Manufacturer settings, being proprietary or NL2 or whatever, are often providing less gain/audibility than would be expected or optimal.
Yes, it just measures what the hearing aid is doing and compares it against prescriptive targets at different frequencies and levels. Then, if it’s not hitting targets (as it is frequently not), you can make adjustments to correct this. If, for whatever reason, you are ignoring prescriptive targets, it also tells you whether a particular sound is audible at all relative to the hearing loss. Tenkan is right that we cannot compare against manfucaturer targets because they are proprietary, but if you’re assuming they are hitting whatever target they are supposed to be hitting, “inaudible” still isn’t necessarily great.
I’ve never left an aid where it was set though it did take a long time to sort things out with my first set the Oticon Alta2 Pro. I had no idea what I was in for when I walked out of the clinic the first time. It was a total inundation of things I hadn’t heard in a long time. I also had only a marginal idea what they could and couldn’t do. But after 6 years I’ve got a good idea of what I want to hear. That’s why I said that the first fit on new aids is just a starting point. When I got the Evoke 440s three years ago I did my best to drive my audiologist crazy. But she had the patience of Job. Unfortunately she’s now 160 miles away and I have to break in a new one.
Anyway whatever standard is used to fit them, the chance of them staying there is zero. One thing has been consistent though. For Speech in noisy complex environments they’ve all been found wanting. If I can get the Phonak to come close to the More 1 in the situations I encounter on a regular daily basis, I’ll get the Paradise just for the Roger as you suggested.
Yeah, I can’t predict whether you’ll end up liking the paradise or the mores better. I expect that the Roger would do better in noise for you than the paradise or the mores alone, but it may be that on their own the more will do better than the paradise. I haven’t had enough chance at setting up head-to-head comparisons with patients to have a strong opinion on that.
You can connect a Roger On to a More through the Edumic. It’s expensive and unwieldy and won’t have quite the same functionality, but it’s possible.