The outcome of going to DSL v5 is that overall sounds seem more natural, and less harsh, except for the occasional female “s” sound. There might be a slight loss in overall volume as I have noticed that I have tweaked the TV volume up some from where I was with NAL-NL2 (SmartFit). We were out to a restaurant a couple of nights ago that was fairly loud and I did quite well hearing conversation at our table of 4. Didn’t have to resort to my Noise/Party program, or narrow down the microphone focus, or turn the volume down.
The unique feature of the DSL v5 at least with the type of loss I have is that compression is very low and approaching 1.2 for the soft sounds, but there is still some significant compression in the loud sounds, with up to 1.7 for compression. But still way less than what I was getting with NL2.
I can’t detect any impact of any changes in the time constants. I believe they are supposed to be adaptive in any case, so who knows what they really are…