I haven’t had much luck with various OPN programs I tried, not because they were bad, but because I couldn’t really tell much difference between them.
Here are the programs I’ve tried:
Mode 1. Default program built based on my answers to the OPN setup questions to fine tune it to my taste. The noise reduction is set to medium here. I also had the 4K & 5K down 1db and 6K and 8K down by 2db on the right HA to reduce the distortion I hear at high frequencies.
Mode 2. Same as default program but with noise reduction turned up on max -> I can’t tell any difference between this and the default mode 1. Can’t tell any more noise reduction.
Mode 3. Directional mode program with max noise reduction -> Can’t tell any difference that it’s in the directional mode. Sounds omnidirectional to me just the same. Negative artifact -> start hearing very noticeable low frequency floor noise in this mode.
So I told the audi to scrap programs 2 and 3 above. And I asked her to just put max noise reduction for my mode 1 (the default one). I complained to her that in very noisy environment, I cannot hear speech very well. For example, while driving at freeway speed with a lot of road noise, I can’t hear a female speech sitting in the back seat. She consulted with the Oticon trainer on how to tweak my program to help with this, and the trainer suggested to her to try another program for me:
Mode 4. Copy my mode 1 (default mode), change noise reduction to maximum, BUT also open up everything. I asked her what does that mean, “open up everything”? She said it means that instead of using the settings based on my setup profile answers, just assume that I prefer to hear everything wide-open without much restriction (except that we still implement max noise reduction). I think the idea here is to hope that the wide open settings can help me pick up speech better in very noisy environment. I haven’t notice much difference between this mode and my mode 1 so far. But then I haven’t had a chance to replicate and be in a very noisy car again with a female talking in the back seat to compare between the 2 modes. So the verdict is still out on this.
The bottom line is that with my older HAs, it was very easy to tell the differences between each mode (regular, music, noisy environments, etc). But with the OPN, you can have multiple programs all you want, but the question is whether you can really hear any significant differences between them or not? The answer for me so far is no. Maybe that’s why they only propose 1 default mode in the first place. Maybe it’s because the “open” paradigm is such that you’re supposed to be able to hear everything anyway, so there’s no need to have customized programs because they’ll still all sound the same to you.
Actually I have 2 more distinct modes:
TV Mode -> obviously only for use with the TV adapter
Autophone mode -> turned on to have the HA automatically switch to this mode when I hold a phone (or headset) up to my ear(s).