Wide Dynamic Range and music

OK, answered my own question. Basically it’s about letting the hearing aid microphones accept loud sounds without clipping them. Bernafon’s have the 96 db dynamic range of most hearing aids, but they shift it upwards to make it 15-111 instead of 0-96. Volusiano’s right that Widex and Oticon have wider dynamic ranges than most other hearing aids. Here is a nice article that deals with hearing aids and music.

Programming Hearing Aids for Listening and Playing Music, Presented in...5

This course reviews available technologies and current strategies for optimizing hearing aids for both speech and music.

Yeah when I first decided to take the plunge and give in to needing hearing aids I was all about hearing music. Yeah sure of course speech will be better yeah yeah… but how does it sound with music? Then I got that equalizer program and settled on listening to music at my computer with headphones or speakers from an amp. I was pleasantly surprised at how acceptable the music program on the KS7’s was though. But I rarely use it. If I’m out somewhere and there’s a need to focus on music then I’ll use it but otherwise I haven’t.
Now it’s all about speech with the aids. It’s frustrating how some female voices and low male voices are being difficult.
That Chasin guy who wrote that article has a lot to say about the Etymotic Bean PSA in that it uses apparently one of the better analog processors to provide a natural analog sound rather clipped and altered digital sound from modern aids.

I think the wider input dynamic range is not just valuable only for (live) music, but when you’re in a very noisy place, people also tend to talk much louder to rise above the noise. In this case I guess it also helps if the HA can also manage speech when it’s being yelled at you when people need to talk a bit louder than they should.