Signia App disables CROS during manual direction control

Hearing Aids
1

This is my first post… have been reading posts on this forum for several weeks. This is a very impressive and valuable resource.

As mentioned in my profile, I’m on my 4th trial day with Signia Pure C&G 7IX CROS.
Signia’s app (iPhone) enables directional control of aids’ microphones and by many accounts this feature is excellent when using two aids. My CROS experience is that all manual direction adjustments disable the CROS microphones. Manually adjusting the microphones’ beam angle on the app can significantly reduce background noise as the beam is narrowed or focused to sides/front/back. However, the CROS microphones at my left ear are ‘dead’ throughout this process unless the direction is set to ‘auto’.

Tomorrow I’ll be testing speech recognition in noisy environments with a friend. Following that I’ll contact my audiologist with feedback. I understand that CROS, generally speaking, has some shortcomings in noisy situations where CROS might need to be turned off, but having zero use of CROS microphones for all manual direction control seems a bit extreme.

Is this normal Signia app CROS behaviour? Early days still with my first CROS experience. There are some positives but I’m a bit confused.

2

I believe it’s not the App, but the limitations of the CROS system, BiCros would work like that tho.

CROS & BiCROS Hearing Aids – Hearing Loss In One Ear | hear.com.

3

Thanks for your reply & link, @tenkan

To clarify, I’m trialling a BiCROS setup.

My audiologist has confirmed that CROS appears disabled if manual directional microphone beamforming is switched on in the Signia app. I’m paraphrasing… CROS is designed to take sounds from left/right; this function becomes counterproductive when activated beamforming pushes the microphone configuration into a forward focus.

Interestingly, though the 2 CROS microphones are effectively ‘dead’ in this situation, they are still being accessed by the binaural 4-microphone adaptive beamforming technology used in the other aid to help locate and filter background noise for the ‘good’ ear.

My own tests (finger-brushing the aids and also recorded voice) confirm that the 2 CROS microphones are ‘dead’ while the app is in manual direction mode (all beam coverages 15-360 degrees).

This is my first CROS experience… not quite sure what to make of it. My learning curve continues…