First two days with ReSound ENZO Q 798 from a musician

This is coming from an upgrade from the 1st model Enzo. I have a profound loss and use sealed ear molds. I am an active musician - performing (well as soon as the venues reopen) recording and engineering. I have my own studio and have been self programming since about 200o or so.
Also all of my programming is doen without any sound processors engaged - no noise reduction, wind noise reducers, speech enhancers, and none to minimum anti feed back. For music you can’t have anything active like that running. And I have the microphone set to narrow directional. For Geeks, 3 out of 4 channels are WRDC while the other is semi linear compression, but for now, I can’t decided which works better.

What the audio did was make a direct transfer of my stetting from my old Enzos to these so the only things that was changed was the aids themselves, at least as far as I know. The aids were first set up with Recommended testing - speech recognition and it failed miserably in the real world- too much compression, no lows a 2K bump that made the music and overall sound too crisp. However, once my old setting were loaded in, the aids made a remarkable improvement.

All the caveats said ---- The Q7s are much “tighter” sounding, especially the low end. Much cleaner sound. I am a bassist and I need to real sound of my bass. In previous models the bass would be tubby and the aids would be right on the point of occlusion. Any less and my bass sounds thin. The highs are cleaner too with less emphasis around 2k, but still the same amount of gain at that point. Sounds picked up from a distance and background sounds, like across the room, are less loud - a problem I had with the old aids. Flip side soft conversations at a distance are a little harder to hear. I am thinking about using one program with a speech enhancer to fix this. Could be the narrow directionality has been improved. I have my MPOs open a bit and the CR under 2.0 and so far they work great for music in the studio through my Yamaha NS12s and a sub. The compressors’ release time has been improved - it’s still slow (bum) but if the CR is set right, it’s hard to notice, especially when the music is being played around 85db. I used to wonder why my old settings didn’t give me the results I thought they would - as compared to what should happen in a music studio - but with the same settings now the setting are what I expect and that is very good. Overall a huge improvement over the Enzos I had. Much cleaner and tighter.

The aids work better with my iPhone, too and there is very little lag when playing music and listening to music at the same time through the TV Streamer. If I record a bass track of long notes and listen while playing the same part live there is a little phasing. I believe it is less phasing than with the old Enzo aids.

So all in all, the Q7 are worth it, once you dump the “stock” Programming. The issues of in “business” Always programming for speech has been around forever. As I wrote to another musician, if you can get your audio to turn off all of the sound processing, change the microphone to directional and raise the low end to be about 1 step above 500hz, maybe drop 2k a step, depending on your loss, you will be in the ball park. I caution against doing this to all programs - pick one or two and try this out. If it doesn’t work simply use another program then have the audi restore back to stock.
So I have rehearsal tomorrow and that should be a tough one for the aids. We are not loud but the music is complex and I need to hear everything and sing at the same time. More on that later…