Widex introduces WIDEX MOMENT, the world’s first hearing aid to deliver a truly natural sound experience

Here is my take on natural hearing. I have Oticon hearing aids and I have been wearing them for over 10 years of the 15 + years I have been wearing hearings, so Oticon sounds natural to me. I have also worn siemens, and Sonic. I have tried Phonak, and Resound. And I once did try either miracle ear or widex, I cannot remember now and they sounded great also. I do not pay for my hearing aids I get them from the Veterans Administration, and while I do have choices of what aids I get, I always know that the aids I get are always the top of the line of what ever company I get the aids from.

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I’m convinced that there is little difference between the top-of-the-line for the major manufacturers. My audiologist carries both Phonak and Widex and because of the Widex reputation I asked her to set up the Widex Evoke 440 to compare with the Phonak Marvel M90. I then took both pair home to compare side-by-side. I’m a classical pianist and have a full size concert grand in my home. I spent several days and many hours with both pair sitting at my piano and going back and forth between the two. I can tell you that, for me, they are very close. If there were a noticeable difference I would go with whichever was decidedly better. Cost is not a factor in my choice. I chose the Phonak Marvel M90 because of the connectivity with my Android Pixel 3XL phone.

With that said, I’m waiting to audition the new Widex to see if there is enough of a difference to cause me to change. For me my music is the single most important factor. I’m not brand loyal. I’ll go with what makes my music sound the best.

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Right. Being new, with professional sound-balance experience, I struggle “what was natural?”. E-Gad are these key-clacks loud!! Were they like that when I was young? Or are my ears just sore on sounds I have not heard in years? The brain is very plastic. I do not know. I will evolve an answer, but I am glad I will never judge sound balance for pay again.

The microphones are NOT a limit. Even in the 1980s they were so good they were re-packaged as expensive music microphones. A condenser (electret) will respond to “zero” frequency. The real limit is they want to be vented so barometric pressure change does not burst them. Optionally they can be over-vented to cut <200Hz as in cheap answering machines. The Knowles site is not real cooperative but I snagged this random data:
Knowles-Mike-42
It’s 10dB down at 50Hz. We know that much larger boosts are trivial in digital aids. So there’s no technical reason we can’t be full-bass.

The receiver is likewise capable of response to zero frequency if it could be perfectly sealed. Put current in, pressure changes, decaying with leakage. Putty the receiver into your ear, all the bass you could want. (But also chewing-sound and own-voice issues.)

Years of audio taught me that the world is full of bass and excess bass “makes mud”. To flatter a dramatic baritone I would be flat to 80Hz, might even bump 120Hz (Sinatra’s balls); but for a man lecturing in math or chem or EE I would want to shave-off <150Hz for sure; 300Hz if size/power were limited.

OTOH Jefferson Airplane et al, or even a cello solo recorded in a nice church, is awful thin if not flat to below 100Hz. Jack and Phil sure boomed 42Hz sometimes, though most recording chains and speakers hardly do 50Hz. (I made an organ recording with BIG 32Hz fundamentals, and never found a speaker to play it at full booming glory.)

But WHY do we get hearing aids? In 1935 the HoH were thrilled to have poor telephone response because it did make speech more intelligible. With tubes/transistors came wider-range response and screwdriver tone-shaping. Today we can set an arbitrary curve… but can we?
{doggy dinner time, and I have to poke Target and see what may be revealed…}

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When I left off I was musing whether we get HAs to hear speech, or to hear music. Gary testifies that music is very important to him. Yet any but the most open fitting, with low bass HL, provokes complaints like “tinny”, even on speech and everyday door-slams and dog-barks. I reserve my whine because I am tender, but you guys with decades of aids tell me so.

Technically the mike and receiver can do as much bass as we can seal into the ear. And “amplifiers” (analog or digital) can go to zero. It isn’t even as hard as making bass in a room. (Assuming we can tolerate a SEAL to the ear canal.)

I opened Target on my test client “Fred”, and gave him a flat 50HL loss:HA-bass-audiogram
(This should have been less; it pushes the MOL.)

I sold poor Fred a Marvel like mine but better, with full earmold and no vent. The default EQ wanted to slope like an old AR hi-fi speaker so I let it. I could tweak the handles to be smoother than an AR speaker… except the bass falls-off at 150Hz! This is like an old kitchen radio.


Or in Gary’s world: the bottom two and a half octaves of his piano can not be heard on fundamentals! That’s a couple feet of keys and about 3/4 of the area of the piano wasted. (He hears the notes fine, but on overtones, not on gut-throbbing fundamentals; unless he got the 97-key Bösendorfer.) In my world, it is an octave of the guitar, the kick of the drum, and two octaves of the bass brutally beat-down. An operatic baritone hasn’t any more power than the tenor, and the operatic bass may as well phone his part in.

What about a whole different aid? A good ear-filling lump like the Ambra. I fiddle with a lot of stuff and got it JBL flat, except no handle fixes the bass fall-off now above 160Hz (less steep though).

Obviously I’m hitting MOL hard. So I scraped 40dB of wax out of poor Fred’s ear, flat 10HL loss, and forced the AGC to see what diff that makes (very little, and does not look “natural”). But this reveals that at low sound levels the bass cut-off moves up to 350Hz! (Slope below that is 12dB/Oct, which I call too steep to hear through, though not as bad as the 40+dB/Oct cutoffs for most cases.)


By Fletcher-Munson, this may be reasonable; but I have doubt about F-M for musical listening (holistic hearing is not as bad as tones).

Target has a “BASSBOOST” option. This seems to be a simple 8dB boost below 500Hz. In hi-fi or PA, we’d say “boxy” or “tubby”. It raises mid-bass as much as deep-bass so the deep boom is masked in tubbyness.

When I got my aid I was pleased with the bass in the car; but it was a very-vented eartip so it was “mostly me”. With the small-vent tip I lose bass in the car. In streaming, I get the impression of bass, but there’s no true deep bass.

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I found the Marvel and the Quattro to be neck and neck, so there ya go.

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Hi, as I’m a singer in a choir (soprano) I wonder if you have some advice about the ennoying sounds when we sing high notes. My HA are going in ‘overdrive’. Maybe you as a musician has some experience about it?

I am a musician who has used and demoed various brands of hearing aids. For me, I am currently wearing the Widex 440 Beyond, Widex does have better sound than Phonak, Oticon, and Starkey. I have not tried the latest Widex product.

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Caroline, you’re probably experiencing a “warbling” or “trilling” sound when you sing a sustained high note. This is your HA mistaking the sustained high note that it is hearing for feedback. The HA then tries to introduce very quick pitch modulations to interrupt and defeat what it thinks is feedback.
A couple of suggestions: Have your audi set up a separate HA program for you to use while singing. In that program the feedback control should be set at the minimum setting. You probably won’t be able to turn the feedback control off completely because you will experience the feedback that the feedback control is designed to stop. I have mine set on the first (weakest) possible step.
Then have your audi turn off or minimize all the speech comprehension enhancement features, especially compression.
You, as a singer, need HAs that have high input headroom so that they don’t produce distortion when they receive a loud input like with you and many other voices singing together. Widex HAs are known for having the highest input headroom, although other brands may be catching up by now. I will probably look into the new Widex when I consider replacing my Oticon Opn 1 later this year. Good luck.

Thanks a lot. I’m not sure those brands I never heard of are available in Europe. I have GNResound for ten years now. Can’t remember if my first pair of HA, 15 years ago, were also GN Resound.

Thanks a lot! I’m new on this forum and it’s nice to hear about new suggestions. I’ll check these brands.

world’s first hearing aid to deliver a truly natural sound experience

Wow! What a lie! They all want to make that claim with every new product, and it’s never happened, and it never will.

Why not just be honest and claim, “one of a few hearing aids to deliver a somewhat better sound experience than last year’s model

:slight_smile:

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Can a person with a hearing impairment judge what a truly natural sound experience is?

Can a blind person judge the function of an electrical diagram or the beauty of the visual arts?

I have a severe hearing impairment and I am also sensitive to sharp loud noises.

I use my hearing aids so that I can understand speech and perhaps hear other sounds that might be important to sustaining life. The hearing aid sound experience is very different to what I consider natural. I just got use to it and assume it must be somewhat like a perfect hearing person should hear.

If I want a truly natural sound experience, I take my hearing aids off. To me that is truly natural (not enhanced) sound.

A hearing aid that produces a natural sound experience to me is a hearing aid that would be useless for my hearing impairment.

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I’m disappointed in Widex. Selling snake oils claims.

You can be disappointed in all hearing aid manufacturers.

Thankfully we have this forum to weed through the nonsense.

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I’m lost if I can’t see my diagrams, at least to get them in my head.

But the best audio answer man ever, Joe Giovanelli, was profoundly blind. Reading him pre-1960 well into the 1980s I never guessed this; but when I saw the one photo published I realized that is how photographers posed blind people in those days. His education confirms it. clippings

Very late in life he published an autobiography about his life path. It is more spiritual, has few details about how he learned electronics. I learned of several types of meters to read with fingers, and that he made much use of “readers”, but they are expensive to hire and a reader for schematics must be super-rare. (This was long before scanners which could make tactile images.) I found his story very inspirational. Specifically when cataracts were hurting my diagram reading. This isn’t bad, I thought, what about Joe?

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This is a tough subject. I got new Resounds almost 2 years ago, replacing the Oticons I’d been wearing for 10 years. Speech recognition is a lot better. I had a friend ask not long ago if I still had a hearing problem because it seemed I was hearing him a lot better - that was during a bike ride.

However…I’m a musician. I play the trumpet in a 30-piece band. I get false feedback on a whole range of notes. I have a setting with feedback control turned off…and I get feedback when I smile :grin:

The biggest issue is distortion. It happens when I hit a high note, when the bari sax player next to me honks loudly, and at other random times, like when I sing. It’s like the blown speaker on my old Mazda - it just sounds like the HA has hit a wall and can’t handle heavy duty sounds. A more technical term is “gnarly”. Natural it ain’t, but I’m grateful I can hear. I just wish we could have it all - speech and music reproduction that comes closer to what non-hearing-impaired folks are used to.

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Hey wait - you can’t be disappointed with Widex. Just because they use lousy Z power batteries (when no one else does) and then threw their “energy cell” technology into the trash heap. That’s only two strikes. You need one more for an “out”.

I’ve heard them. I work in a hearing aid dispensary. They sound like zero processing time to me. I cannot hear any delay between real sound and amplified sound when wearing them open fit.

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Managed to get a pair of the new Moment, upgrading from the previous gen Evoke Fusion. I didn’t get to really sit down and compare them side by side listening. There doesn’t seem to be a HUGE difference in sound quality - but the Evoke was already really stellar in sound quality for me (compared to other brands). It certainly sounds kind of “natural” to me but I’m not really quite sure if there are significant improvements in that regards.

I’ve previously tried the Resound extensively and briefly tried on all the other major brands. I know it’s all different for each user but I found Widex to be by far the best in sound quality and “naturalness.”

Other details: I think the sleeker receivers tips are an improvement over the previous gen (might fit narrower canals like myself better). Li-on version seems to be very good and actually very light weight wise versus the previous version. The design is sleeker and there is no discernible difference in size between the new battery replaceable and li-on powered versions.

Hope this information helps!

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Last week I received my new Widex Moment 440 rechargeable hearing aids. I LOVE EM !!! They are extremely “clean” sounding to me. I’ve worn hearing aids since 2008. This is my third set. And by FAR the best sounding. Setting up the Moment app on my iPhone was reasonably simple to accomplish. I read in some of the other posts on this Forum about people not “believing” the hype about the quality of the sound that these hearing aids produce. I wonder if the “nay-sayer” commenters have actually heard thru these hearing aids or are they just “negative-nellies”. From an experienced first-hand experience, they are awesome.

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