Hi Marks, congratulations on being able to get a new pair of HAs from your insurance coverage.
First of all, regarding music on the More, Oticon recently released a new built-in MyMusic program that’s supposed to make music sound much better than the original built-in Music legacy program. However, a number of More owners on this forum, one who’s a professional guitar musician (@SpudGunner) , don’t like the new MyMusic program because it artificially boost the lows and the highs too much, leaving out the mids to be too thin. This is with the most recent firmware 1.1.1 on the More. The unfortunate thing is that Oticon removed the legacy Music program in favor of the new MyMusic program, so people can’t even restore the legacy Music program even if they wanted to. Some DIY folk (like @flashb1024) tried to build their own custom music program with good success. Others resort back to other built-in programs like Comfort and the default P1 program for listening to music for now.
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The NNS max value in the MoreSound Intelligence page can be set to different values in any program you have that have NNS enabled. So you can have a lower max value set in one program and set it to the highest in the next program so you can toggle back and forth between them to see how they perform compared to each other. Although Oticon sets the default to NOT be the highest possible value, if you really still struggle with speech in noise, I think that is justification to change to the max value to the highest possible value. You can do the above with 2 identical programs except for the max NNS values, then toggle back and forth to decide for yourself whether it’s better to leave NNS max at default or NNS max at the highest value. Note that they will most likely be the same for simpler situations, and you may only notice a difference in complex or very complex situations.
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Virtual Outer Ear only affects the Easy Environment and what Easy Environment encompasses is configured by you in the MoreSound intelligence Configuration setting. It’s basically a “filter” of sort to let you hear more around or give you a more front focus, or something in between.
2.1 For Difficult Environments as configured by you, the Virtual Outer Ear is not used. Instead, a Spatial Balancer module is used, and this module does MVDR beam forming to create null directions to attenuate dominant noise sources around you. Basically the Spatial Balancer does a more aggressive job of rebalancing the sound scene by attenuating dominant noises sources around you, while the Virtual Outer Ear rebalances the sound scene simply using a virtual model of the outer ear and lets you pick out which outer ear model you want to have, not matter what your real ear shapes are like.
- The Sound Enhancer applies only to the Difficult Environment and what Difficult encompasses is configured by you. It’s basically because users don’t have a say in how Oticon’s Neural Noise Suppression affects the level of details one can hear, so they give the user an option in the Sound Enhancer to enhance (Detail) or reduce (Comfort) the NNS effect or keep it on even keel (Balanced) the level of details they want to hear.
I would be remiss not to mention a couple of other brands that utilizes the Deep Neural Network to implement noise removal from speech. That’d be the Philips HearLink 9030 sold by Costco for $1800, and the new Whisper brand that’s subscription based which runs around $90/month (current discounted price) on a monthly subscription model for a 3 year sign-up rate. The Whisper requires a “brain” which is an extra small box you have to carry around with you to maximize the speech in noise benefit.
But if you can only use TruHearing to acquire your HAs so that the insurance will cover them, then perhaps neither of the 2 options above can be applied to you.