Resound Omnia vs Phonak Lumity

Jordan, I have been following your story from the beginning. Glad you went with the Lumity. Partly due to your clear posts it encouraged me to get a pair too (L90-RL ). I’m impressed with their improvements over my previous Phonak Marvels (M90-R).

@platypus Thank for confirming my findings. What are some of your observations? Music? Hearing in noise, etc?

Jordan

The first thing I noticed was Stereozoom 2.0. This really works. It picks out the voice in front of me in a noisy environment. (I have a Partner Mic which I would use if eating out with a friend but Stereozoom is effective enough in a pinch).

Everything is just slightly easier (16 % improved SNR according to Phonak?) to understand/hear. I like how my guitar sounds - richer, more melodic.

Streaming media sounds great and as someone said almost as good as earbuds - maybe as good. Either way, better than the Marvels all else being equal. (The only thing I can think of that would be different would be APD2.0?)

Jordan, I already had a PartnerMic and a Roger Select iN. I would highly recommend you consider getting a Roger On iN. It would be very helpful in your work meetings. Yes they are expensive, but really enhance speech understanding in virtually every application.

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I think you should be able to remove them in the app. No? I have iphone.
Click devices tab (middle on the bottom)
Under Program Management open Hearing aid programs
Restaurant, Music, and TV, when opened, all have a “delete program” button at the bottom.

The ones provisioned by your HCP needs to be removed by them.

Hope this helps.

WH

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WH … yes it worked, thank you

Thanks for review. This Friday, I see my Audio and will get fitted with the Phonak L90. What made up my mind was that the ReSound Omnia does not work for people who have small ear canals. Also, the higher range of frequencies with the Phonak L90.

Matthew Allsop, now the Hearing Tracker YouTube guy, has a very detailed review of the ReSound Omnia. Although he says at the start that he only likes to do HA reviews after he’s fitted a number of his patients with a device and gotten their feedback, that doesn’t come out in the “review” at all. It’s basically just a rundown of all the features and attributes of the Omnia, the Smart 3D app, and the varioius accessories. In that, he does an excellent, very thorough job. He gives special kudos to the Smart 3d app (~the best there is, he says), remote fitting, and tinnitus control. He mentions the 150% improvement in signal-to-noise ratio vs. the ReSound One but says nothing about patient experience or his own opinion, even though whether the 150% improvement is real is posed as a prominent question at the beginning of the review (that question was automatically inserted at the beginning of the copied YouTube link below). So, the “review” is basically a litany of features and not very critical in a + or - way, going along with an earlier post of mine in which I complained that Allsop and Dr. Cliff pull their punches when it comes to real performance reviews of HA’s.

Jordan, did you find any noticeable difference between the Lumity and the Omnia in the speed of switching listening environments? I have found the ReSound Quattro relatively slow, taking as long as 5 seconds to adjust between a very noisy and a very quiet environment (e.g., in coming into the front desk of a gym from a very noisy parking lot).

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Jordan,
Thanks for all the info. As a first time HA user it was very helpful. I too went with the L90s, due in no small part to the music setting and how well they work with my acoustic guitar.

Hi @jim_lewis,

Your comment hits the nail on the head. This is absolutely the key difference between Lumity and Omnia. Lumity switches blazingly fast and seems to be switching between 6-7 different types of sound scenarios. It not only does it very fast (without delay) but Phonak has also done something to smooth out the transition between different modes so that you don’t actually notice the transition. The only mode where there seems to be a bit of a delay is the switch to Music Mode (while in automatic). Good example of this is when you get into your car and put some music on while driving. I think they have programmed in a delay before the music mode kicks in. Mostly because everything gets kinda boomy with tons of extra bass and you wouldn’t want this happening unless you were listening to music. The automatic switch to music mode is the only time I notice the hearing aids switching.

Omnia is more sophisticated than Quattro but isn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as Lumity. Quattro uses one ear as the focus ear and one ear as the environmental ear. This didn’t work well for me because Resound hard wires the right ear for speech focus because the right ear is connected to the speech centre in the brain. Well…my right ear has a much lower speech score so that didn’t work well. With Omnia, they improved this setup by giving both ears the ability to switch between focus and environment so this was an improvement for me over Quattro. That being said, Lumity was a good step ahead of this in the sophisticated way it flips between modes and focus microphones to optimize speech comprehension. Plus it’s so fast that it just feels natural.

Make sense?

Jordan

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@twilkins10

You are most welcome! The negative with Lumity is the rechargeable battery life. This isn’t a big deal if you do lots of streaming as you just have to put the hearing aids in the charging for 20-30 minutes at some point in the day and you are good. I usually do this when reading or if I take a shower after working out. Without doing the extra charging, I just make it through the day.

One more negative for both Lumity and Omnia…stupid expensive. But in my humble opinion, worth it for me.

Jordan

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Now THAT"S funny! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Hi, @Ureout. You mentioned awhile back that the Lumity seemed to give you a noticeable improvement in speech recognition in difficult listening situations but haven’t said too much more about your comparative experience with Lumity vs. Omnia (and the One). I’d be interested to hear more about what you’ve found since you’ve been a longtime ReSound user.

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Hi Jim, yes I have worn Resound for my last 4 sets of HA’s… I have the 1’s now and trialed the Omnias recently… I did see a little improvement in hearing in difficult situations and the battery life with the Resounds is SO MUCH better than phonaks also the Resound app is world class where phonaks is just ok
I only got to wear the Lumitys for about a week with the ACTIVE VENT receiver wires and they were AMAZING I’ve heard sounds and conversations from people at a distance that I haven’t heard in a LONGGGG time and in noisy situations they seemed to calm down all the unwanted clatter … then 1 wire stopped working and my Audi had no replacement so I’m wearing normal 3M wires waiting for the replacement AV wires to come in… even with the normal 3M wires I’m hearing better than with the Resounds so even with poorer battery life and a lousy app I’m 95% sure that I will get the lumitys but told my Audi that I needed to wear them again for a week or so with the AV receiver wires once he finally gets them

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Thanks, @Ureout. Your and Jordan’s comments make me very interested in the Lumity. I do enjoy the battery life of the Quattros and MFi connectivity with Apple and the ability to control my Quattros with my Apple Watch. But it sounds like those are conveniences I might want to give up for Lumity sound processing. I typically carry my ReSound charging case around with me on long trips away from home so lugging the Lumity charging case around, too, should just be more of the same for me. I won’t be giving anything a try before the December/January timeframe but we’re almost there now!

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Jim, once the AV wires are in and I wear them again for a few days I’ll let you know how they are

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@jim_lewis

I’m ok with the Phonak app. It actually has more functionality than the Resound app. Weird thing is that with Lumity, I almost never go into the app to change programs or make adjustments. I just leave the Lumity’s in automatic mode and the auto mode gets is right about 95% of the time.

The only real negative with Lumity is battery life. The trick is to just throw them in the charger for 20-30 minutes at some point in the day if you think you will need to go more than 18 hours or will have a heavy streaming day. They charge really quickly (< 3 hrs) so 30 minutes in the charger gives you 3 extra hours.

I went to the absolutely worst/noisy restaurant of all time on Saturday night with the Lumity’s. This was actually the first time I had issues hearing with Lumity in a restaurant. I think they would have done just fine at the restaurant but there was a speaker behind me (on the ceiling?) playing loud music (i.e. “thumpa, thumpa, thumpa”) and whenever the music was louder than the people speaking to me at the table, the Lumity’s kept flipping into music mode, etc. Now that I think of it, I should have just opened the app and forced the Lumity’s into Speech in Very Loud Noise" mode and I would have been fine.

As I have stated many times, these Lumity’s are way more sophisticated than Resound Omnia when is comes to challenging situations. Almost at a new level.

Jordan

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Jordan, do you have the AV receiver wires??

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I am just using regular medium power receivers with my Lumity’s. When I went to the audiologist last week, I asked if I could try out Activent. He actually called Phonak and got one of their technical support people on the phone who could discuss the pluses/minuses of using Activent. The technical support person said that my hearing loss profile is not suitable for Activent. Activent is really designed for people with fairly normal low frequency hearing but bad higher frequency hearing. In other words, sloping down from left to right. My hearing loss is totally flat so doesn’t work for me.

Jordan

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I spent the last few weeks in London, Ontario. Lovely city (the part I stayed in was more like a lovely town!).

But I was in more difficult listening situations than I normally am in. So, I used my Multi Mic quite a bit and it aided my hearing greatly. And I was rationalizing, “Well, maybe the Omnias would work out if I always kept the Multi Mic handy for truly difficult listening situations.” An attraction of going with Phonak, though, would be the Roger On, which would give me even more control over what I heard (if only I can persuade the wife to accept the price tag!).

One thing that was not so good with a remote mic, though, was the range of voices I had to deal with. The wife has a very soft voice. So, I wanted the volume and the treble up in my sound profile to hear her. The 3 1/2 year old grandson was “yelling” half the time, blasting my ears on the settings that worked well for my wife.

So, as I was “suffering” through my grandson’s boisterousness, I was wondering if there’re any hearing devices, especially the Lumity, the Roger On, or anything from any other HA OEM that can automatically equalize voice volume in multi-speaker conversations. I’m using “old tech,” (four years old), and it would be great if there’s a better way to handle such situations than I was able to figure out.

Edit_Update: When I could, though, such as at household dinners, I did sit at one end of a table with wife and daughter to either side, the mic closest to my wife, and the boisterous grandson and his stentorian-voiced father (6’6", 250 lbs++) at the other end of the table. My ears were still blasted by the kid, though! I don’t think the family subscribes to what I had to grow up with: “Children should be seen but not heard!”

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