Also haven’t been impressed with Ultra Focus! Everything sounds too tinny and actually worse! I love my Ones but in a crowd, I don’t like the Ultra Focus.
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I’d have a pound/dollar on MaRIE mic being really good at natural ambience due to the flat response across the chart; however there’s two potential reasons why it wouldn’t help with speech in background noise.
1: It’s not directional: despite some pinna effect ( I don’t think it sits deep enough to get the full function); while the two mics on top of the aid can be mapped for directionality - this is worth somewhere between 3 and 9dB signal to noise ratio (depending on which manufacturer you believe). The mic also sits in a different and variable plane from the other mics so you you can’t even use it for 2nd or 3rd order directionality (unless you did something really nifty with in-situ calibration of your complex array).
2: Feedback: not in the completely traditional sense, but if the receiver is producing a given signal; it ‘wiggles’ in a reverse oscillation of the diaphragm direction. This action will get passed to an active mic attached to it. This is why the MaRIE is limited to lower loss situations. Take this a step further and physical sound in the air (the mic input) becomes more and more compromised by both the direct vibration and the reflected sound from the canal. This means that at significant input levels speech clarity is going to take a hammering from the drive artefacts of the MaRIE mic.
So I guess what I’m saying is that they’ve invented a hearing aid that’s great in the quiet or if you’ve only got a mild loss.
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I found Dr. Cliff’s precocious YouTube Omnia review interesting in that he remarks that the M&RIE is, according to ReSound, only for moderate loss (not quite true as I remember that it’s important for the loss to be relatively flat across frequencies). Yet he says in the video that he’s successfully fitted patients with M&RIE with more severe loss and that his patients who’ve tried M&RIE prefer that over standard behind-the-ear mics only.
Here’s a link to the specific time in the video (4:54) where he discusses M&RIE: https://youtu.be/eBcN_S1I1bI?t=294
I like my Quattros and the way they work with my iPhone and Apple Watch. My main issue is that I’ve had almost a half-dozen Quattro external microphone sound failures and it’s ~always the left ear. My audi always says that she can see no problem with debris in the mic opening and ReSound, despite repeated attempts to get them to analyze what went wrong, always has just provided me with a replacement aid.
So, it’ll be interesting to see what the next Phonak aid offers in comparison and what forum members have to say about each aid before plunking down money for any new HA’s. Perhaps I should have Oticon, Signia, or Starkey on my shortlist, too, but from the number of forum members who are enthusiastic about Phonak aids, there is this strange gravity pull …
Edit_Update: I did have one specific question about M&RIE receivers that perhaps you know the answer to, @Um_bongo.
The question is basically if I got fitted with custom occlusive earmolds to help prevent feedback at higher frequencies to give M&RIE a try, but it doesn’t work out successfully, whether I can have my audi just turn off M&RIE functionality and have the Omnias function FULLY as if they only had standard behind-the-ear mics? That would avoid the cost of having to get new standard receivers if using M&RIE receivers is a bust. My audi, when I asked about the ReSound Ones awhile back, said I wasn’t a candidate to be fitted with M&RIE receivers. A Costco rep, though, was willing to let me try the Jabras with M&RIE receivers and with occlusive molds if I had wanted to go with those.
Further_Edit_Update: Graphs on severity of loss that can be fitted with M&RIE receivers - straight from a ReSound Audiology Online course after ReSound having ~1 year experience with fitting patients out in the field (relatively flat losses across the frequency spectrum work best):
Wonder if Costco will be soon releasing this aid with the Jabra branding… I’m about to purchase a pair of Jabra Enhanced Pros … perhaps I should wait.
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These examples (in the Resound link) are pretty much what I was saying above.
The ‘flatter’ losses are aidable, but just don’t occur nearly as often in reality (perhaps 20%). They are essentially just plugging the canal to drive/hold more sound in there before feedback.
The whole point/raison d’etre of the RIC style is to keep the canal ‘open’ while dealing with a sloping loss. If you seal it up, you trade-off the benefits. Even the loss illustrated with the moderate/severe level is still only likely to use 20dB or so of gain. That’s in the moderate foothills of what you expect to be able to fit. The fact that you’d be throwing away a £200 set of receivers and £150 of canal moulds within a short space of time on a ‘maybe’ fitting doesn’t make any sense in trails either.
If you want a straw poll on here: just ask how many people have been successfully fitted long term with MaRIE receivers vs not (GN Customers only).
I don’t understand why (if they wanted to use this configuration) they didn’t try to place a mic in the Helix area (like the Resound Be - So they have the patents, spares and tooling). That would have potentially yielded the same Omni benefits without the feedback/fitting/venting issues.
Thanks for your comments, Um_bongo. I’m not sure whether your reply directly answers my question whether M&RIE can be turned off, if desired, on a ReSound MM receiver and the receiver then function in all ways like a standard ReSound receiver. I would think that should be so as even in a fully functional M&RIE receiver, at least for the One, ReSound has stated that as the noise level in an environment increases, the HA response phases out the M&RIE mics and switches to the entirely behind-the-ear mics on the body. So it seems like the One at least can function without the M&RIE receiver working.
On occlusion, there seems to be different lines of thought amongst audiologists. I started out wearing an open fit and as soon as I had my first meal or two in a very noisy restaurant, I came to the conclusion that a very open fit with open domes is worthless in dealing with noise. A lot of noise is low-frequency spectrum and the noise just leaked into my open hear canals straight to my good low-frequency hearing and made understanding conversations very difficult. I also thought with an open fit my speech recognition wasn’t as good as it might be. Putting my fingers in my ear canals seemed to help me better understand my wife’s voice.
A while back MDB posted a 2016 review article on open vs. closed fits: Article on open fit vs closed fit
from that article, I found a 2006 Widex paper on the advantages of going with a more closed fit: Article on open fit vs closed fit - #11 by jim_lewis
So after the first few months of “enjoying” an open fit, I decided to follow Don’s route and I got molds with Select-A-Vent. For the first year or two, I quite happily wore the molds with no vent. After a while, I don’t know if it was from flying in airplanes or what, I decided I’d rather go with a 1 mm vent in each mold.
I’m presuming that the options in Smart Fit to specify the type of dome or mold and the size of any vent opening in a mold actually mean something relative to the gain applied via the HA’s to low-frequency sounds and if one has little or no venting, the HA’s just transmit low-frequency sound to the eardrum at the level it was heard, as for good low-frequency hearing little or no amplification should be required but the sound needs to be reproduced by the HA’s if the vent is non-existent or very small.
The bottom line is that with a very occlusive fit, the world sounds no different to me with and without my hearing aids except for two obvious things. I don’t hear high-frequency sounds well without my HA’s and the sound of my own voice sounds different and deeper wearing my HA’s, which doesn’t bother me at all.
My molds were very well-made by ReSound. Normally, I can cup a hand over either ear and get no feedback. The DFS Ultra III feedback test (or whatever it’s called in Smart Fit) shows little or no gain control is needed in either ear.
So, based on my own experience of using a very closed fit for years, if I had molds as good as I have now, I might experience little feedback problems with M&RIE receivers. I’m well enough off that I could afford to blow a couple hundred dollars on the receivers and molds to fit the M&RIE receivers. That’s peanuts to blowing thousands of dollars on one premium high-end hearing aid only to find out that another brand or model might have been better, etc.
The view of audiology espoused in the 2006 Widex paper is that a lot of audiology is marketing a sound experience to users that doesn’t cause them to reject hearing aids, both for the patient’s long-term benefit and the financial bottom line of HA OEMs. There is the ease of using the hearing aids with cheap easily replaceable open domes, the natural sound of one’s own voice with an open fit, and so on. But I’ve tried that and I much prefer a very closed fit, especially for the opportunity it presents me to deal with noise and directionality more effectively and to control the frequency spectrum I hear more effectively with the ReSound Smart 3D app Sound Enhancer functionality.
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Great observations which just confirm my suspicions about open fit hearing aids. So here is a question. What do you all think of Resound’s New Custom by Resound ITC Bluetooth hearing aids that launch in parallel with the Omnia platform? Full Bluetooth in an ITC format with dual microphones, waterproof, rechargeable and hopefully better music listening tech.
Jordan
Yeah; I know they can work without a MaRIE -it’s the way I’ve fitted them.
My point was that they marketed as the reinvention of the wheel. However it doesn’t work any better for the majority of losses if you use them as intended. Couple that to the clunky design and we’re seeing the fall towards otc product that claims a lot, but delivers average performance.
Thanks for your reply again. I will be very interested in learning what Phonak has to offer in its new aid tonight: https://qa-forum.hearingtracker.com/t/new-phonak-hearing-aid-to-be-revealed-tonight-at-midnight-cst/70327?u=jim_lewis.
I do like ReSound for the naturalness of the sound, especially while streaming podcasts to my ears and for the way it works with the iPhone and the Apple Watch. I haven’t checked recently but the fact that Phonak’s app didn’t transfer in any way to the watch was a downer. I guess one can never have everything one wants in the world…
@JordanK , sorry, I don’t know anything about the ITC devices. My own preference, since one can have a bigger battery, is to use an RIC device. With your low frequency loss, it looks like you don’t have to worry about the pros or cons of an open fit.
I would not recommend Resound to anyone unless if they have CI from Cochlear
Hi Jim,
Nice to see you here. Didn’t know you had been fitted with molds. You have Resound and I have Costco‘s Preza’s. Going in Friday for a fitting for molds. Any tips you or anyone else can give me I would appreciate it. Do you have acrylic molds or the softer Gel type?Sounds like you are very happy with them.
I think our Navy vet from Ark, his name escapes me right now, is fitted with acrylics and is happy.
I have been very pleased with my specialist at Costco, he has been doing this for over 25 years and really knows his stuff. I am sort of surprised that he has not suggested this but that I had to ask for them.
Wondering if I should have another audiogram. About a year ago he checked me and he said I didn’t need another one. Lots can happen in a year.
Will let you all know how everything turns out. As I had mentioned on here before, when I plug my canals I can really hear a lot better.
Glad to see you’re still around, too. I have ReSound silicone molds. They are not all that soft and certainly not very squishy. They can wear a bit with time but mine are 3.5 years old and still hanging in there. One benefit of molds is the receiver openings are much more recessed in the mold cavities and ear wax seldom gets directly down onto the receiver wax guard. A little bit of wax may fall into the mold opening but it’s always easy to clean out. I really like my molds compared to all the various types of domes that I tried and I tried them all. Most users seem to like molds better than domes and, hopefully, if you decide to give it a try, you will, too.
I like the Jodi-Vac for cleaning my molds but I’ve stopped using it on the HA body - which I decided wasn’t a good idea. The device is available on Amazon for about $100 (the consumer version).
@jim_lewis I guess what I don’t get is that they’ve converted from a set of speech-in-noise scores to decibels and done their comparisons on the decibels. My maths really isn’t there, so this conversation might be a waste of time, but wouldn’t it have been better to present a comparison on the original s-i-n scores?
If you take 0 as being profoundly deaf and 100 as being what these moderately hearing impaired people experience, the omnia brings that to 250? Most people would see that and think they would hear like bats.
I remember a video by Dr. Cliff a few years ago. He said then that about a 5 dB improvement (as if you were hearing the speech 5 dB louder) is about the most you can expect to get out of a HA in speech-in-noise situations. But, IIRC, he said with a remote microphone that you can effectively get as much as a 25 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio.
So, with that in mind, it’s probably not worth getting too worked up about any OEM claims until someone has the AI that can cleanly separate out the speech and throw away the noise. And it may sound paradoxical but a strike against Phonak for me is that their Roger devices are so expensive, and the batteries are non-replaceable. When the Roger On In is ~$1500, as much as a premium iPhone, where the battery is replaceable for less than $100, making the Roger On In a throw-away device that expensive is too much for me. Knowing that if I want the best speech-in-noise recognition, it’s going to cost me $1500 extra with Phonak is $1500 too much. Whereas I already own all the ReSound peripherals and the Multi Mic, although not Roger On caliber, is still pretty decent. So, I’m waiting to see what reviews say. Having no BT 5.3, no BT LE Audio is also a strike against Phonak. The Roger ReSound One is supposed to be BT LE Audio capable according to hearsay (it has BT 5.2) and I would expect the Omnia to have that or 5.3. And then Oticon More may be due for an update soon.
bluetooth 5.3 just improves packetization of LE protocol , not really needed for hearing aid at this time but it has slightly better battery life if both sides have bluetooth 5.3, just because it has 5.2 it doesn’t mean it support BTLEA, it just mean the bluetooth 5.2 core specification is implemented…
Thanks for the comments. I think what we’re looking at when we try to find out what BT an HA model supports is the sine qua non. If an HA has at least BT 5.2, it MIGHT support BT LE Audio but if it just has BT 4.2, it’s lacking the sine qua non. So, the Lumity only has BT 4.2, unless it’s somehow further upgradable, whereas one might expect that if the Omnia is derived from the One, it’s possibly at least BT 5.2. But I think we’d all agree at this point we’re waiting for Godot and just killing time until he/she arrives (but Godot never seems to get here in any timely fashion!).
From an business standpoint, they spent 5 years and millions of dollars optimizing bluetooth classic to fit on a cell battery, Why should they spend R&D budget on BTLEA and BT 5.2?
I expect a firmware update which enables BLEA because Cochlear announced that they are supporting BTLEA with nucleus 8 sound processor… the N8 and omnia both came out the same week probably they worked together and timed the.release
Perhaps Phonak used the same philosophy when it continued on with NFMI for years, while everyone else had already kowtowed to Apple to get on the MFI bandwagon… But seriously, Phonak has the resources to wait for the optimum time to incorporate BT LE Audio while everyone else plays Avis’s “We Try Harder” to Phonak’s Hertz.
It might be different where you are, but customers with Mfi aids and IOS have way more choices ‘out of the box’ here. Just on the initial control, call handling and integration (you don’t even need the app).
Most people know that the treble tap on the home button fires them straight into the adjustments without hindrance - and it works the same across all HA that we sell. I’m not a huge Apple fan, but this is a standout feature for anyone with a hearing loss considering an upgrade on their phone.