Jonathan: I can’t help with the reverb issue but I had a HA width problem with my first set of OPN 1s. I loved the rechargeable feature but had a hurting ear at the end of the day because of the pressure on one ear caused by the glasses/hearing aid width, I switched back to the ones with replaceable batteries to resolve the problem. FYI, the OPN rechargeable was 10mm wide. The Intent 1 is 7.5mm wide and the Real 1 is 6mm.
After I had trouble with the OPNs, I later got a set of titanium frames with thin “temple/ear” arms to give me more room with any future hearing aids. They were very pricey, but worth it, and will last for years. In my case, I now have just enough room with the Intent units for there to be no conflict.
The feature of the Intent I most appreciate is the improvement for speech in noise. Otherwise it is an incremental step up from Real in the basic hearing department. I wish you well with your decision. If you have time, try a pair of thinner frames at an optician against the chance you might get the clearance and relief you need.
loved your review! I traveled a similar path in the HA history! At this point I,m wearing Phonak Lumity HA , so far pleased with them because I can change the setting to meet my environmental need. I would like the HA to do that for me ,but not sure the AI really knows what I really want to hear. Tried the Starkey HA, they’re very good in a restaurant but didn’t like the constant changing of sound in their AI setting ( Edge)! I also have a older Oticon s1 open pair, overall pleased with them ( but can’t change any settings) So the Intent sounds very appealing if they really can figure out what I’m trying to hear!
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First of all, you should really share your audiogram in your profile for everyone to see. Then they can give you more helpful suggestions if they know exactly what kind of hearing loss you have. Otherwise, any suggestion would be like a shot in the dark.
I think it’d be a real shame if you went backward to the Real when the Intent is available. I would find other viable solutions around changing your eyeglass frame as @eliotb suggested, rather than reverting back to the Real. Beside the improvement for speech in noise in the Intent, the BT LE Audio support may not mean much at this point, but it will be a major plus in the near future when more devices start supporting BT LE Audio, and Auracast.
Both the Real and the Intent has a feature called Sudden Sound Stabilizer. Make sure your HCP set the value of this parameter to the max value first, before messing with the neural noise setting (I assume that’s what you mean when you say “background nosie”). Your HCP’s approach to adjust the neural noise parameter to address the sudden loud sound is a totally wrong approach to solving this problem. A loud yelling from a kid is not really considered noise per se that needs to be suppressed anyway.
I totally don’t understand how changing the Neural Noise Suppression value from 3 to 5 would pick up more road noise when you’re driving, unless what you call “background noise setting” is something else and not the Neural Noise Suppression parameter I’m thinking about. Besides, the Neural Noise Suppression available options are in even increments from what I can tell (see screenshot below), so I’m not sure where the 3 and the 5 comes from.
As to the glasses. I have lots of old pairs. I’ve been swapping them out to see if some are better than others. If I can make an eyeglass change and keep the intents, that would be my preference.
As for the settings and what was changed, I’m not sure what he switched, I remember seeing something get switched from a 3 to a 5, but it could have been the neural noise or the sudden sound. I will ask. Whatever it is, it made things worse. I work in schools. I’m an admin most of the time but I also teach about 30-40% of the time and in elementary classrooms. My environment can go from whispering teachers to loud six year olds very quickly. The issues I have are with the sudden loud sounds having a reverb or ray gun type effect at first. This is most evident on my right side but I’m not sure if that is a result of the right hearing aid settings or my ear itself as I have a prosthetic inner ear bone on that side. What is interesting is after my AUD bumped that setting up, driving with my hearing aids has become impossible since it picked up road noise and tries to suppress it, but it does it on/off every second or two like it can’t make up its mind. Going to Music Mode stops this (since there’s no settings there).
A final question is how did you get access to Genie2? I understand that most HA users are old folks who can barely work their smartphones, but I’m a 44M who does tech for a living in schools and used to build speakers as a hobby. I understand audio and tech. I’d love to be able to adjust my own HA using Genie2 and not have to wait 2-3 weeks to have my AUD do it. To me this seems like a deal breaker for $7K on hearing aids.
Below is a screenshot of the Sudden Sound Stabilizer settings. It does not have values, only word descriptions (OFF, low, medium, high, very high, max). So if you saw him change something from a 3 to a 5, it couldn’t have been this. I can’t really think of what on Genie 2 that he could have changed from a 3 to a 5 myself so I can’t comment further on this, except to make sure that the Sudden Sound Stabilizer is on, and maybe start it out at least at a High setting, and if not good enough, go to Very High or Max next.
You can go to the DIY section of this forum to try to get help obtaining a copy of the Genie 2 software. There are plenty of requests for Genie 2 download there. If you actually want to connect to your hearing aids, you will have to purchase a NoahLink Wireless interface (ranging between $160-$190 on Amazon or eBay). I also hear that there’s a NoahLink Wireless 2 coming out soon but I don’t know when. But you don’t need to have the NoahLink Wireless to just run simulations on Genie 2, you just wouldn’t be able to actuall connect to your hearing aids and impart the changes into your hearing aids, that’s all.
I am on week 3 with my Intents too, first time HA user, glasses wearer. Day 1 was unbearable! My ears were so sore and I wasn’t sure how I was going to tolerate using the HAs for more than a few hours at a time. Then I switched out my glasses for an older pair with titanium frames. Bliss! I went and got another super light titanium pair made, even lighter than my older ones. Now, I only get a bit of soreness after >8-10 hours of wear - from a comfort perspective, I often forget I am even wearing them.
In terms of sound, I am working with my excellent audi to get the balance right, so far we are doing pretty well. My brain is still learning what is ‘normal’ HA sound and what can be improved. I have a cookie bite loss and the difference in my ability to maintain conversations has been profound.
Sounds like the old TTTF issue! (Talking Through The Fan).
Methinks your audi needs to go into the Automatics screen in Genie2, and adjust the Feedback Manager:
Jonathan: just a little additional comment on the reverb issue. I finally encountered something that might be like what you describe. I was in a large room at a meeting and someone had a dog with them. The animal got excited and, from behind me, started barking rather loudly. Each sound was like getting an audio punch in my ear on the side where the animal was. Strange to say the least. Fortunately, the owner grabbed the dog and got it to settle down and quit being obnoxious in its enthusiasm to be somewhere new with new people.
That’s the theory, anyway. But I still find that the directionality imposed by the “Speech in Noise” program on the Real 1 works better than the pure “open paradigm” in background noise situations. It’s not just marketing.
And surely the Intents use head positioning to detect better what the user wants to focus on?
It’s really not “my” theory. It’s actually what Oticon told their customers themselves back in 2017.
As a wearer of the Oticon OPN 1, when I bought it in December 2016, there was no built-in programs. When Oticon finally released the built-in programs around April 2017 (a full year after their initial release of the OPN line), I distinctly remember Donald Schum (then VP at Oticon) saying at the release time that although they designed the General Program to be sufficient in most cases, with 3 more programs for customization, they’ve decided to now release additional built-in programs as a response to their users’ popular requests/iinputs.
And there is no additional directionality imposed by the Speech in Noise program on the Real 1 like you think. Both the General program and the Speech in Noise program uses the same “Neural Automatic” value for the Directionality Settings field, as you can see in the 2 screenshots below (the first is the default General P1 program, and the second is the Speech in Noise program in P2.
The main differences, as you can see in the 2 screenshots below, is that the General program settings are not as aggressive as the Speech in Noise program. For example, 6 dB max Neural Noise Suppression in Difficult for the General program, vs 8 dB max NNS in Difficult for the SIN program. The other thing is that in the General program, Moderate environment is set to be part of the Easy environment configuration, while in the SIN program, Moderate environment is set to be part of the Difficult Environment.
The gain curves for the SIN program are also made slightly more aggressive than the General Program as well. If you have Genie 2, you can do P1/P2 switching back and forth in Fine Tuning to see how the gain curves change slightly in real time.
The bottom line is that the General program settings are not as aggressive as the SIN settings. But there’s no reason why you can’t apply the settings in the SIN program to the General program, and now you don’t have to deal with switching back and forth between 2 programs all the times. That’s because the Neural Noise Suppression parameter is not fixed in any Oticon program (unless it’s turned off like with the Music program). It changes depending on what environment you’re in.
The third screenshot below shows an example. The black dotted line is the SNR value applied for the Real, and the X axis goes from less noise toward the right (great 15 dB input SNR) to the most noise (really bad -10 dB input SNR). You can see that the output SNR enhancement goes to a very low value (0 dB) for simple environment, and up to 7 dB for the most difficult environment. So it’s not like if you’re in a simple environment, you’d have to “get out” of the SIN program and “revert” back to the General program. In fact, if you don’t want to copy the parameters from the SIN program to the General program, then you can just use the SIN program 100% of the times, and it should still work just fine with simple environments as well. The only disadvantage there is that you end up hogging 1 of the 4 available programs needlessly, and you will always need to switch to the SIN program on startup. So it’s easier to just copy the SIN parameters over to the General program and get rid of the SIN program.
Regardless of who expresses it, it’s still a theory in the sense that it may or may not work that way in the real world.
You do seem to accept Oticon’s claim as Gospel that their hearing aid adapts its parameters automatically, efficiently, and, above all, effectively to the sound environment. If this is true, why not set Neural Noise Suppression to the max in easy environments as well? Why limit it at all? BTW, I have already increased Neural Noise Suppression for difficult environments in the General Program to 10 dB max with Sound Enhancer set to “Detail.”
It was my audiologist who informed me that the “speech in noise” program makes the mics directional. Notice the popup in the lower right-hand corner of your screen: it’s set to “neural automatic.” I don’t have Genie 2 handy: is there a manually-selectable directionality setting?
All I’m saying is that I don’t invent these things out of the blue. I had first hand experience that my Oticon OPN 1 was delivered with NO built-in programs, only the default General program. I also had first hand experience that the firmware update in around April/May of 2017 started having built-in programs available. I also had first hand experience of hearing the VP of Oticon announcing the launch of the built-in programs and explaining why they were launching it at the time, and why it took them a year to finally decided to launch it. But hey, you can keep calling it “theory” if you want. I’m just reporting the things above as “facts” because I had first hand experience of all of these facts personally.
As to your question of why not just set 1 max neural noise suppression value for EVERYTHING and be done with it. Or why even bother picking a lower value than the max available in the first place, be it for the General program or SIN program? I was wondering the exact same thing when I started learning more about what’s in the Oticon aids and how/why they work the way they do, because the HCP who dispensed my Oticon aids didn’t know very much about it. Along the way, although Oticon never said it out publicly or explicitly anywhere, I came to the realization that there’s a price for everything. If you apply too much Neural Noise Suppression on speech, the speech can become less natural. So as a trade-off, you only want to apply as much NNR as you need, but not necessarily as much as is available for the Tier model that you have, because the unnecessary overuse of the NNR will degrade the quality of the speech sound.
As to your comment that I seem to take everything Oticon claims as Gospel, I can simply say that if you want to learn something, you find and read all information you can get your hands on, then you try to understand it, then you try to use your own logical reasoning to decide what you can and cannot believe in what you read. Combine that with your first hand-experience of using the hearing aids you’re trying to learn about and use it as corroboration between your own experience and what you read, and decide on what you want to believe and what you don’t.
What I’m doing is sharing on this forum my understanding of how Oticon aids work, at least the parts that I believe in. You might not have read my opinion on the 4D Sensor technology. where I’ve expressed my doubt about it as gimmicky and rudimentary on the intent reading claim at best. So at last you’re wrong about what I think about the 4D Sensor technology because I don’t drink their kool-aid as Gospel on the 4D sensor there. Apparently you must think what your audiologist told you that the SIN program makes the mics directional as Gospel, too, then, because you’re repeating what he/she told you here. So if you believe what your audi told you, why would you criticize me for believing what Oticon tells their customers as Gospel?
As to your question if there is a manually-selectable directionality setting, the answer is yes. You can either set it to Neural Automatic, Full Directionality, and Fixed Omni. Below are the descriptions for each value. In Neural Automatic, you leave it up to Oticon to decide when to be directional and when not to. With Full Directionality or Fixed Omni, you force Oticon to stick with your choice, period.
To clear up something, you said earlier “But I still find that the directionality imposed by the Speech in Noise program on the Real 1 works better than the pure open paradigm in background noise situations.” All I did was to clear up that the SIN program does NOT IMPOSE directionality like you think, or like your audi told you. The SIN program LETS the hearing aids decide when and when not to impose directionality by setting the Directionality Setting to Neural Automatic (just like how it’s set in the General program, no different there). So yes, the hearing aids might decide to impose directionality at certain times in Neural Automatic, but it’s not like the SIN program imposes it and the General program doesn’t. BOTH programs lets the hearing aids decide when and when not to impose directionality when Neural Automatic is selected as the value for Directionality Setting. And my guess is that even if you’re in the General program, if the same listening environment would force the aids to impose the directionality in SIN, the aids would force the directionality in General just the same. The only difference is that the amount of Neural Noise Suppression applied in General would be weaker than in SIN, but only because it’s been set as such.
Of course I can’t know what your audi did when she goes into her clients’ SIN programs and change parameters in there for them to make it even more customized than the built-in.
But I’m not speaking for your audi or any other audi, I’m just speaking about the Oticon built-in SIN program “AS IS” before any audi might go in there and change things up. What I presented to you was the default values set by the Oticon built-in SIN program and General program, and the default Directional Setting value for both programs is Neural Automatic according to my little test on Genie 2.
Again, let me quote what @happymach said that I felt the need to clarify → “But I still find that the directionality IMPOSED by the “Speech in Noise” program on the REal 1 works better than the pure “open paradigm” in background noise.” The key word he used here is “imposed” (by the SIN program on the Real). This implies that the built-in program imposes Full Directional as default value (which is not true). It does not imply that it was imposed by his audi.
Has he said that “my audi changed the SIN program to Full Directional and I find it to work better than Neural Automatic that is set in my General program”, I wouldn’t have seen any need to clarify anything. The whole point is that I don’t want any reader to misconstrue what he said to mean that as long as they use the built-in SIN program, it will automatically impose the Full Directional value in the Directionality Setting, because it does not.
Talk about belaboring a point and splitting hairs! I didn’t know that my audiologist had set directionality to “full,” but surely what is important here is that the “open paradigm” cannot properly handle all situations as it is supposed to, i.e. “neural automatic” doesn’t do what the listener needs in certain environments, such that s/he has to resort to full directionality. And thus, contra@Volusiano, one program does not suffice.
@Volusiano has repeated ad infinitum the marketing gospel about the “open paradigm,” about allowing the system to make its own determinations based on the sound environment, and then he turns around and notes that you can’t leave the NNR on the maximum setting because “speech can become less natural.” And how, pray tell, does one “apply as much NNR as [one] need[s]”? That’s one setting that can’t even be invoked manually by the user!
I’ve always thought that the whole “open paradigm” concept is a great theory; does the Oticon Intent bring us significantly closer to this ideal?
Whether you prefer the full directionality in the SIN program that your audi might have set for you or not, it doesn’t change the fact that you made an incorrect statement that needs to be corrected (by telling people that the SIN program imposes full directionality), because an incorrect statement is not a hair split, it’s a big deal because it can make people incorrectly think that it’s a fact when it’s not.
And it’s also OK if you don’t like the open paradigm in noisy environments. That’s your personal preference. Nobody is arguing about who likes what here. There are also plenty of other folks who do like the open paradigm in noisy environments as well, beside the plenty of folks who don’t like the open paradigm like yourself. It makes me wonder, though, why you chose Oticon aids when you dislike their open paradigm in the first place? Nevertheless, the debate here is never about the individual personal preferences for the open paradigm, there’s no right or wrong to either preferences. The debate here has always about correcting an incorrect statement.
And contrary to @happymach , one program does suffice for other people, even if one program does not suffice for @happymach. And again, the debate here is never about the preference to use one program or two or three or four. The debate is about clarifying an incorrect statement.
As for the issue of the trade-off that the Neural Noise Suppression (NNS) can make the speech sound less natural, @happymach twists it together with the open paradigm in one paragraph (as seen above in bold) as if they’re intertwined, but the two really have nothing to do with each other. The system does make its own determination of how much NNS to apply accordingly depending on the complexity of the environment, but the system lets YOU decide what the max NNS is for yourself and the system will use what you tell it to use. The system doesn’t care what the Directionality Setting value is when it determines the appropriate NNS value to apply to its environment classification → hence the open paradigm is not tied to the determination of NNS value at all.
@happymach also twisted my words incorrectly by quoting me saying that “you can’t leave the NNS on max setting because it makes speech less natural”. That’s not what I said. I said that you don’t want to unnecessarily set max NNS to something more than what you need because of the trade-off. But if you truly need the max NNS available, it’s still better to have less natural speech quality than to not understand speech at all → the lesser of the two evils. Apparently @happymach cannot comprehend that simple implication there.
