I’ve had my trial Sphere 90s for a few days now and been able to try them out in a wide range of settings. I’ve taken them everywhere from driving with and without people in the car, being at home in the quiet, a party with inside and outside elements and many people talking around me, and a very noisy bar. My wife has been kind enough to be the test dummy in all of this and talk at me from different angles with as much noise going on around us as I could find. I’ll try to summarize what I’ve found so far as clearly as I can to help give an impression of what these are good at and what they aren’t.
Battery: I’ve been wearing these for about 14-16 hours a day and being in environments where the Sphere mode kicks in for about 3-4 hours. When I took them out to go to bed, I had just under 60% battery left. I was really expecting these to maaaaaaybe squeeze out 1 day of wear but like another user posted in their review, they battery life is completely fine with these.
Sphere: To be completely honest, when this mode kicks in, it is the clearest I have ever heard in noise since I experienced my hearing loss. This has been the first time I’ve been able to easily hold conversations with people in crowded spaces and almost feel like I have somewhat normal hearing again. The hype is real and these are a complete game changer. BUT, I’ll go into some detail of the pros/cons to this mode
Pros: Great clarity. It’s almost like there is a microphone on the person talking that is directly connected to your hearing aids. It turns on/off as it needs and you can hear the background noise drop out when it kicks on. Meaning, that the 4 or so hours you’re supposed to get with this is not just a straight shot of when it’s loud, it turns on and the clock starts ticking. It turns on when someone is talking at you under the right conditions and when they are you are no longer talking for a period of time, it turns off. It feels like you get way more than 4 hours of this in loud environments because its cumulative and shuts off pretty quickly when it is not needed.
Cons: It feels like you need to be facing the person talking OR have them be talking louder than what is happening around you. It seems to only focus on one person at a time and directionality seems to be a big part of this. I also noticed some audio static when it kicked on. If you can imagine changing the channel on an older stereo system where you get an audible noise when switching between modes. It can be a little jarring but this only happened a few times. There can be some strange sounding volume jumps with background noise when its not clear if someone is talking to you or not. It sounds like the HA is trying to figure out what to focus on and that focus is jumping around a bit so that can sound fairly awkward but it’s not terribly bad. For very loud environments (there was a group of women sitting behind us who were screaming and just being completely obnoxious… which was amazing to have for this test!), you’re not going to get much benefit if you have open domes or huge vents. These are trials so I don’t have my molds and was fitted with power domes. I had a pretty hard time hearing my wife when the group behind us started one of their wine induced screaming matches BUT if I plugged my ears with my fingers to simulate having my ears blocked off by a mold, I could hear her great. So I think it’s super important to stress that the more sound that naturally comes into your ears because of your mold/dome type, the less benefit you’re going to get from these in this very specific type of situation. I’m still pretty young and travel a good amount for work so I find myself in these places more often than not and being able to hear while someone near me is having a great night out is a godsend. One last downside, and I don’t know if this can be adjusted, but the Spheric mode kicks in maybe just a little too late. I would really like if it would turn on at a slightly less loud level. The threshold to get it to turn on is right where it’s borderline impossible to understand people so I found myself riding that line quite a few times where I was really struggling to hear anything and then a minute or so later, the volume would go up a pinch and then it would kick in. If it turned on at maybe 5db less, it would feel perfect to me.
Size The Spheres are pretty massive. I won’t lie, it’s almost a deal breaker for me with how large they are. I feel like I’m wearing (no offense to anyone here) old people hearing aids. I should say, I feel like I’m wearing what people used to associate with old people hearing aids. They are quite a bit longer than my Oticon More 1s and the bottoms are large to the point where you can easily see them sticking out from my ears when looking from the side/back. I have short hair so they’re very obvious, I don’t think it would matter to someone with longer hair. That said, I will gladly deal with something more visible if it means I can hear better in loud situations. For those of you who aren’t in noisy environments often, you would need to decide if the added size is worth it because they really are quite large.
Sound Quality: I can’t touch on this too much because it’s different for everyone. I personally think my Oticons sound better than the Phonaks but these are just the trials and I know that I can tweak them a ton and probably get them very close to what I’m used to. Phonak seems to pretty aggressively reduce background noise in all situations (which I really don’t like) and it feels like that cuts into the areas where voices are. To me, voices can sound a little thin, which makes them harder to understand. I think this is more of a general settings/eq issue because I felt the same way when trying Phonaks a few years ago. This is purely my experience with these and I recognize that what people consider to sound “good” is incredibly subjective. Outside of that, They seem to perform about as well as any other HA in general noise environments. I can hear pretty well but they still have the drawbacks of any HA with background noise competing with voices fairly strongly. I do like how the Phonak app lets you adjust the amount of background reduction though and that seems to work well. The downside to it is that the more aggressive you are with the noise reduction, the more it feels like voices are getting scooped with it and they start to get very thin sounding.
Charger: The charger feels incredibly cheap and flimsy. Also, good luck if you have somewhat large molds and getting them to fit in there. No idea why they would design it like this when a huge number of their customers use molds but the charger is crap. It is super light weight (which is kind of nice) to the point that I don’t know how there is a battery in it but that means that just having the a USB cable attached to it is going to pull it over. The HAs are held in with magnets which makes putting them in easy BUT when you try to take them out, you need to hold the charger and pull the HA out. Otherwise, you will just pick up the entire assembly and the HA will stay stuck in there. That’s a minor complaint but its a pain when waking up in the morning and wanting to just reach over to get my hearing started. Because of the magnets, if your hearing aids cant push all the way down into the charger because your molds are pushing up on each other (You’ll have to stack them because they wont fit side by side), I can easily see one HA not being able to charge and people being left with a dead one in the morning. I don’t know what Phonak was thinking when they designed this but the charger is garbage and for as much hate as Dr Cliff gets here sometimes, he is 100% correct on his criticism here.
Conclusion: Outside of everything I wrote, these feel like your incremental increase in a modern hearing aid and should give you what you expect from a Phonak aid. The bluetooth is great, they have the Phoank sound and they do everything you would expect with the same shortcomings we all know, regardless of brand. That said, the Spheric mode is just hands down amazing. Even if the rest of the hearing aid was trash, which it is not, I would still buy these just for that mode. It really is that good and I felt like kids you see in videos where they get hearing aids for the first time and discover sound. Being able to walk around in Costco and hear my wife like she was talking directly into my ears is a game changer for me and being able to talk to colleagues at a restaurant without struggling to keep up is worth it to me. Can you run that mode all day? No. Does that really matter? I don’t think so. I can’t imagine many situations where I would actually need 4+ hours of this being on 100% of the time. Maybe a long wedding is the exception here but even that is debatable. I do wish this was the 2nd or 3rd generation of this where the size would be smaller and you could have the AI chip just be the primary one that was running 100% of the time but for a 1st gen version, I think it is more than enough in 90% of real life situations. Personally, I will be ordering these on Tuesday, after the holiday, after only having them for a few days. It really is that big of a difference for me.
