Hey y’all, thank you for the quick and super-helpful replies!
Tenkan, yeah, I’ve heard that it’s best to have low expectations for music-listening with HAs, but I’ve been overall happy with my Widex ones (Evoke, then Moment) for music. Only downsides have been a tendency to have feedback when I get close to other people or walls or even sometimes randomly when playing piano depending on the motion of my head (annoying but not terrible) and what seems to be mediocre help with hearing-in-noisy-environments or even with teammates speaking softly / whispering (more frustrating). So my hope was that the latest Oticon would be close to as good as Widex with music, and noticeably better re speech-in-noise.
I haven’t gotten to test the latter so much, but plan to soon (I have ~3 weeks to try these things out).
Good to know that I can get these (or the new Widex smartRICs) from my current audiologist office and then take them to a more experienced specialist for fine-tuning. The only downside of that, aside from obviously the subsequent cost, is that it’s hard for me to know whether I should buy the Oticon Intent or the Widex smartRIC (I had at least informally narrowed down to these two, though I know the other major brands also have flagships).
Vulusiano, thanks for the bit o’ history re Oticon and their music program. As a tech geek by day, I’m definitely intrigued by the idea of DIY, but I’d need to buy a Windows PC (I presume), acquire the relevant hardware and software (probably not too onerous), learn how to use what I expect is kinda badly-designed software and so on. Hmm.
fbacher1, thank you for the info & guidance! I’ll be really curious to learn what you think about the Moment 440 (which I have and like overall for music) or the SmartRIC (which I’ve heard is equally good for music, and better for speech-in-noise given the mic placements). Either way, hope things work out great with the new audiologist!
flashb1024, I’m dating myself, but… while I have a lot of fond memories of 1980 boomboxes, yeah, I don’t wanna recreate them musically in my ear.
As I whined about in my original note, my audiologist office was bought out, all the senior audiologists retired or fled, and now there are two very junior audiologists left (basically just out of school). So with that (and my visit today), I don’t have any hope whatsoever that they’ll be able to smartly help me further optimize my Oticon HA for music :(. So I’ll either need to go back to Widex (getting the SmartRIC) which I expect is largely great for music out of the box, or buy an Oticon for ‘free’ with this current audiologist and then immediately book some (paid) time with a more experienced audiologist.
My next appt with my current audiologist is on May 28, so I have some time to further research and contemplate and will make sure to provide more of an update here then! (and of course, happy to continue chatting in the meantime).
Thanks again y’all for the helpful replies to my first post here!