I’ll be seeing two audiologists (tag-team) at the clinic later this month, to talk about new HA’s. My 2014 Siemens HA’s are not up to the 2023 tasks at hand.
Being a retired broadcast and audio engineer, I’m very interested in the technical side of HA’s. But finding technical info and specs has been a challenge. With a very few exceptions, everything that I find seems to be written by the marketing department.
Is there anyway to find serious tech stuff?
There’s plenty of technical papers on just about everything to do with HAs, google is very helpful, what exactly are you looking for, as in- model/brand you’d like to know more about.
I have been searching seriously for the last two months and casually for two years. I guess, I don’t know what words to search with. I see members write about ‘white papers’ but I can’t find them.
The technical stuff seems to be hidden in areas reserved for “professionals.” Phonak uses the phonakpro.com domain for their stuff, for example. Hope this helps. Google is your friend. Looking for “fitting” details also helps.
WH
Here’s one example.
Phonak Audeo Lumity for professionals
I dug it up using this google search: (Your mileage may vary)
“phonak lumity fitting guide”
WH
For example this is the type of papers that I am looking for:
https://www.signia-pro.com/en/blog/global/2022-06-white-paper-evidence-supports-the-advantages-of-signia-ax-split-processing/
You have the expertise to udnerstand this technical stuff. This will come in handy, I suppose, if you decide to self program your aids. But HA’s are complex. The paper like the one you linked to for Signia Ax seems to focus on one feature. But that’s not the whole story. At the end of the day, trialing will doubtless be determinative for choosing a brand of aids. And even then, getting a good fitting to match your specific loss is crucial. this can’t be addressed by a white paper.
By the way, I have the Signia Ax7 and like them a lot. But my specific needs aren’t typical for most people. Some brands seem to perform better in crowded spaces; others are better for music; some sound ‘more natural’ according to some people…it’s complex. No aid will solve all issues. so, one tends to choose what’s most important for them and then find an aid that works best for those priority needs.
edit: I re read your post and I see that you’re not a newcomer to HAs. sorry if I came off as condescending.
There’s no hearing aid benchmarking, unfortunately. For example, if you were looking for the best hearing aid to perform in noise, it would be useful for there to be a standardized test that was done on every new hearing aid to give you SOME idea of how they compare relative to one another. This doesn’t exist, so you are left trying to compare based on marketing material and white papers using non-standard methods. Additionally, if you are looking for something specific like how hearing aid X feedback manager works, it may frequently be the case that this is not a feature that has been much worked on lately and you have to go back 1, 2, 3 generations to dig into how it actually working. OR a competitor had a better feedback manager and their patent just ran out, so now this manufacturer has quietly implemented the same feature but have not announced this anywhere and use different language because they don’t want to be seen to be copying a competitor.
(OR it’s proprietary and only the company engineers in Norway/Denmark/Germany/Sweden know how it works and you have to wait a year and a half while your provider sends escalating and specific emails with attached flowcharts and graphs to get a response that is still not convincing or satisfying. 
)
If you’re looking for hearing aid power levels, frequency levels, battery draw, bluetooth compatibility, etc. It’s all out there. If you are looking for ways to make objective comparisons of the functional features of one hearing aid versus another in advance of a new purchase, prepare to be disappointed. Take some heart in that many functional differences are non-obvious–>therefore minor–>therefore hard to really make a big mistake.
This is one of those things that the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know.
Have fun and good luck.
I don’t think it’s possible to quantify, e.g. speech in noise. People vary, so that the best HA for me would be different than the best HA for you. And then as we get accustomed to the aids, we change, and the amount of change varies, depending on the individual. My hearing loss is non-standard, and so is yours. This, of course, gives the marketers free rein.
You definitely need to be searching in places off the beaten path. I would agree with the comment above where it is mentioned to look for the “professionals” part of any given website. AudiologyOnline has a ton of courses that you can take and I highly recommend them. Finally, Marshall Chasin has a lot on content online and he is very good about including the technical details in the topics he covers (usually directed at musicians with hearing loss).