Just to inject some other reality into the discussion, when I was trialing both the Lumitys and the Omnias, my wife and I had dinner in a VERY noisy Chili’s bar with ~bare surfaces everywhere. We sat at a high bar table on high bar chairs in the center of the bar with a speaker constantly blaring directly overhead and lots of clatter of dishes and silverware and conversations in the background everywhere. So I’d say the signal-to-noise ratio was very bad. If I sat next to my wife (around a corner of the table, two connected sides), I could hear her with either hearing aid reasonably well. If I sat across the small table, about 3 to 4 feet away, I couldn’t hear her very well with either set of hearing aids in my ears. I wasn’t wearing occlusive molds for the Lumitys. That might have helped them do better and ensure better directionality. I think that’s a sine qua non for great hearing in noisy situations if you have good low-frequency hearing, as I do.
I think if you really are going to be in a very difficult noise situation with any brand of hearing aid, there’s no escaping that you will need a remote mic. Anyone who doubts that should view Dr. Cliff’s videos on how a remote mic can provide a SNR enhancement of up to 25, whereas an SNR enhancement of beyond 5 to 8 or so for HA’s gets dicey. All these reports are subjective in that the exact noise situation is not nailed down, but I’d certainly say in the Chili’s restaurant situation, I was up at the level that no HA could deal with the noise in that bar. (it would be interesting to see how real-time AI processing of sound such as discussed in the following thread: Restoring speech intelligibility for hearing aid users with deep learning can handle such situations. Perhaps that considerably enhances the inherent SNR limits of HA’s). The hearing tracker ratings of how various HA models handle speech in noise also provide another opportunity where you can actually listen to the test recordings of various brands and get a sense of how relatively good any one brand might be without actually trialing the brand (the best way in the end).