Perhaps it is time to reevaluate this auditory scene. If we think about how individuals who use hearing aids function in real life, the following conclusions seem inevitable:1.They don’t spend a great deal of time listening in small sound-treated chambers.2.They are not always facing the source of the speech message.3.When they do face the talker, they enjoy the benefits of a rich panoply of helpful visual cues.4.The sources of competition are more likely to be the speech of other persons than temporally or spectrally modulated noises.5.The level of the speech to which they are attending may vary over time rather than remaining constant.

The above is copied from Starkey Audiology. The below is research done by Phonak. Also, Etynomic Research out of Texas provides many recordings of simulated real life noises for speech tests and are valuable in doing a quantitative evaluation of hearing instruments used in different environments.

The Phonak Audiology Research Center believes that real-world testing is an essential element to understanding how hearing aids are performing. Testing in a well-controlled sound booth is the “gold standard” in terms of research design and replicability. We know, however, that as internal control increases, the ability to generalize performance to the real world decreases. That is why at PARC we focus on research in both highly-controlled research environments, but also recognize the importance of testing in the real-world. Both are essential to understand hearing aid performance.

The Listening Loft, a reverberant room in the PARC designed to look and feel like the first floor of a home or an apartment, provides one such example of how the real world can be brought into the research environment. This space allows for hearing aid users to provide feedback and complete performance testing in a reverberant space, layering elements like a TV playing in the background and speech from a distance- both of which cannot be assessed easily in a sound booth.