Jordan gives good advice on getting Spheric noise reduction as a standalone program.
You can not only adjust the Sphere settings in Target but certain features, such as the amount of noise reduction and the amount of front focus, can also be adjusted in the MyPhonak app (and the Phonak literature indicates you’re tweaking the same settings in the MyPhonak app as in Target).
I also found it helpful to amplify soft sounds by one “notch” in the MyPhonak Dynamic Loudness adjustment. I hit the Speech option, too (this tweaks the MyPhonak Equalizer (I like the base low, the mid-tones a notch above average, and the treble two notches).
I think this helps; after I remove ~all the noise, I still have a soft-spoken wife to hear.
I never adjust my hearing aids by pushing their buttons. I do have Siri set to come on if I double-tap an ear.
Although several people recommended disabling the Always Connected Bluetooth option under the Devices tab in the MyPhonak app to save phone battery life, I don’t find leaving it on causes much of an iPhone battery hit, and the MyPhonak app is much more responsive if the HAs are always left connected to your smartphone. I usually run my iPhone in Battery Saver (low-power mode) to keep my plethora of phone apps from running in the background (~300 apps on my iPhone beyond the standard Apple iOS apps).
I’ve wondered if running in low-power mode with the lack of background refresh for many apps has anything to do with the ease with which AutoSense can turn on Spheric Noise reduction, but I’ve been too lazy to investigate the idea.
My audi overestimated the cost of cShells with a new set of receivers (to keep the old ones as spares). She ended up charging me $120 apiece. She had a devil of a time pulling the original receivers out of the Sphere bodies. Hence, the irony of keeping the old receivers as spares in case I have to send in the cShells to Phonak for a receiver problem is, based on @raylock1’s experience with receiver wires being trashed on extrication, that one or more of my spares may now be no good. But based on Ray’s experience, I’m certainly not going to try pulling the cShell receivers out of the Sphere bodies to test my “spare” receiver functionality any time soon.
Most of the time, I use either a custom Calm Situation program or a custom Speech in Noise program, both with the Dynamic Loudness and equalizer adjustments in the MyPhonak app described above. I don’t particularly like AutoSense choices and sound, even though I have Speech Recovery (or whatever it’s called for soft speech amplification) set up, I save Spheric noise reduction for really extreme situations. But with all three tuned programs, Calm, Speech in Loud Noise (Restaurant), and Spheric Speech noise reduction, I can handle almost any situation if I am close to the speaker. All I care about is whether I can clearly understand the speaker, not if the speaker sounds as he/she would if there were no noise anywhere around.
According to the MyPhonak app, I spend about 1 1/4 hrs a day in noisy environments, 1 2/3 hr streaming, a few minutes in Music (driving when the wife isn’t a passenger!), and the rest in Calm situations. I’ve only been wearing the Spheres about 10 1/4 hours a day (lazy about putting them on, don’t wear them, but wear ear protection when doing dirty or noisy work in the yard). I only charge them up to about 70% at the beginning of the day and they usually discharge to about 35% SOC by the end of the day, with the right master BT aid being 5% to 10% lower. Whenever the charging case LED starts flashing green with the aids charging (less than one full charge remaining for both aids), I charge the case for 2 1/2 hours without the aids in it. The case will then be able to charge my aids to 70% SOC for several days before it needs to be recharged.
Since the depth of discharge (DoD) is a well-known factor affecting the long-term lifespan of Li-ion batteries, the above scheme should ensure that both the charging case and the HAs have very healthy batteries several years down the road. I avoid wearing my hearing aids outdoors in the height of Texas summer heat (when relatively few humans in our neck of Texas are outdoors anyway when it’s 100F or more and the sun is a broiling oven!).