business.
BUT, this is very tangential to the main thread…
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It’s helpful. I’m glad you wrote
Yes, my basic point is that Audeo Spheres will be more affordable thru truhearing, it’s not a full-package deal, and YMMV, according to whom you pick as an HCP and their policies. But truhearing is not a fly-by-night operation. I was happy with my first fit and am a DIY’er; my hearing loss has been very stable over ~the last 14 years. Also, am not very discriminating or fussy about what I hear as long as I can understand speech. Was going to go to Costco for my next set of HAs in 2026, but if a Costco version of the Sphere doesn’t show up, truhearing would be my fallback option.
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Thanks, Jim.
There is a likely connection between Sonova/Phonak and Audatic. While at the time of the article (2023) there were only vague indications in terms of business ownership, what stands out more today is that the Managing Director, Henning Hansemann, is now featured in Phonak articles and marketing videos.
The article linked is coauthored by Henning Hansemann, the Managing Director of Audatic. This suggests that Sonova probably partnered with or acquired Audatic at some stage and has since figured out how to run their denoise algorithms on a hearing aid-sized processing chip, instead of a smartphone, which was their previous model.
I’m curious to see how the devices work in the real world, and whether the compromises of this „groundbreaking“ technology are. AI processing is clearly the future of everything, however this is first generation technology, and Phonak has removed „Comfort in echo“, CROS support, automatic StereoZoom, and software indicates an option to limit sphere mode to 3 hours a day. Add Bluetooth classic streaming on top, and who knows if you’ll achieve the advertised battery life at all!
Al
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The thing that struck me in the 2/15/23 Nature paper cited by Abram was the extensive discussion of the applicability of DNN denoising towards hearing aids and their optimism that with the help of Moore’s Law (! 
), they expected a DNN might run on hearing aids in a few years time:
Outlook
A challenge for neural network-based denoising algorithms is their computational cost compared to denoising methods traditionally used in hearing aids. As with most deep learning-based systems, the performance of our network improves with the available computational resources. Here, we limited the size of the network such that the algorithm runs in real time on a laptop. Hence, the computational power required to achieve the presented results is higher than what is available in current hearing aids and scaling the technology to the point where it can fit in a hearing aid still requires engineering more powerful hardware and/or more effcient models. However, the gap is not prohibitively large, and we speculate that Moore’s law and the exponential improvement in computational power per watt46 should lead to a feasible implementation on a hearing aid within a few years. Additionally, the rapid progress in the algorithmic effciency of neural networks47,48 should further shorten adoption time.
In summary, we have presented a denoising system that enables hearing aid users to achieve speech-in-noise intelligibility levels comparable to those for normal hearing listeners and generalizes across noise environments. Deep learning-based denoising systems could hence facilitate an entirely new type of hearing improvement that is directionally independent and could prove useful not only for hearing impaired users, but also for normal hearing listeners who wish to reduce noise in noisy situations, such as crowded restaurants or bars.
Since my search said that Audatic was a Swiss company, I made the unwarranted leap that Sonova must somehow be involved. Glad to hear there’s some further evidence that might be so. As the Nature discussion says, the two key things are the hardware and the computational design of the algorithm. If Phonak has both those things locked up, maybe it will be awhile before anyone else can catch up. OTH, maybe it won’t. The discussion points out that denoising would also be of tremendous benefit “… for normal hearing listeners who wish to reduce noise in noisy situations, such as crowded restaurants and bars.” Phonak doesn’t make earbuds (yet! 
). I wonder if some company who does, who’s not going to compete with Phonak in the HA sphere (pun intended) might be their next big customer?!
Sonova indeed manufactures earbuds, however they do so under the brand of Sennheiser consumer electronic division, which they acquired a few years ago. They also released some OTC products under Sennheiser’s brand as well.
I would be surprised if any of the other big manufacturers have anything in the short term pipeline to compete with this new Deepsonic processor chip. If it works, and this still remains to be confirmed, Sonova could be headed for a long lead, especially with confirmed Auracast and BT 5.3 support.
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AudioExpress carried a short piece on Phonak’s announcedment.
This quote might be germain to some of the discussion above. In reference to the Deepsonic chip…
"this chip is 53 times more powerful than existing chips used in hearing-aids and is capable of performing 7,700 million operations per second.
As a reference, current platforms available for consumer hearables include the Greenwaves GAP9 ultra-low power processor that offers up to 50,000 million operations per second (or 50 giga-operations). For perspective, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Compute Platform (laptop class) includes a neural processing unit that’s capable of 45 trillion operations per second."
They’re a little salty on the whole thing actually:
“For some reason, these products targeted for prescription by medical professionals continue to be a complicated maze of too many options and multiple layers of different technologies that, in the end, do not benefit the people who need hearing-aids.”
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Nothing on Wholesale Hearing yet, which look like they are affiliated. I got my P90s from them, as my Audiologist couldn’t get them at that price.
Peter
@Zebras
Probably not, unless reviews are oustanding. I may wait for a battery version.
Peter
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