[rolfus]

Audiologist and hearing aid user here. It's a great time to be looking for new hearing aids! Speech in noise capabilities have improved massively this generation, and I can personally attest to this. For me, the most important performance metric is speech perception in noisy / challenging listening situations. For you there might be other considerations, so keep that in mind.

With that said, my recommendation are the new Phonak Infinio Sphere devices with with their "Spheric speech in noise" feature. It's a complete game changer in terms of speech perception in loud noise. Activating this program in a noisy situation feels like turning off the background noise, leaving only (nearby) voices.

The caveat is that to achieve this they use a separate, power-hungry processor and compensate by increasing the battery size (making the whole hearing aid bigger than other, similar hearing aids). The upside to this is that if you're _not_ using the spherical program, you'll have really good battery life. I use mine for exactly 16 hours a day and if I'm careful I can make them last almost three full days. The charger is much better than the previous ones; they use magnets to keep the devices in place instead of relying on plastic friction.

The Oticon Intent and new Starkey AI aids are also great. You should always try more than one model before you make a decision.

Happy to answer any questions!