Costco hearing aids and poor voice call quality on Apple iPhone?

[rcstevensonaz]

[Update: I went in to Costco today, and found out there was a firmware update from 1.1 to 1.2.1 which addresses some Bluetooth LE issues. Need more time to test, but so far it seems better but still nowhere as good as my Air Pods from 4 years ago.]

Is anyone else experiencing issues with poor voice audio quality when using an Apple iPhone 16, especially for hearing aids from Costco (Philips, Rexton)?

Several months ago, I purchased Philips 9050 hearing aids. At that time, I was using an Apple iPhone 8 Plus (Bluetooth 5.0), and never had any problems with the audio quality. The only annoying part was that I had to use the phone itself for the microphone because of the older version of Bluetooth.

Recently, I upgraded to an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max (Bluetooth 5.3). On the one hand, voice calls now use the microphone built into the hearing aids. However, voice call quality is often staticky or blocky — both for the audio quality of what I hear in my ears, and equally or even worse on the quality of what is sent to the other party on the phone call. Under this current situation, these hearing aids are nearly unusable for regular phone calls; and I can't risk using them on business calls where voice quality matters.

I'm curious whether anyone else has experienced similar issue on iPhone 16 with either Philips or Rexton, or is this something about my setup?

 

[Timcognito]

Sorry if way off base but I hope you are cleaning your hearing aids. Costo does it for free. 96 yo mom had a similar problem and that fixed it.

 

[staticV3]

Makes sense. Bluetooth has limited bandwidth and so transmitting both your voice and their voice via BT cuts the BW available for each in half, reducing sound quality.

Plus, I bet the 9050's built-in mic is worse than your iPhone's as well.

So yes. When switching from iPhone internal mic for TX and 9050 RX via BT to 9050 TX+RX via BT, I would expect the overall experience to take a hit.

Retaining good quality for both takes careful tuning of Bluetooth parameters, which Apple will do for their AirPods for example, but I doubt Philips would care about for a secondary function.

I'd try to disable the 9050's mic for calls to restore the connection to what you had before.

 

[Speedskater]

Maybe someone at the Hearing Aid forum has some thoughts:

Hearing Aid Forum - Active Hearing Loss Community

An open forum to discuss hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other hearing solutions. Welcome to the world's most active hearing loss community.

forum.hearingtracker.com

 

[rcstevensonaz]

I went into Costco today, and found out there was a firmware update from 1.1 to 1.2.1 which addresses some Bluetooth LE issues. I need more time to test, but so far it seems better... but still nowhere as good as my Air Pods from 4 years ago.

 

[unpluggged]

I don't know much about your specific setup, but most probably is that the hearing aids use the standard HFP BT profile and corresponding codecs for voice applications, while the Apple's earphones might use their own proprietary BT profile and codecs when used with an iPhone, hence the voice quality difference.