I’ve told this story here somewhere before, but I had a patient trialing a phonak hearing aid and a widex hearing aid. He preferred the phonak hearing aid sound, but liked the widex app. I matched the hearing aids in testbox. He noticed the loss of the adaptive frequency lowering, but it was close enough and he happily took the widex hearing aid.
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it I had another patient who tried two sets of hearing aids and reported liking the one in quiet situations and the other in noisy situations and he was getting ready to pay some $12000 to get both sets AND make them both roger compatible. He was so ready to do this that I had to insist that he let me try to match, but i did and he ended up only getting the one set.
I would say the vast majority of time I demo multiple sets of hearing aids, patients pick based on extra features not based on sound quality because they all sound fairly similar. Or, if there’s a big difference, I can MAKE them sound more similar.
I’m skeptical of a lot of the talk on these forums about how different hearing aids are in basic sound quality because I’m always skeptical that they have been set identically. In a huge number of cases, real-ear isn’t being performed. But even when it is being performed, the audiologist is taking your feedback during the process so if you didn’t like set #1 for various reasons that they think they can resolve through adjustement, when they give you set #2 they will make those adjustments. I wonder how often it’s set #2 that magically sounds better. Further, matching things precisely takes some work. But give me a quiet hour and I’ll bet I can make your Oticon More sound just like your Phonak Pico Forte. Note again, I’m not talking automatic features and performance in noise, just basic sound quality.