The choice of prescriptive methods

[Li Mao]

Hello, I'm new here. I've been wearing hearing aids for about 20 years since I was 10 years old.
When I started fitting the HA myself, I found the prescriptive methods to be quite interesting and they caught my attention.
Before I started self-fitting, my audiologist would simply use the default prescriptive method without any inquiry.
I tried each of the available prescriptive methods. For me, the DSL v5a is more suitable as it allows me to hear substantial sounds. The NAL v2 is indeed more comfortable, but it's too quiet for me.
What about you? Do you have any experience with choosing prescriptive methods?

 

[Volusiano]

I don't know what brand of aids you wear, but I wear Oticon aids, and I find their proprietary VAC+ fitting rationale give me the sound I like the best. I find DSL and NAL-NL2 a bit more harsh (strong on the high ends), which is useful when I'm a challenging situation to understand speech better. But as soon as I'm not in a complex environment where I find I may need DSL or NL2 to understanding speech better, I revert to VAC+.

Some people may tell you that some rationales are better than others, especially for speech understanding. But I say you just use whatever you want that would be best suitable for different situations. I don't just limit myself to VAC+, I have different programs for the different rationales and most of the times I stay with the default program that has VAC+, and once in a long while, I may switch to another program that has DSL if I find that understanding speech is more challenging in that particular instance.