To the OP (@codergeek2015 ): Compression is not such an evil thing that you make it out to be. Without compression, louder sounds would get amplified too much which would make the wearer stressed out due to uncomfortably loud amplified sound.
Yes, compression would result in loss of dynamics. But it’s not due to the incompetence of the hearing aid manufacturers who don’t know what they’re doing. You just can’t get everything in the world if you have severe to profound hearing loss like in your case. It’s the law of physics that’s against you. The amplification for your kind of loss on softer sounds is already so aggressive that without compression, the amplification of louder sounds for your kind of loss would either be too much for you to handle without compression, or for the hearing aids to be able to deliver.
OK, maybe your severe to profound hearing loss may not cause you to stress out too much at very aggressively high amplification without compression if you can’t hear well enough in the first place, but there’s no guarantee that removing compression altogether would make things sound less muffled for you anyway. I remember my severe to profound hearing loss mother wearing old analog hearing aids back in the days, and they would whistle all the times because of the lack of automatic compression in analog aids, and she didn’t even know that there’s whistling unless my dad told her that her aids were whistling like crazy so she can turn down the volume. But if she turned up the volume to be able to hear better, then it’s just too loud for her to understand anything anyway in noisy places. So she had to constantly adjust the volume, turning it up in quieter places, then when she got to noisier places, her aids start whistling like crazy and she didn’t even know until my dad told her to turn it down. So it’s a constant game of volume adjustment for my poor mother. Has she had digital hearing aids with automatic wide dynamic compression like they do nowadays, I’m sure she would have appreciated this technology a lot more.
For people with mild to moderate hearing loss, yeah, the music program removing some of that automatic compression may make a difference and give them a wider dynamic range in the music sounds so they can enjoy it more. For folks with severe to profound hearing loss, having more dynamic range to enjoy music better is much more limiting because their hearing has only a very narrow range of dynamics in the first place. So removing compression altogether may not necessarily make music sound any better for them.
If it’s about your own voice that sounds muffled that bugs you the most, maybe you can try the Widex “own voice” technology. The solution is not always necessarily removing compression because it may lead to other issues with your severe to profound hearing loss anyway.
DIY self programming would be a good approach to try to see how you can improve things for you if you’re a DIY inclined person. Getting the hearing aids to perform to how you want with your kind of loss would involve a lot of experimentation that only a DIY approach can afford you to do without having to make countless HCP office visits. But with your severe to profound hearing loss, I would caution about being careful with DIY and get buy-in from your HCP to review your end results to make sure you didn’t do anything damaging to worsen your hearing loss.
Below is a screenshot for WDRC (Wide Dynamic Range Compression) of how a normal hearing range looks like on the left and how the reduced dynamic range of a hearing challenged person looks like on the right, just to give you an idea. It also shows how automatic compression dynamically across the frequency range is helpful in letting you hear what you can but without the discomfort of excessively loud sounds that can lead to the whistling feedback.
The bottom line is that compression is not necessarily an evil thing like you think it is. Without automatic compression, you may constantly have to manually adjust your hearing aids’ volume settings all the times as you transition from one environment to another. Even though it’s not necessarily an evil thing, it gets a bad rap and it’s often misunderstood as a necessary evil altogether without much acknowledged benefits.
