I was interested in an article in the recent Hearing Journal, which discusses “best Practice Guidelines” for audiologists. When the Blamey and Saunders Hearing aids are self fitted, the customer sets them up themselves, for comfort. We don’t use compression, and do have an end to end system especially designed to do this.
The hearing aids are not set up to a formula based on averages. they are designed to stay audible and comfortable, once the user has set them to comfort.
We sometimes get some questions from audiologists who are used to making Real Ear Measurements which is often used to check that a hearing aid is reaching it’s prescription targets (REM). Interestingly in The Hearing Journal articele the author writes “..the evidence for a well-known and basic test practice like REM is not based on overwhelming scientific data”. Hmmm. The rest of the discussion is interesting, but still leaves me saying, hmmmm.
It seems to me that fitting a hearing aid so that it is audible and comfortable is a better way to go. I think the hearing aid user has a lot better judgement than they may be given credit for.