I just hit the 10 day point for testing the Phonak Lumity P90-RT hearing aids and I’m actually quite pleased with how well I am hearing with these hearing aids. I’ve got another appointment with my audiologist on Monday morning to get fitted with the new Resound Omnia equivalents to the Lumity L90. My audiologist wants me to take both home to test and compare. I thought I would post a quick summary of my observations over the last 10 days before I start testing the Resound Omnia’s on Monday. Here are my thoughts on the Lumity:
The sound from these hearing aids is superb…and that is really what matters the most. It’s hard to point at any one thing as it appears there are improvements across the board. I like these hearing aids and will consider purchasing them if the Omnia’s fall short. Here are some thoughts I can share:
Environmental Sounds: I find the sound from these hearing aids to be very natural and there are many things in my daily sound environment that I am now hearing again. Everything from the furnace going on in the basement to an airplane flying by overhead, birds chirping, cars driving by…the list goes on. It just seems I am hearing more things than I used to with my Resound Quattro’s. I don’t know if the Lumity hearing aids were just setup better or whether they are have made significant improvements to how sound is processed. I will just say that I am hearing more. I will also say that at no time over the last 10 days did anything sound tinny or unnatural. Hearing is normal sounding and I actually didn’t even notice a transition between the Quattro’s and the Lumity’s. When in the automatic mode, these hearing aids shift seamlessly through the different programs and you rarely notice a change.
Speech: Speech understanding is also improved across the board. I am having fewer issues hearing people speak. I am having better comprehension in noisy environments too. Much easier to hear people who are sitting beside me in the car or talking to me from either side while sitting on the sofa. The hearing aids seem to adapt well to just about any listening environment and I rarely had to change programs to find improvement or rely on reading lips to sort out what people where saying. I would say the only environment where I didn’t see a huge improvement was sitting in a noisy restaurant with multiple conversations going on at the same table. The scenario is 3 couples all sitting at the same table and multiple conversations going on back and forth. With Lumity, I have no issue hearing the people beside me quite clearly but Lumity (and probably any hearing aids) can’t cope well with multiple conversations all coming from the same direction. One on one conversations in bad noise are fine and definitely improved. When you have too many conversations all coming at the same time from the same direction, I guess nothing will really help.
Music: This is an area that is significantly improved. Music sounds fantastic again through these hearing aids. Not sure why but there is more bass and dynamic range. Phonak seems to have done something to the music program and IMHO, they have nailed it. Music on Lumity is significantly better than Quattro and close to the quality of wireless earbuds. May just be the RICs have improved and the frequency range is better. Would love someone else testing these hearing aids to confirm this.
Bluetooth: Surprisingly good. Maybe the iPhone integration isn’t quite a good as my Quattro’s with MFI but the sound quality through the Lumity’s was better. The bluetooth connection was rock solid and I don’t think I experienced a single dropped call on any device. There was also the ability to connect to Apple, Android and Windows and they all worked well. I had no issues connecting to my work Windows laptop (less than a year old) with the native bluetooth built into the laptop. No need to buy a third party bluetooth dongle and no issues with sound and lips being out of sync. iPhone was rock solid with Lumity and that was a key thing for me testing non-MFI hearing aids for the first time.
Other Stuff: The app is still a bit buggy and hopefully they will push out some updates to solve some of the small bugs with the hearing aids not remembering setting changes via the app. The charger is nice and compact but it would be nice to have a battery in the charger in case you want to charge the hearing aids on a flight, etc. Battery life for Lumity seems to be in the 18-24 hour range. I didn’t experience a single day where I ran out of batteries but there were a few days where I was down to 10-20%. Might be an issue for those who have jobs with long hours.
All in all, a great experience and I was impressed. My hearing and comprehension is better and that is the most important thing. Looking forward to a direct comparison between Lumity and Omnia next week and I will definitely post my observations comparing the two.
Very interested in getting feedback from others testing both platforms.
Jordan