these have to be two of the best hearing aids ever created but which one is best hey guys Cliff Olson Dr of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix Arizona and in this video I'm comparing the phonak Ado sphere infino hearing aid with the Odon intent hearing aid to see if one of them is actually better than the other anytime we have two brand new hearing aid Technologies released within months of each other I always have people reach out to me asking hey Dr Cliff which one of these hearing aids is actually better the intent was an upgrade from okon's previous generation technology that was already pretty impressive and over the course of 6 months the Odon intent was widely regarded as one of the best hearing aids ever created that is until the release of the new phonak Ado sphere infino hearing aid that was released in August of 2024 and after what was probably the most successful hearing aid launch in the history of hearing aid launches it naturally started the debate between whether or not the Odon intent hearing aids were better or if the new phon adosphere infino hearing aids were better naturally since I've done detailed reviews on both of these hearing aids and I fit a lot of people with each of these hearing aids I felt like I should weigh in on the key differences between them to help you decide which one is right for you but before I do if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button it really helps out the channel and while you're at it if you have not yet subscribed to the Channel with notifications turned on go ahead and do that as well because that ensures that you never miss one of my newly released videos and I publish a ton of new videos every single week that being said it's greatly appreciated and if you are wearing one of these hearing aids go ahead and tell us your experience down in the comment section that might be the difference between someone going with the ones that you're wearing and the other pair like I mentioned before I do have detailed reviews of both of these hearing aids that you guys can find linked down in the description so if one of these devices piques your interest or you just want to get more information than what I'm able to share in this video you can go ahead and watch those review videos as well that being said let's go ahead and take a look at the different technology levels of the Odon intent the intent hearing aids come in four different technology levels you have the intent one you have the intent 2 the intent 3 and the intent 4 with the intent one being their premium offering the sphere infino comes in only two different technology levels you have level 90 and level 70 with level 90 being their premium offering now if you're trying to decide which technology level is right for you just keep in mind that each time you drop down in technology level it takes features and customizations away from your hearing care professional when they're trying to optimize the performance of those devices for you however it typically reduces the cost of the heing AIDS and cost is extremely variable depending on where you live the technology level the services whether they're bundled or unbundled and the quality of those services so my recommendation is the same for everybody you should be going with the highest level of technology that you can reasonably afford and if you cannot afford it you should be dropping down to whatever technology level you can afford and then it's the job of your hearing care professional to get the most out of those devices for you that being said you can probably get yourself a pair of odan intent hearing aids at a lower cost because you can drop down to a third tier or a fourth tier as opposed to the sphere infino hearing aids that you can only drop down to a second tier next let's go ahead and take a look at the ranges of hearing loss that you can fit with the Odon devices and the phonak devices as you can tell both of them are receiver in Canal hearing aids which means you can change the receiver wires to Stronger receivers that have more gain and more output so you can technically fit anything from a mild level hearing loss up to a profound level hearing loss with both of these hearing aids the Odon intent hearing aids can use a 60 D receiver 85 D receiver 100 D receiver or a 105 DB receiver the lower end of this range here you can use rubber domes with or custom earm molds but once you get up to 105 dbel receiver you need to use a custom ear mold when using the phone X sphere infino hearing aids you can use a standard medium power or ultra power receiver and again with the lower range of these you can use a rubber Dome or custom ear mold but once you get up to the ultra power level you have to use a custom ear mold for those the good news is both Odon and phonak accept 3D digital ear Impressions from your hearing care professional for an extremely comfortable and acoustically optimized custom ear mold okay so as far as customization goes meaning the programmability of these devices when you look at an Odon intent hearing aid you can get up to 24 different adjustment bands in the top tier device for them this will allow your hearing care professional to be able to customize the audio of these hearing AIDS exactly to your hearing loss prescription for average loud and soft level sounds I do have to say that the Odon intent hearing aids do an excellent job of amplifying high frequencies which is where most people's hearing loss is at and it does that much better than the phone act hearing aids especially if you're using a rubber Dome I do have to say though that the amount of digital features that are available inside of an Odon intent hearing aid are somewhat lacking I mean outside of adjusting for handling noise wind noise noise reduction and directional microph phones there's not a whole lot that you can do with them the PHX spere Andino hearing aids have up to 20 different adjustment bands so it's a little bit less than what you can get with the Odon intense but they are still very customizable especially with all the digital features that phonak has inside of their hearing aids these features include Autos sense OS 6.0 which automatically adjusts your program settings based on the environments that you're in and other features like noise reduction directional microphone controls soft speech enhancement and impulse noise reduction to name a few the sphere infino can struggle with amplifying up to high frequency prescriptive targets especially if you're using a rubber Dome if you want to be able to amplify high frequencies much better with a phone act hearing aid you're going to have to go with a custom ear mold but when it comes to streaming audio you can customize a phonak adosphere infino hearing aid substantially better than what you can in Odon intent hearing aid and it allows your hearing care professional to customize for different types of streamed audio like music media speech media and even phone calls of course the best way to customize the amplification and therefore the sound quality of both of these hearing aids is to use real ear measurement real ear measurement is the only way that your hearing care professional can verify that you're getting proper amplification from your Odon intent hearing aids and your phon adosphere infino hearing aids unfortunately only around 30% of Hearing Care Professionals actually perform real ear measurement which is a huge problem because if you wear either one of these hearing aids without realer measurement being done you leaving a significant amount of benefit on the table if you'd like to learn more about real ear measurement I will have this video linked down in the description as well of course you learning about real a measurement and you receiving real a measurement are two completely different things so if you're looking for a hearing care professional who actually does this critical verification measure I highly recommend that you go to my hearing up.com website and find a hearing up Network member in your area hearing up members have been vetted and are committed to providing comprehensive audiologic best practices including real ear measurement to ensure you can hear absolute best so if you need help identifying which one of these hearing aids is best for you and ensure that it is fit and programmed for Optimal Performance finding a hearing up Network member in your area is your best bet okay let's move on to water resistance when it comes to resisting water or dirt and dust infiltration into these hearing aids both of these hearing aids are excellent for that because they both have an ip68 rating which is high as the rating scale goes of course I have to say that the phonak adosphere infino hearing aids dramatically EX exed this ip68 rating criteria these are pretty much some of the only hearing aids that I cannot kill by jumping into the pool jumping into the shower or sweating all over when it comes to Bluetooth connectivity the Odon intent hearing aids actually have three different forms of Bluetooth it has the new le audio Bluetooth it has Bluetooth low energy and it has the Asha Bluetooth protocol Le audio is definitely the Bluetooth of the future and the only reason why the intents still have Bluetooth low energy or the Asha Bluetooth protocol is because not a lot of other wireless devices are using Le audio Bluetooth yet of course when I had a chance to test the Le audio of the intent hearing aids the sound quality was substantially better than any other form of Bluetooth that I've ever listened to and it actually lowers the battery drain as well Le audio Bluetooth also allows for a new feature called orac cast broadcast audio that I don't have time to talk about in this video I do have another video posted about that but this will be a game changer for individuals who want to hear better in public venues now if you have to use the Bluetooth low energy or the ash Bluetooth protocol I'm sad to say that with the Oda kind intense neither one of those are fantastic now the phone X SP infino just got an upgrade from Bluetooth version 4.2 up to Bluetooth version 5.3 but they are still using Bluetooth classic now Bluetooth classic is nice because it gives you very Universal connectivity because pretty much any wireless device is using Bluetooth classic so you have a direct compatibility there but you can also pair with up to eight different devices with your phone AC hearing aids and you can have two active connections at the exact same time which is not something that you can say about the Odon intent devices it technically uses Bluetooth low energy as well but only to connect with the my phone AC app now you may have caught on that even though it has Bluetooth version 5.3 they are
technically not using Le audio Bluetooth yet that only comes with a future firmware update but rest assured when that firmware update comes out you don't have to switch devices it will be an update that happens inside of the hearing aids that gives you that compatibility as for when that firmware update will become available who knows both the Odon intent hearing aids and the PHX sphere infino hearing aids have their own proprietary apps that you can connect to to adjust different parameters inside of each of these devices for the Odon intent it's the Odon companion app and for the phac adosphere infino hearing aids it's the my phone AC app both of these apps are adequate for adjusting between different programs different volume settings a couple of additional customizations with a three-band equalizer a little bit of noise reduction and ultimately remote care with your hearing care professional so they can adjust your hearing aids through your smart device even if you're not in their office while we're on the topic of connectivity let's talk about telecoils for a second so the Odon intent hearing aids I don't care what level you go with anywhere between intent one through intent 4 all comes standard with a tel coil but you cannot get a tel coil inside of the phona spere infino hearing aids now if you're not familiar with what the benefits of a tel coil are sometimes you can find a public venue that has a loop loop system in it that gives you direct access to the audio of that venue think of like when you go to a Broadway show and they're singing up there on stage if you're struggling to hear it through the regular speakers of the venue you could tap into the hearing loop system with your telecoil and get that audio stream directly into both of your ears as of right now this feature is still a very good feature to have considering that orac cast it would do basically a similar thing is not yet widely available unfortunately for the phonak Ado sphere infino devices they do have a telecoil like I mentioned and you're just going to have to wait for orac cast to become more widely available when it comes to listening to music both of these hearing aids are actually really good but you have to separate out listening to streamed music or listening to live music I will say that when it comes to listening to stream music because you have so many more customizations with the phone act devices they probably take the win there but when you're listening to live music a lot of my professional musicians and audio file patients actually prefer the sound quality of the Odon intent hearing aids of course this is also very heavily dependent with how your hearing care professional programs the different music programs inside of each of these hearing aids okay let's go ahead and talk about rechargeability so both the odan intense and the phon adosphere infino hearing aids as of this recording only come in rechargeable form factors while they may come up with disposable battery options at some point in the future right now it's all about rechargeable lithium ion technology both of these hearing aids use contact charging this is actually a beneficial thing when it comes to speeding up the charging process and I feel like a lot of different hearing aid manufacturers are starting to go away from the inductive charging the Odon intent hearing aids will get you up to 20 hours of battery life on a full charge and it only takes 2 hours to go from zero battery up to 100% battery inside of your hearing aids the Odon intent hearing aids when they were initially released they came with a desktop charger not the smart charger that I'm holding in my hands right now the desktop charger did not store any battery inside of it it didn't have an internal power bank but the smart charger does have an internal power bank and the well that's inside of there is plenty big to handle most of the ear molds that you would order from Odon with the PHX sphere infino hearing aids you get 16 hours of battery life which obviously is less than what you get with the intents but when you switch into the spheric speech and loud noise program to separate speech from background noise using the Deep Sonic chip that drops down to only 7 hours of battery life basically you cannot use these hearing aids inside of that program setting all the time because you'll run out of battery before you're halfway through your day and it takes 3 hours to go from a dead battery up to a fully charged battery with the sphere infino as far as the rechargeable case for the sphere infinio it actually stores a charge which is great so you can charge it up on the go if you need to but the well inside of there for the domes and the ear molds is a lot smaller and that's probably my biggest issue with this charging case is that if you happen to have medium to large size custom ear molds on these hearing aids it's very difficult to fit them inside of there perhaps the biggest difference between both of these hearing aids is the physical size of the hearing aids and I'm going to take some photos for you guys so you can do a direct comparison there but for right now let me just kind of show you here on the screen this right here is the Odon intent hearing aid to give you a general size and what that looks like and then I'm going to go ahead and show you the phac hearing aid and you can tell that this one is substantially larger than what the intent is but the true test is me actually putting them on my ears so let me put the phonak device in my right ear and yes I am a glasses wearer so that can potentially cause an issue depending on the size of the unit behind my ear and let me put on the Odon hearing aid in my left ear just to kind of give you a few looks here so if you look at me head on you might be able to tell a difference between how my ear is getting pushed out on one side versus the other let me spin around this is the Odon intent hearing aid on this side give you a few looks at what that looks like this one's actually I believe like a graphite gray color the phac hearing it is more of a silver color which might stand out a little bit more I do recommend that you actually find a color that matches your hair so they blend in better but you can definitely tell from a size perspective that the the phonak adosphere infino hearing aid is substantially larger than the Odon intent hearing aid all right here are the actual photos of a side bys side with the Odon intent and the phonak adosphere infino hearing aids you can see that it is not even close the Odon intent hearing aids are substantially smaller both in length and width compared to the phonak adosphere infino hearing aids will this be a problem for you well it really just depends on the size of your ears now I'm not here trying to be an apologist for a phonak and the size of their devices but they do have two chips inside of their hearing aids and that deep Sonic chip that uses the Deep neural network requires a lot of battery so they had to put a bigger battery inside it as well and that extra waterproofing that makes these one of the most waterproof devices on the market right now takes up more space as well okay next let's talk about the accessories that you can get with each one of these hearing aids so the Odon intent hearing aid accessories are rather limited they have the Odon TV adapter 3.0 they have the connect clip and they have the remote control control Odon has really not updated any of their accessories to a significant degree over the past like 5 to 7 years at this point and honestly when you get into really big group situations and you're trying to hear multiple talkers Odon really doesn't have a good option for you for that phon on the other hand has some of the best accessories on the market not only do they have their pretty standard accessories like their TV connector their partner microphone and their remote control but they have all of their Roger microphones as well these Roger microphones include the Roger on the Roger select the Roger clip-on mic and the Roger table mic that can handle almost any noisy situation that you throw at them so if you have a really bad speech and noise score that is identified by your hearing care professional you may have to lean towards the phone act devices if you're going to need accessories and last but not least probably the comparison that pretty much everybody was waiting for is how good do these hearing aids perform in background noise now Odon was the first hearing aid brand to release a hearing aid that had a chip that was trained with a deep neural network now I want you to think of a deep neural network is an artificial computer brain that you feed a ton of data into and then that brain actually learns what speech is and it learns what noise is so it can filter out the noise and give you the speech now inside of the Odon intent hearing aids Odon actually updated their deep neural network to version 2.0 they trained it with 12 million different sound samples and they refined the outputs of it they also combined their new and improved deep neural network with their new 4D sensor to help better separate speech from noise this allowed Odon to a achieve up to a 9 D signal to noise ratio improvement with up to 12 DB of noise reduction the 4D sensor resulted in a 15% relative Improvement in speech comprehension and a 35% Improvement in speech intelligibility index over odeon's previous generation technology and these improvements have been extremely noticeable by previous generation Odon hearing aid technology users all that to say is that people who wear the Odon intent hearing aids and background noise do really good in background noise the phonak adosphere infino hearing aids also have a chip that uses a deep neural network called The Deep Sonic chip in combination with their era chip when you get into a noisy situation that's when the Deep Sonic chip actually kicks in and starts using its artificial intelligence to separate speech from noise the Deep Sonic chip was trained with 22 million sound samples through 4.5 million neural connections and performed 7.7 billion operations per second to effectively separate speech from noise this chip requires a ton of processing power and has 53 times more processing power than other chips on the market now when you combine the performance of this deep Sonic chip with directional microphones you can get up to 10 DB of signal to noise ratio Improvement no matter which direction sound is actually coming from in terms of performance both of these hearing aids are fantastic when it comes to background noise however independent hearing aid lab hear adviser did evaluate both the Odon intent and PHX spere infino hearing aids to see which one of them actually performed best in background noise and here were the results when fit to an Nal nl2 hearing loss prescription for a mild to moderate hearing loss verified with realer measurement the Odon intense and the PHX sphere infino were at the top of the list when it came to Performance and noise on a scale between zero and five with five being the best the PHX spere infino scored a whopping 4.6 and the
Odon intent scored an impressive 3.7 now if your initial reaction to that data is that the PHX spere infino hearing aids must be substantially better than the Odon intent hearing aids because it scored almost a full point higher I would have to agree with you however it's also very important to understand that the testing done inside of a lab is different than what you would experience in the real world and depending on your type and configuration of hearing loss with a combination of different rubber domes or custom ear molds your performance could vary widely between these two hearing aids but all things being equal when you directly measure the performance benefit of each of these hearing aids the phone X spere infino did come out on top when it comes to background noise as far as real world performance goes when I tested both of these here in AIDS in really noisy environments I happen to notice that both of them did a very good job in background noise and I would give a slight Edge to the phonk adosphere infino devices that being said as you can see there are a lot of different variables that come into play when you're trying to determine which one of these hearing aids is best for you honestly you could take two different people that have identical hearing losses and one of these hearing aids could be better for one of them and the other hearing aids better for the other one perhaps the most important variable is the hearing care professional who's actually fitting you with either one of these devices if you have a hearing care professional who's better with phac it might make more sense to lean towards a phonak hearing aid because they're more familiar on how to program them better for you but if you get someone who primarily dispenses Odon you'd probably be better off going with the Odon of course if you're still confused after watching this comparison I would recommend that you go watch my other detailed review videos and ultimately if you have an excellent hearing care professional who follows best practices and they work with multiple different brands of devices they should be able to identify which ones are actually best for you and make the recommendation
2024-09-27