You certainly can wear open domes for less occlusion, at the expense of not be able to get sufficient amplification for your hearing loss at 3-4 KHz. If you look at the 85 dB receiver fitting range in my last post, open domes can only fit up to 65-70 dB loss while bass domes (with double vent for the More) can fit up to 85 dB loss at 3-4 KHz.
Another thing that occurs to me is that with open dome, if there’s some kind of compression limiting going on due to over saturation at high volume, the delayed response in the compression limiting can possibly cause the (late) sound coming from the hearing aids to become out of phase with the natural sound coming through the open dome at those frequencies, triggering some sort of phase cancellation, resulting in nullified or reduced volume perception. This is all an educated guess, of course. Nothing can be proven. But there’s a lot of trade-offs between wearing open domes and bass domes and this may be one of those things.
But this discussion brings up another point, and another thing you can try. Before trying out 100 dB receivers yet, maybe try to switch from open to bass domes with double vent first to see if this would help with your issue. I wear bass domes with single vent and I find it to be a very good compromise that would give me better high frequencies amplification and still acceptable openness and I really don’t feel a noticeable occlusion except for when chewing maybe.
One other advantage of the bass dome vs open dome is that if you find speech in noise a challenge, the neural noise reduction with the bass dome would be more effective than the neural noise reduction with open domes, because no matter how much noise reduction you can apply through the hearing aids to clarify the speech, the noise bled through the open domes tends to render the clarified speech muddle again anyway.
