I’m curious if others have experienced this problem. I have a iPhone 11 and Phonak sphere 90 hearing aids. The problem I’m having is they will randomly disconnect and then reconnect themselves. I know the iPhone 11 is Bluetooth 5.0 and the hearing aids are 5.3. Could that be the reason? It’s not a big problem because they disconnect and reconnect quickly, but it is annoying.
I’ve been wearing the Sphere 90’s for the last three months and I’ve noticed the same thing. What I have observed is that it happens with some devices more than others. As an example, it rarely happens with my iPhone 16 Pro Max and my MacBook Pro laptop but it does tend to happen more with my company Dell Windows Laptop. I’ve tried updating the Bluetooth drivers on the Dell laptop but it only marginally helped.
My personal theory is that the drops are caused by radio/electrical interference that is impacting the Bluetooth frequencies the hearing aids are operating on. The number of devices that are wirelessly connecting in a typical home or work environment is really high these days so no big surprise that most wifi and bluetooth channels are very crowded.
Just my two cents.
Jordan
Yeah that makes sense. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have to upgrade to the iPhone 16 because if I understand right the iPhone 16 is also Bluetooth 5.3. Not sure if that makes a difference but maybe it does. I do to spend the money because my old iPhone does still work.
I’m in week one with Spheres 90 after 1st pair stopped working . Now these are working except Bluetooth keeps going in and out on phone calls and streaming music. I have IPhone 15 pro with 18.2 . I’m still in trial and considering switching to Oticon Intent if this is going to an ongoing issue.
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My Sphere’s are rock solid with Bluetooth on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. I would try deleting the two Bluetooth connections on the iPhone, rebooting the iPhone and then re-installing.
Jordan
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I also have regular Bluetooth drop outs when streaming YouTube or during online meetings. Sometimes i have no problems for an hour, often a 1-2 second dropout every minute or so and sometimes continuous drop outs every 5 seconds.
I thought i fixed it by making my left hearing aid the streaming HA and sent in the right HA for repair, but I now have the same drop outs with my temporary replacement.
It starts with the non streaming HA, and within a fraction of a second the other HA ( the one connecting to my devices) drops out also. If I am lucky it will recover within a second, but often it take 1 or 2 seconds to start streaming sound again. This makes them useless for online meetings.
I have a 25 euro bt adapter for my Bose headphones that had been rock solid for years.
Number of connected devices does not seem to matter. Having the app continuously connected also makes no difference.
I have an iphone 11, ipad air 3 and a MacBook Pro 2019.
Wiping all bt pairings in target also does not help.
Any people out there with rock solid Bluetooth? What is your configuration?
And please chime in if you experience the same problems. Phonak says they have had a few reports, but does not seem to look at it as a wide spread problem.
I contacted Phonak and this is what they said:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Phonak. We apologize for the Bluetooth disconnect and reconnect issues you’re experiencing with your hearing aids.
To address the connectivity issue you’re facing and to re-establish a connection between your hearing aids, please follow these general steps:
Please make sure your phone software is up to date and reboot your phone before beginning.
Unpairing Phone Call Connection:
- Navigate to your phone’s settings app
- Open the settings for Bluetooth
- Locate “L or R-Phonak Hearing Aid,” NOT “LE_L or LE_R-Phonak Hearing Aid” (This may be listed as something different if your audiologist has changed it)
- Tap on the settings icon on the right side. This may show as a small blue circle with the letter ‘i’ inside, or as a small gear.
- Tap on “Forget Device” or “Unpair.”
Pairing Phone Call Connection:
- Turn both hearing aids fully off and back on. Your hearing aids will be in Bluetooth pairing mode for 3 minutes after they turn on.
- Select the option to “Scan,” “Pair New Device” and/or look under the “Other Devices” section.
- Tap on the “L_ or R_Phonak Hearing Aid” hearing aid connection.
- If you see a Bluetooth pairing request on your phone after you select it, make sure to agree to pair.
- You should now be connected for Bluetooth streaming for phone calls and audio.
We do find sometimes depending on the phone settings, that can happen. Here are the settings to check:
- Go to your phone settings
- Go to Accessibility
- Go to Touch
- Go to Call Audio Routing
- Make sure this is set to Bluetooth headset. If it is set to Automatic, that is when the phone decides where the sound goes, and sometimes it can switch from a headset/hearing aids back to the phone.
If that was the problem, you should also make sure system sounds on your phone are off, usually it is these sounds that prompt that switch.
- In your phone settings, go to Sounds & Haptics
- Go to Keyboard feedback, touch that and then turn off sounds
- go back to sounds and also turn off lock sounds
- go to Display and Brightness
- Turn off “raise to wake”
If you are still having trouble, we would recommend reaching out to your hearing care provider for in person assistance to troubleshoot your issue.
Warm Regards,
Consumer Technical Support
After updating my phone to 18.2 I’m not having the problem. Once in a while, but like it was.
Ok so I changed the settings that Phonak suggested and it seems to have worked. I haven’t had any disconnects since I changed the settings! If that changes I’ll let you know.
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Ok, so as I said I changed the settings that Phonak suggested and it seemed to work but the dropout are back. Not as bad but still there. I put my Lumity’s in just to see if I get any dropouts and found that they are rock solid. I really hope that Phonak comes up with a firmware upgrade because I really do like the hearing aids but I hate the dropouts!
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i have the same experience. The restart and repair on all devices appears to make the dropouts a lot less frequent and shorter in length, but after a few days they were back. Making it unpractical to use for videoconferencing or listenings podcasts.
Not sure it was coincidence ( regression to the mean) or really related to the repairing. After a second repair it appeared better, but not as clean as the first time.
My audiologist days a previous Phonak model had similar issues that were eventually solved with a firmware update. Fingers crossed.
I’ve had this happen in the last week or so a bunch of times. Weird thing is…it didn’t happen when I first got the Sphere’s 3 months ago. I’ve done some experimenting and I’m convinced it’s an iOS bug and not something wrong with the hearing aids.
Today was a good example. I had a MS-Teams call for work. I turned on bluetooth on my Dell laptop and it connected immediately. After my call ended 60 minutes later, I ended my Teams call and turned off bluetooth on my laptop leaving my iPhone as the only connected device. I immediately noticed that my hearing through the Sphere’s was a bit quiet. During my initial fitting, I had the audiologist turn down the microphones in the streaming program so I immediately knew that the hearing aids were still connected to something. A quick check of the myPhonak app showed that I was still in the streaming program and given that the iPhone was the only connected device at this point, I figured the Sphere’s were connected to the iPhone and doing something. I then turned off Bluetooth on my iPhone and the Sphere’s immediately when back to the normal Calm program in AutoSense.
Basically, the iPhone was grabbing the Bluetooth connection and had opened a channel to the Sphere’s to stream even thought nothing was streaming on my iPhone. I then rebooted the iPhone and everything seems to be ok again.
Not sure why this is happening. It could be there is a bug in iOS 18.1 and 18.2 that is causing issues with Classic Bluetooth connections and given the Sphere’s use Classic Bluetooth.
Curious if the only people having this issue are iPhone users. Any Android people having issues?
Just
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Being connected to Bluetooth does not always put the HAs in streaming mode in my experience on iOS 18.2. I found certain apps have this issue. When I open the Spotify app it puts the HAs in streaming mode and keeps them there even when I start streaming to a Spotify connect device.
And I have the problem also on my MacBook and you on your Windows laptop, right? So would the problem then not most likely be with the HAs?
I had terrible dropouts once playing a video from VLC on my iPad. When I increased the audio delay the sound became suddenly rock solid. I wonder if it has something to do with buffering.