- In this video,
I'm doing a detailed review
of the new Phonak Roger On remote microphone coming up.
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Hi guys Cliff Olson Doctor of Audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona.
And on this channel,
I cover a bunch of hearing related information to help make
you a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that,
make sure you hit that subscribe button.
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As most of you know, at this point,
I am a huge fan of assistive listening devices
like TV streamers, remote microphones and FM systems
that you can use alongside your hearing aids.
The reason I'm a big fan of these different accessories
is because they can help you here substantially better
than with just your hearing aids alone.
Even if you have a severe to profound hearing loss.
And even if you're in a really noisy situation,
the best hearing aids in the world program perfectly
by your hearing care professional,
still can not give you the auditory benefit,
that's possible with an assistive listening device
like remote microphone.
This helps particularly when you're in
a background noise situation.
When this audio gets sent right from that remote microphone
directly into your hearing aids.
And this even helps you at a long distance.
So if you happen to be somewhere,
where you're far away from the person that you wanna hear,
you can have a remote microphone send that sound directly
from their mouth, into your hearing aids.
That's why I get so excited when I see a new assistive
listening device, hit the market
with a bunch of new features to help you here even better.
But before I get into my review on the new Roger On,
if you could do me a huge favor and click that like button,
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That being said,
let's go ahead and get into the review.
Now, if you'd like the Phonak Roger Pen, Roger Select,
or Roger table Mic ii,
then you're going to love the new Phonak Roger On,
first, let me explain how a Roger accessory works.
So you need the Roger accessory in this case, the Roger On,
and you need that to be able to communicate
with your hearing aids.
Now, there is a variety of different setup options for this.
If you have a newer Phonak hearing aid,
meaning you have a Marvel device or a Paradise device,
you can actually have Roger receivers installed inside
of these devices.
And it's a simple software install,
not a hardware install.
That means that you'll also have to be able to purchase
a Rodger X receiver to install inside of the Marvel
or Paradise hearing aid.
Now, if you have an older generation hearing aid
or a hearing aid, that's not even from Phonak,
you can still communicate with the Roger On microphone,
but you need to have an external accessory
in order to do so.
So if you have a generation of Phonak curing aid
that predates the marble,
you actually have to have something like the ComPilot II.
So in this case, you would loop this, around your neck.
Pardon me with my microphone here.
Then you would take a Roger X Receiver
and plug that into the bottom of this.
So now what's happening is that the Roger on is going
to communicate with this Roger X receiver,
then that is going to convert it into a near-field magnetic
induction signal, that will communicate with your older
generation hearing aids.
If you wanna use this with a different off-brand.
So like a Resound hearing aid or an Oticon hearing aid,
you just have to have the compatible accessory
that can take this Roger X Receiver
and plug into the bottom of that accessory.
But once you have your Roger Receiver connected
to your Roger microphone,
you can then take that Roger microphone and use it,
and it will send that audio into your hearing aids.
All right, so a lot of people ask me,
well, what's the difference between the Roger On
and the Roger On IN,
well basically they are the exact same thing,
except that you have a couple of Roger Receivers,
inside of the Roger On IN,
so don't go and actually buy Roger X Receivers.
You have them installed in the Roger On IN,
and you can just upload those receivers into your Marvel
or Paradise hearing aids.
However, if you do not have Marvel or Paradise hearing aids,
do not get the Roger On IN version,
just get the Roger On, because you'll have to get
these external Roger X Receivers.
Now I know all of this sounds complicated,
which is exactly why you should have a really good hearing
care professional to guide you through this whole process.
All right, that being said,
regardless, if you have the Roger On or the Roger On IN,
outside of those additional receivers
that are inside of the IN version, of the Roger On,
they do the exact same thing.
There are basically five things that you can do
with the Roger On microphone.
You can use it in Presenter mode,
Table mode, Pointing mode.
You can stream audio directly from a TV
into your hearing aids,
and you can stream audio from another audio device
directly into your hearing aids using the Roger On.
The Roger On has an on-off switch on the right hand side,
it has a USBC charging and data port on the bottom.
It has four microphones, three along the left side,
and one on the right side,
which allow the Rodger On to identify
and select which direction to pick up sound from.
It has a display screen that indicates
which microphone mode you're in.
And how much battery life you have left.
It has a single push button in the center of the microphone
that lets you manually control
which microphone mode, you're in.
Or you can just let the Rodger On
use its internal accelerometer,
to determine which mode is most appropriate
based on the position that the device is in.
However, perhaps the coolest thing about the Roger On
is that it has a dedicated app
that you can use to control the Roger On the vice.
That I'll get into here in a minute,
as for the different microphone modes.
When you were in presenter mode,
you basically had this clip to someone short,
or you have it hanging around their neck,
on the lanyard that comes with it.
And then it orients itself,
microphone wise to be picking up the voice
of the individual who you're trying to hear,
and then that transmits their voice directly
into your hearing aids.
So even if you're a really far distance away from them,
like at a lecture hall,
you can hear them talking like they're right next
to your ear.
Table microphone mode means that you set the microphone
on the center of the table,
and then you can pick up the voices of the people primarily
at that table with you and not so much the background noise
that's outside of that table.
Pointing mode is my personal favorite,
which allows you to point this microphone
at the person that you want to hear.
So if you're in a cocktail party environment
and there was a bunch of different people speaking
at different times, you can actually point
the microphone in different directions.
Now you can be really weird about this,
or you can just be laid back and casual about it.
And no one else actually knows that you're doing it.
The docking station that comes with the Roger On
is one that charges your device,
but you can also plug it in, using the tasks link cable
into the optical audio out of your TV.
What this does is that when you put this inside
of that base station,
it takes the audio of the TV and sends it directly
into your hearing aid.
So you don't need an additional accessory
like a TV connector to hear the TV better.
And the best part is, is that you get your own
dedicated stream from the TV of sound
and it doesn't affect the sound for anyone else
in the room.
If you wanna hear a TV better, do direct audio input
like you get from the Roger On base station
and you will never go back to watching TV
without it ever again.
You can also do direct streaming from another their audio
device that does not have Bluetooth or anything like that
by using the adapter cable to plug into the bottom
of the USB-C and the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack
goes into that other portable device.
So if you still have like a Walkman or a CD player
that doesn't have Bluetooth,
I guess you can use it for that.
Otherwise I really think you should be upgrading
to Bluetooth devices by now.
There are a few issues with the Roger On microphone.
The first one being, it's really hard to use this,
to be compatible with your landline phone,
or like if you work in an office that has a landline phone,
there is a workaround that Phonak has devised
for the Roger devices,
but I've never actually been successful at setting them up.
And I do this stuff all the time.
And so you can try it yourself and please let me know
if you have success with this.
The other issue that I have with the Roger On microphone
is that it does not have a telecoil inside of it.
It would be great if it did have a telecoil,
that way if your hearing aids don't have telecoils
inside of them,
you can use the accessory to gain access to a hearing loop
inside of a public venue.
I really think that this is something that Phonak
should have added into this device.
And I know that this is much slimmer and sleeker
than the Roger pen, but at the same time,
I don't think it would have added a whole lot of additional
space inside of this to have a telecoil.
However, other than these two issues,
this really is one of the best remote microphones
that I have ever reviewed.
A few of the reasons for this is that you basically
have several different Roger microphone features
that are jam packed inside of this little guy right here.
And it also has an app that lets you control it.
One of the biggest issues that I have with both the previous
generations of Roger devices and with other remote
microphones out there, it's really hard for a patient
to understand what the heck they're actually doing
with the microphone, with flashing lights
and things like that.
But the, my Roger Mic app lets you control the Roger On
and it actually lets you see what you're doing.
All right, I promise I'm gonna get into the my Roger Mic
app here in just a minute.
But before I do that, I wanna go into the my Phonak app
because I wanna show you what happens
when you turn the Rodger On, on.
So I went ahead and just turned on the Roger On device
and here in a second,
what we should see is it switch over
to RogerDirect plus Mic,
this means that you are actually streaming audio
from the Roger On device.
Now you can switch that off.
You can do the dropdown selector here
and you can go back to AutoSense if you want to,
to let your hearing aids function in their automatic mode.
And then anytime you want,
you can go back into RogerDirect plus Mic
and that will start the streaming again.
Another thing that you can do here
in the bottom right hand corner,
you can hit that setting and you can actually shift
how much sound you're pulling from the Roger On device
and how much sound you're pulling from the microphones
on the actual hearing aids by shifting over to surrounding.
So if for whatever reason you wanna get a little bit more
awareness of the sound around you,
you would slide it closer to the surrounding side.
And if you want to get dedicated all of your sound
from the Roger On microphone,
you would shift it all the way down to the right.
So those are the main things that I wanted to show you
inside of the my Phonak app.
All right, so let's go ahead and get into
the my Roger Mic app.
Once we're inside of the, my Roger Mic app,
you can see here that we have the Roger On, turned on.
We can see that we have 90% battery life
and we can see which microphone mode we're actually in,
right off the bat.
You can see that we're in the automatic mode,
meaning that if I pick up that Rodger On device,
it's gonna start shifting between what mode it thinks
it should be in.
So right now I have it laying flat on a table.
It is in the table, microphone mode.
If I pick it up and start pointing it at someone,
it will shift into the Pointing mode.
And then if I clip it onto my shirt,
it switches into Presenter mode.
Now I'm gonna go ahead and set it back down here.
And when we're in this table mode,
what's happening here is that it's picking up sound
from 360 degrees and I've actually locked
into Table mode here.
I don't have to do that if I don't want to,
but if I wanna make sure that it stays in table mode,
I will go ahead and tap on table
and it will lock it in that position.
Again, these are all adjustments
that you can make as well,
on the actual Rodger On with that sensor push button,
I can cycle through each one of those particular programs,
including the custom programs that I've made,
which I'll show you how make here in a second.
So let's go back to the Table microphone mode
and we could, tell the table microphone
what sides you want to pick up sound from.
So if I want sound to be coming from directly
in front of me, I can set it up like this.
If I wanna hear the people to the right hand side of me,
I can set it up like this.
Those directional microphones will essentially
prioritize the speech coming from the right hand side.
If I want it to pick up from all the way around,
we can set it up to where every single one
of those microphones is picking up sound equally
from all different directions.
Now, if I wanna switch into manually,
going into Pointing mode,
I can do that just by tapping it here on the app.
I can tap into Presenter mode
and then we have these custom programs.
So I basically, when I was in the Table microphone mode,
I selected different microphone configurations
and I hit save.
And so I made custom program one
and I made custom program two.
You can only have two custom programs here
from what I've identified,
which is fine because I don't see much utility
for having, a ton of different custom programs
just with different microphone configurations.
But it is nice, if you can make a couple
and then you can actually toggle through to them
without opening the app by just using the push button
on the Roger On device.
Of course, if you end up not liking
any of your custom programs, you can trash them
and then you can start over if you want to.
So I'll go back to Automatic mode.
You can also mute the Rodger On device.
If you just want to be having a conversation with someone
next to you and you don't really wanna be pulling sound in
from the Roger On that might be at the center of the table.
You can do that.
And then when you're done with that conversation, unmute it,
picking up sound from the table again.
In the top left hand menu,
that gives you just one other thing that you can do here.
So going to Roger On settings,
and you can actually connect multiple Roger On devices
to your hearing aids and to this app, essentially.
So if you had a table of four individuals,
you could have four different Rodger On's,
clip one of them to each one of their shirts,
and you could essentially control which one of those
microphones you wanna pull sound from
or if you wanna pull sound from all of them,
that's great is a great way to separate their speech
from background noise.
Now, what a lot of you are thinking,
you're probably thinking,
that the my Phonak app that is used as they remote control
for the Marvel and the Paradise hearing aids
is absolutely horrible.
And I would partially agree with you there,
but I've been putting this app through the ringer over
the past several weeks.
And I've gotta say,
that I have not found any glitches in it yet.
I think you could safely make the argument,
that the Roger On is Phonak's best Roger microphone
to date and quite possibly the best assistive
listening device on the market right now.
So if you're having difficulty hearing the TV,
hearing at a distance or hearing in background noise
and your hearing care professional has already maximized
the performance of your hearing aids
by following best practices,
then the Rodger on microphone probably is the solution
to your problem.
That's it for this video.
If you have any, leave them in the comment section below.
If you liked the video, please share it.
And if I wanna see other videos, just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
Also feel free to check out my website, Dr.cliffaud.com.
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