when it comes to picking one of these two pairs of hearing aids you really can't make a wrong choice hey guys Cliff wson doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix Arizona and in this video I'm doing a comparison between the Fon adosphere infino hearing aid and the starky edge AI hearing aid so you can decide which one's best for you of the new hearing aids released over the past several months these are definitely two of the best in August of 2024 we saw the release of the new phonak adosphere infino hearing aids and just a few months later in October we saw the release of the new starky Edge AI I will say that the biggest feature update for both of these hearing aids is the new deep neural network that they're using for Sound Processing following oticon's lead from a couple years ago and since I brought up Odon if you want to see my comparison videos comparing the phonic Ado sphere to the Odon intent or the starky edge AI to the Odon intent I will link those videos down in the description for you on top of that I also have independent detailed review videos for each of these different pairs of hearing aids so if you want to get my full opinion on both of them including both pros and cons make sure that you check out those as well please keep in mind that while both of these hearing aids are fantastic neither one of them are very good at all unless you go to a hearing care professional who follows comprehensive audiologic best practices best practices are a series of considerations and procedures by your hearing care professional to ensure that you're able to receive the maximum amount of benefit from whatever hearing aids you used the problem is it's extremely difficult to find one of these best practice providers however if you'd like an easier way to find one of these providers I highly recommend that you go to my website hearing up.com and find a hearing up Network member in your area hearing up members have been vetted and are committed to following comprehensive audiologic best practices so you can hear your absolute best no matter which hearing aids you choose to use now before I get into a head-to-head comparison of these two different hearing aids do me a huge favor and click the like button it really helps out my channel because it gets these videos in front of a broader audience and while you're at it if you have not yet subscribed to my Channel with notifications turned on go ahead and do that as well it is greatly appreciated and while you're at it let me know down in the comment section which one of these two pairs of hearing aids you find to be the best and why all right let's go ahead and start this comparison looking at the different form factors and the different technology levels that each one of them offer the phonak AO sphere infino hearing aids only come in a receiver in Canal rechargeable form factor with two technology levels level 90 and level 70 with level 90 being their premium offering there is technically a nons spere version of the infino hearing aids that come in four different technology levels but they do not have the Deep neural network that I'll be talking about inside of the sphere version of these hearing aids The starky Edge AI Hearing Aids on the other hand come in several different form factors so the one that I have right here is a rechargeable receiver in Canal model but there is also an additional receiver in Canal model that has a telecoil that is still rechargeable and they have a size 312 disposable battery version of this receiver in Canal hearing 8 but that's not all they also have custom rechargeable full shell half shell and in the canal Hearing Aids on this Edge AI platform in the top of the Loft they even have a wireless completely in the canal non-rechargeable version of this hearing eight the edji also comes in three different technology levels you have level 24 level 20 and level 16 with level 24 being their premium offering essentially phonet gives you one form factor with this particular hearing aid and starky gives you a variety of different form factors and starky gives you one additional lower technology level as well as far as recharge ility goes the PHX sphere gives you up to 16 hours of battery life on a single charge and the time it takes to go from 0% battery to 100% battery inside of the charger is around 3 hours the sphere also comes standard with a Premium charging case that stores three additional charges inside of it without it having to be plugged into the wall so you can charge your hearing aids on the go the only real problem with this charger is that the well where custom eolds would go into inside of there isn't very big so if you have larger ear canals with big custom ear molds it's very difficult to fit those inside of this charger now the rechargeable receiver in Canal starky Edge AI hearing a have a ton of battery life the smaller version will get you up to 41 hours of battery life and the larger version that has the telecoil inside of it will get you up to 51 hours of battery life the custom rechargeable versions of the EDI hearing aids will get you up to 42 hours of battery life on a full charge starky offers both the regular Starling charger 2.0 which is the one that I'm holding right here this one does not have an internal power bank so you have to have it plugged into the wall but they also offer a premium model of this charger that does store additional charges inside of it but that's likely going to be an upgrade that you have to pay for with your hearing care professional both of these Chargers though have plenty of room for custom ear molds if that is something that you need to use to optimize the performance of these devices and the custom charger is extremely easy to use for individuals with poor finger dexterity when it comes to these size differences between these two different hearing aids there is a pretty Stark difference so let me go ahead and just hold the PHX sphere up to the camera here for you to give you an idea of what that really looks like there you go I'm going to go ahead and put this one inside of my ear as well so you can compare it with the starky edge AI now the starky edge AI model that I have with me right now is actually the smallest one that they have it's the EM version of this but you can see how much smaller that is I'm going to put this one into my left ear and then I'll spin my chair around so you can see what this ultimately looks like I've got the phac device on the right ear the starky device on the left ear let me start off by showing you the starky device this one is in a silver color hopefully you can see it there okay let me spin back the other way so you can see what the phonak one looks like and you can see that that is definitely much bigger let me see if I can go straight back from the camera and if I slide my glasses on it's not really a huge issue with either one of these hearing aids but you may be able to see that it pushes out my right ear a little bit further than what it pushes out my left ear here's an additional side-by-side comparison of these two hearing aids so you can get an idea of the size differences between them all right so let's go ahead and talk about durability of these two different hearing aids so the PHX sphere is an ip68 hearing aid which means that it's incredibly moisture and debris resistant they've tested it for over 10,000 hours in 135 different tests to make sure that this hearing is extremely durable quite honestly it's one of the most waterresistant and debris resistant Hearing Aids on the planet right now which means that it's right up there with the starky edge AI hearing aids which have an ip68 plus rating meaning that these are also extremely resistant to moisture and debris this is enlarged part thanks to the eight protective layers that starky has created called their pro8 Hydra Shield inside of the starky ede AI hearing aids at the end of the day both the fonx spere and starky Edge AI hearing aids are some of the most durable Hearing Aids on the market right now now when it comes to the fitting ranges of both of these hearing aids you can essentially fit the same exact levels of hearing loss with either one of them the phone X speres use a standard medium power and ultra power receiver so you can treat anything from a mild level hearing loss up to a profound level hearing loss and the starky edji hearing aids use a low power receiver medium power and ultra power receiver as well I will say that both of these hearing aid manufacturers have really good custom ear molds to be able to retain the amount of amplification inside of your ear canals especially when you get up to the more severe and profound levels of hearing loss when it comes to the Precision of programming for these hearing aids the phone X spere will give your hearing care professional 20 different adjustment bands that they can manipulate to match your hearing loss prescriptive targets and this is both true for the 90 level of technology and the 70 level of Technology The starky Edge AI gives you 24 different adjustment bands in their 24 level of tech but the 20 level of tech gives you 20 different adjustment bands and the 16 level of tech gives you 16 adjustment bands both of these hearing aids have a variety of different digital features that your hearing care professional can optimize to whatever level is most appropriate for you now when it comes to Performance and background noise the biggest variable that will control for this is the new deep neural network that both of these hearing aids are using that I mentioned at the beginning of this video now if you do not know what a deep neural network is for Sound Processing and hearing aids I highly recommend that you check out this video that I'll will also have Linked In the description for you essentially a deep neural network is an artificial human brain that uses artific I intelligence to be able to separate speech from background noise the PHX sphere actually has two chips inside of it it has the regular era chip and it has their deep Sonic chip that uses artificial intelligence that was trained by the Deep neural network to access this artificial intelligence Sound Processing using the Deep Sonic chip to separate speech from background noise you can either manually toggle the spheric speech and loud noise program or the spheric speech and loud noise program can activate automatically when you get into noisy environments now please keep in mind that when you're using using the spheric speech and loud noise program either manually or automatically it can take your battery life of your hearing aids down from 16 hours of use down to around 7 hours of use which means that you do not want to use this program that activates the Deep Sonic chip all the time however when you do activate this program to use artificial intelligence separating speech from background noise it can get you up to a 10 dbel signal to noise ratio Improvement which is really impressive I am going to go ahead and play an audio sample of this for you here in a minute after I explain what starky is doing with their deep neural network starky uses their new G2 neuroprocessor chip which actually has an integrated neural processing unit to perform this AI Sound Processing using their deep neural network so instead of having two chips inside of the starky device they're able to incorporate it inside of their main chip however to get the full benefit of this deep neural network using the starky EDI hearing aids you have to activate EDG mode plus EDG mode plus is not a feature that will activate automatically inside of the starky edge AI hearing aids you have to actually activate it yourself either through the hearing aid through your smartphone app or through your Apple watch however when you do activate it it can get you between 10 and 13 DB of signal to noise ratio Improvement so now that you know how both phonak and starky are integrating this deep neural network into their Sound Processing of their hearing aids let me go ahead and give you a comparison of how both of them sound I caned it maybe later by judging the track just like intro song and I was like so behind beat because when I would press it down all of a sudden the pit shift stuff was behind by like 10 milliseconds I mean it's enough to make the feel off you know range aniy Char our goal at Star is to remove the fear from hearing aid users that they'll miss out on one of life's most important moments due to running out of battery life and their hearing aids now you have to admit that both of these sound samples were really impressive for each of these hearing aids but I want to know what you think so let me know down in the comment section which one you thought sounded better now just keep in mind that in the real world your performance and background noise has a lot to do with how your hearing care professional fits you with both of these hearing aids and how they're programmed for you now if you're looking for an easy way to improve your ability to hear in background noise even more than what these deep neural networks can do for you I highly recommend that you check out lace AI Pro for auditory training lace AI Pro is an auditory training program that you do right from your smart device and it's like Physical Therapy but for your ears depending on the level of hearing loss you have lace AI Pro can significantly improve your ability to hear in background noise by up to 6 DB this is roughly equivalent to a 60% Improvement in speech understanding when you're in a background noise situation and this is in addition to the benefit that you would get from using hearing aids alone lace is backed by over 20 years of use and over 80 research studies to prove its Effectiveness now to get lace AI Pro you need to purchase a license but for Dr Cliff Channel subscribers I will have a discount code down in the description of this video as well as a link link for you to check it out for yourself in terms of comparing the overall performance of each of these hearing aids I'd like to refer to hear advisor which is an independent hearing aid Testing Lab that tested the overall objective performance of each of these devices both the PHX spere and the starky edge AI received a sound grade of an a from her advisor the overall initial score of the PHX sphere was 4.4 and the overall initial score of the starky edge AI was 3.8 with the higher the number being better the overall tune score which indicates the performance of each of these hearing aids after real ear measurement has been used to optimize the programming of them the phona sphere went from a score of 4.4 to
score of 5.2 and the edge AI improved from a score of 3.8 to 4.5 however the thing that everybody cares about is the speech and noise performance after optimization using real ear measurement the phona feere hearing aids got a speech and noise score of 4.6 out of
five which is the highest score that they have ever recorded on any hearing aid that they've ever tested and the starky edge AI only scored a 2.6 out of five so how is this possible how did the phona spere outperform the starky edge AI by that much in this objective testing well it is likely due to the fact that he advisor tests these hearing aids in their automatic modes and like I mentioned a little bit earlier The starky Edge AI will not activate their EDG mode plus feature automatically but the PHX sphere will activate its spheric speech and loud noise program automatically that being said we will have to wait for an Apples to Apples comparison of the deep neural network performance of the phonak adosphere infino and the starky edge AI hearing eights because as of right now based on objective testing the PHX feere hearing aid is the clear market leader when it comes to Performance in noisy situations and the starky edge AI isn't even in the top 10 so this is just another reason to make sure that you are subscribed to my Channel with notifications turned on because as soon as they do the objective testing of EDG mode plus using the starky EDI hearing aids I will make sure to publish a video on it as far as connectivity goes the PHX spere did receive a nice upgrade from Bluetooth version 4.2 to version 5.3 which means that it will be future compatible with Bluetooth LE audio and orac cast of course this will come with a future firmware update inside of these hearing aids it can be done by your hearing care professional because as of right now phonk has made the decision to stay with Bluetooth classic which is the most universally used form of Bluetooth that can connect to virtually any Bluetooth device on the market right now I should also mention that the PHX spere does not have access to a telecoil nor can you use a cross transmitter with it the starky EDI hearing a also got a nice Bluetooth upgrade to version 5.3 but
they give you access to a variety of different Bluetooth options including made for iPhone Bluetooth low energy technology the Asha Bluetooth protocol for Android devices and even Le audio and Ora cast right now now everybody has their own opinions on which form of Bluetooth is better some people say Bluetooth classic is better some people say that made for iPhone Bluetooth is better nobody says that Ash is better and then a lot of people are starting to perceive the sound quality improvements of Le audio Bluetooth the Rick RT version of the edgi hearing aid also gives you access to a telecoil like I mentioned a little bit earlier and the RT version and the size 312 disposable battery version of this hearing aid also gives you access to a cross transmitter in terms of audio streaming the PHX feere gives you a lot of customization on the sound quality because they break up all of the different streaming options that you would have into different program settings so you can have sep SE audio streaming for music related media speech related media phone calls streaming from a partner mic or even streaming from a Roger device every single one of these different programs can be customized differently by your hearing care professional depending on how you want them to sound and there are other digital features that they can activate to get rid of some more of your surrounding sound versus the streaming that you're trying to get the sphere hearing aids are also compatible with the activent receivers from phac which will open and close the venting of the ear molds to trap in more low frequency bass tones to make music sound better and to block out a little bit more background noise The starky Edge AI streaming customization is rather limited ever since they got rid of the stream boost feature about a year ago now your hearing care professional has to customize a manually activated program that you can switch into after you start streaming into the EDI hearing aids I will say that the streaming sound quality using the made for iPhone Bluetooth low energy protocol and the Asher protocol are not very good inside of the starky devices you will get a step up if you go and use a device that uses the Bluetooth LE audio streaming but those devices are limited at this moment if streaming sound quality is really important to you with the starky devices make sure that you check out their compatibility list of all the Bluetooth devices that are out there that are compatible with the starky edge AI using Bluetooth LE audio another feature made possible by the Bluetooth is app controls the phonak sphere uses the my phonak app which allows you to change programs adjust volume customize your own programs track your health data and engage in Remote programming sessions with your hearing care professional you also have the ability to download the my Roger mic app which will allow you separate controls for any of the Roger devices that you may have with these hearing aids I'll cover what these Roger devices are here in just a minute so bear with me the edge AI hearing aids use the my starky app this app allows you to do pretty much all the same things including changing programs changing volume creating custom programs tracking your health data and activating tahere Remote programming however you also get a few other cool features such as language translation transcription Services fall detection a hearing aid self check feature and a balance assessment feature using the steady protocol the my starky app is also compatible with an Apple Watch so if you want to make some adjustments to your hearing aids you can do it right from your wrist starky also gives you access to a second app called hear share where you can share usage and activity data with people that you designate like a friend or family member if you want to have a second set of eyes on your overall hearing treatment when it comes to accessories it's really hard to beat a phone AC hearing aid the phonak sphere gives you access to a remote control a partner mic and a TV connector however where it really stands out is the Roger microphones using Roger direct the Roger microphones include the Roger on3 the Roger select 3 and the Roger table mic 3 that now have unlimited receivers these are by far the most useful and impressive assisted listening devices on the market and they all communicate directly with the phone hearing aids because of their integrated Roger receivers using Roger direct The starky Edge AI hearing aids currently only have access to a starlink remote control 2.0 and the starlink edge TV streamer although I do expect starky to roll out some form of remote microphone at some point in the future not only does this mean that you can stream audio directly into your starky EDI hearing aids from your TV but you can share that audio with anyone else who has orac cast enabled devices whether this is hearing aids earbuds or headphones and last but not least I want to touch base a little bit on the custom ear molds that you can get from phonak and from starky often times to maximize your performance with hearing aids you need to use some form of a custom ear mold the phonak spere can use the custom seashells from phonak but you can also use the activent receivers that open and close the vents when you're in a noisy situation as well as when you're streaming phonak accepts either physical earmold Impressions from your hearing care professional or 3D digital Impressions from your hearing care professional so they can make some of the best custom ear molds in the world but you know who else makes some of the best custom ear molds in the world that's right starky starky makes some fantastic custom ear molds for all of the receiver and Canal products and of course if they're good at making custom ear molds for their receiver and Canal technology they also make really good custom ear molds for their custom line of devices honestly when it comes to really good custom ear molds you really cannot go wrong with either phonk or starky okay so clearly both of these hearing aids are extremely impressive but there are a few things that you need to keep in mind first you have to be very clear on what your specific wants and needs are because what's most important for you may not be most important for somebody else when you're picking out the best pair of hearing aids the second thing you need to consider is the hearing care professional that you're going to if they're very experienced working with one of these hearing aids but not the other you may not want to go with the one that they are not experienced in working with and the third being whether or not your hearing care professional follows comprehensive audiologic best practices including real ear measurement when they're fitting in programming these hearing aids for you just like you saw with the hear advisor objective testing both of these hearing aids perform significant better after they were custom programmed using real ear measurement quite honestly if you go and get one of these hearing aids from a hearing care professional that doesn't follow best practices including real a measurement chances are you're going to be wasting a ton of money on these devices because they won't be performing their best but as long as you take your time to identify which one of these hearing aids has the features that you're looking for and you go to a hearing care professional who follows best practices I can virtually guarantee that you'll do great with either one of these hearing aids
2025-01-28 18:16