Tag: Hearing

A friend with declining hearing asked for my experiences with the Nuheara IQbuds² MAX I’ve been re-batterying for quite some years:

Given that other folks may have the same issue, herewith a lightly edited version of the email I sent:

Do you use conventional hearing aids?

Nope, because when I was looking around, maybe six years ago, dropping $500 on Nuheara rather than $5000 on real hearing aids seemed like a good first step. Five Benjamins would be lost in the roundoff should I get something seriously exceedingly much more definitely better.

They are now $200 from Amazon. Nuheara had licensed the design to HP and stopped selling them in the US, which is what you’ll find on their website, so maybe the Amazon seller isn’t entirely legit.

My decision was partially based on an audiologist measuring my ears and stating my loss was “not aidable”, which meant it wasn’t severe enough to justify hearing aids. I interpreted that to mean her experience with similar folks showed insufficient return for the sales effort involved.

Before OTC hearing aids were legit, Nuheara was rated very near the top of the “not really hearing a hearing aid” pack. The better ones cost about half the price of real hearing aids, so IMO it was the best cost-performer.

Every time the question has come up since then, the crux is “Would real hearing aids be that much better than the Nuheara buds” and the answer has been “Nope”.

I’ve done occasional test sessions with various “hearing instrument specialists” and the results show I have essentially no hearing above 1 kHz, thus reducing female voices to mumbles. They are unwilling to test my hearing while wearing the Nuheara buds, for obvious reasons.

Do you use Nuheara instead?

Pretty much whenever Mary is around, because that’s the only way I’ll understand what she’s saying unless we’re face-to-face in the same room.

The noise reduction (see below) works wonderfully well in the car, eliminating all the road noise and isolating her voice.

experience and any advice

Unlike simple “personal sound amplifiers”, Nuheara has a six-band equalizer with settings based on an automated “Tap when you hear the tone” test done in the app. It does not, much to my frustration, display a line graph or export the numbers, but the circular diagram shows I don’t have much hearing above the lowest two channels:

I think the lower quarter of each side the rings is cosmetic filler, given the silence I hear when the test is surely presenting the higher frequency tones. If there’s a lower score than what I get, I cannot imagine what it might be for.

The buds have a high/low cut filter to reduce background sounds that works wonderfully on the ubiquitous 120 Hz hum anywhere in North America. I obviously don’t have much use for the high-cut filter setting.

The “Speech in Noise Control” applies DSP magic to reduce general background sound and emphasize speech, which is more complex than a simple frequency filter: SINC is astonishingly effective. What comes through the DSP magic isn’t audiophile quality, but it’s comprehensible and that’s what counts.

The downside: I hear nothing other than speech while it’s engaged. When we have supper on the screened porch, there is no background sound other than occasional traffic until I disable the filter and SINC, whereupon I can hear the breeze rustle the leaves / birds chirping / Vassar carillon chimes / stuff like that. Fair tradeoff, IMO.

The DSP monitors ambient sound and adjusts the overall gain to reduce the in-ear volume. My normal settings turn the water stream from the kitchen faucet into deafening white noise, but the gain drops after a few seconds and I’m effectively deaf. This also applies when we’re walking outdoors, with any wind noise in the microphones turning the gain down enough that I hear just as poorly with the buds as I do without them.

The buds can stream audio from the phone and the equalizer applies to phone calls / music / whatever. Real hearing aids tend to not stream audio, because Bluetooth requires bigger batteries. Getting phone calls with adjusted audio in both ears is wonderful.

The buds also have “tap” controls to start / stop streaming, raise / lower volume, and (most importantly) enable / disable “world audio” = I can mute the sound before I start doing something noisy. The “world off” = active noise cancellation isn’t perfect, but it’s Good Enough for most purposes.

I wear them under Peltor 28 dB hearing protectors (which cost 25 bucks two years ago sold by Amazon, so beware scalpers) while mowing: the muffs knock down all sounds and the buds remove what’s left. I can then stream music at reasonable volume to make mowing easier.

Those big batteries make the buds heavy in the ear, but it seems the same batteries appear in audio-only buds, so they may be the smallest ones that get the job done.

A good ear canal seal is essential and I’ve gone through several different “brands” on Amazon before finding effective foam tips.

Bottom line: I have no experience with their competition, but the Nuheara buds do everything I have ever read other buds / real hearing aids can do. Color me satisfied.

[Update: I pointed to this post in a comment on the Bose Community forum, wherein I mentioned the lack of Bluetooth in their Sound Control hearing aids. It seems “Posts on any board, including Hearphones, on the Bose Community regarding the Bose SoundControl Hearing Aids will be removed by our moderators”, so they edited out those paragraphs. Fair enough: it’s their playground, so they set the rules’]

Having recently bought a set of Nuheara IQbuds² MAX hearing assistance buds, I get “So, what do you think?” invitations to leave a review. As expected, the third-party company handling the reviews will strip-mine my personal bits for their own ends; I see plenty of upside for them and none for me.

So these brief notes, compiled before I read the Okendo TOS, should serve the same purpose as an actual review, minus the nonsense of providing even more of my sensitive bits.

Bose discontinued their Hearphones last year. While I’m reasonably happy with how mine work, they seem to last about a year before something fails. Bose replaced the first unit after its covering delaminated, replaced the second unit when a wire failed in the left microphone, and the third unit is now approaching one year of steady use.

The Hearphone necklace curled around the IQbuds charging case:

Comparing the IQBuds² MAX to the Bose Hearphones:

• Heavier in the ears, but without the necklace
• Poor battery runtime, both have non-replaceable batteries
• Poor ear seal with silicone tips, OK with Nuheara’s foam tips
• Immediate access to “World off” mode!
• “World off” mode seems noisier, even with ANC on
• Better dynamic noise control / filtering

The tradeoff for not having the Bose necklace is, of course, carrying a smaller battery in each ear. Everybody’s claimed run times are optimistic, but after a year the Hearphones still last the better part of a day, while new IQbuds generate range anxiety after a morning and must then spend a while recharging in their case.

The stock IQbud silicone tips exert entirely too much pressure on my ear canals. The foam tips produce a much better seal and were easier to wear for more than a few hours. The Bose “Stayhear” shaped silicone tips fit much better and suppress external sound just as well as the IQbud foam tips.

Replacing the stock IQbuds foam tips (described as “Comply memory foam”) with actual Comply memory foam tips directly from Comply was a definite step up that should not be necessary; they are similar, but visibly different. According to Comply’s online fit selector, you need their Isolation T-167 Sennheiser-specific tips, even though Nuheara hardware appears in Comply’s selector.

The IQbuds tap controls, except for the simplest single tap, barely work. I cannot perform a double-tap, because the bud registers the first tap as a single tap and either discards the second tap or registers it as another single tap. Long taps generally work, except when they don’t, having nothing to do with tap duration or force. Tech support tells me the buds use the audio signal to determine when a finger taps the bud, but AFAICT tap sensitivity is much too high and the discrimination entirely too unfussy.

Amusingly, nibbling dark chocolate can produce exactly the correct audio signal to trigger the “World off” tap in the right bud and, occasionally, the “Play / Pause” tap in the left bud. I rest my case.

For someone requiring far more audio gain than a typical hipster, firmly tapping an ear bud is an … uncomfortable … user interface.

Fortunately, a single correctly executed tap on the right bud mutes the microphones and turns on Active Noise Cancellation; the Hearphones bury that vital function on a tiny icon inside the Bose app, requiring many seconds to start and activate.

The IQbuds app (and, presumably, the bud firmware) does not allow assigning any tap function to any bud + tap pattern. For example, there’s no way to access both “change location” and “change focus” by tapping, because both those functions can be activated only by the right bud’s long tap: you may select one or the other. Weirdly, volume and media controls appear nearly everywhere and, if double taps worked, they’d be useful.

The Hearphones are much better at muting relatively quiet ambient sound, to the extent that I thought the IQbud “World off” function didn’t work. It does, even though it seems tuned to suppress much higher noise levels. Both do a surprisingly good job suppressing loud yard tools, perhaps due to my inability to hear frequencies over a few kHz.

The IQbud noise suppression exhibits horrible gain pumping in noisy environments and windy conditions. It rolls off the overall gain and filters the higher frequencies as the ambient noise increases, then restores them in a rush as the noise subsides: repeating the cycle as the noise level changes. This is very unpleasant and, AFAICT, there is no way to forcibly set a specific gain / bandwidth other than turning the suppression completely off, which misses the point.

Bottom line: I use the IQbuds and they definitely help my hearing, but I don’t particularly like them.

To be fair, I don’t like the Hearphones necklace very much, either, even though, overall, Bose did a better job with the actual earpieces.