This Widex article’s text looks like it focuses singularly on the spatial acoustic enabled by wearing 2 hearing aids to help knowing where the voices come from, in order to help separate and single out and focus on one sound and ignore the others.
The video enclosed with the article isn’t really saying much of anything except displaying the sources of a noisy environment and simply saying that “the Widex continues the conversation. Even in extremely noisy environments”.
@happymach 's OPN 1 should have a very good Spatial Sound LX feature that comes with 4 estimators already. Yet, it doesn’t seem to singularly solve his issue with speech in noise.
I think spatial acoustic (to provide directionality on the voices) is not the only thing that can help or will help with the cocktail party effect. People also rely on other differentiations to help them single out and tune in on a single voice. I remember watching a presentation by Donald Schum (from Oticon at the time) from Audiology Online, and he offered another point of view that it’s better to get more speech cues from the surrounding environment that are different from the target speech cue, which can also help the listener be able to differentiate in order to isolate and focus better on the targeted speech cue.
I think what he was saying is that front focus beam forming helps with isolation toward the front only, but if the front has the babbles of voices (from around) diffused in with the targeted speech in the front, it can still be a challenge to separate out the diffused babbles from the targeted voice. But if the surrounding voices are made more clear to the listener right up front (not meaning toward the front, but in the first place), instead of getting blocked out by beam forming and reduced to a mix of babbles diffused with the targeted speech in front, then maybe the addition of the surrounding voices (that has better clarity and not reduced to diffused babbles up front) can help the brain hearing differentiate and single out more easily the targeted voice to focus in on.
What I got out of that presentation from Donald Schum was that it’s better to have more acoustical information to present to the brain for it to discern from and separate out, than to hide the acoustical information and starve the brain of the info it needs to sort things out.