All the major brands now appear to have them. Articles that have been linked to here mention the benefit of slow/low compression; turning down/off noise and feedback suppression, not frequency shifting etc. I know that some of the Major brand HAs do that automatically with their music programs - so I hope that’s a good starting point for the Audi to programme from.
There’s definitely a tradeoff in turning on noise reduction and/or feedback suppression.
Hearing aids have trouble discerning the difference between pure tones (think perfect sine waves) vs. white noise and feedback because pure tones share many acoustical characteristics with those other things.
So if you have sensitive ears like I do and you use aggressive settings for noise reduction and/or feedback suppression, you will hear a lot of fluttering whenever you encounter pure tones at higher volumes and higher frequencies, especially for electronic music or even when the microwave beeps. This drove me absolutely crazy.
It comes down to personal taste and what you can tolerate. I have both the noise reduction and feedback suppression on, but set to the lowest possible level. The tradeoff is that I have to put up with having a lot of ambient noise being unsuppressed, e.g. the air conditioner or even the whirring of the tiny fan in my computer. But that bothers me a lot less than all of the fluttering.
At the time I bought my first pair of hearing aids, GNResound had the best noise reduction and feedback suppression, imho, and it wasn’t even close. I’m not sure how the other companies compare today. I don’t necessarily take it as a given that they have all caught up by now.
I also use minimal compression in order to maximize dynamic range. But there is definitely a tradeoff there, too, especially for louder sounds which don’t get brought down enough.
As mentioned, it is only really the top-most notes that seem lacking and further testing on my part essentially restricts that to the top 4 (A A# B C). I have adapted to what I assume is an abnormal tonal range on the rest of the keyboard and have had no complaints. However <!> I do wonder if I am personally missing out on many of the higher harmonics and if my touch and tone would improve with an expanded/normal auditory range.
I also have trouble with that higher frequency range. For me, boosting those high frequencies helps me hear them better, which isn’t nothing.
But as for harmonics, the tonal qualities of sound, and things like that, I’ll just say this: you have to remember that hearing aids are designed and optimized for speech first and foremost. I would love for it to be better, but that’s not the primary reason for getting hearing aids, at least it wasn’t for me.
PS Perfect pitch - both a blessing and a curse I’m told?!
Yes, this is very much the case.
When I read music, I actually hear in my brain what the notes are supposed to sound like. So when I was young and learning a new instrument in a different key, the greatest difficulty for me was always the basic reading music and associating those notes with the correct fingerings, even if the fingerings are the same or similar to the fingerings for an instrument that I already knew how to play. I had similar issues with simply down-tuning my guitars.
I had to teach myself to read music in a different way: by training my brain to transpose the notes on the page and hear in my brain what they should sound like, and then associate those sounds with the correct fingerings.
It’s one extra step, but once I trained my brain to do this for one or two instruments, it became easy to do this for other instruments. Now, I can switch instruments, transpose on the fly, switch keys on the fly, etc., with ease.
I also can’t stand it when things are out of tune.
Australia
Norway
horse in the mouth.
Texas Hill Country
- So much richness of sound that I hadn’t realised I had been missing. 
