These are very interesting questions to me. I too have a feeling that what my audiologist does is too quick, too prescribed and too pre-programmed to allow me to hear without distortion - especially music! I once heard a story about a musician and music teacher who was not able to listen to music on MP3s, because he could hear “only the notes, not the spaces between the notes” because of the compression of the sound in the MP3 format.

I think some of our technology does not serve us well, because of the general demand to save time and space rather than to take care to preserve quality and nuance. It seems that may be what is being done with hearing aid technology. It very broadly serves the purpose of allowing us to hear speech fairly well in optimum circumstances, but it doesn’t seem to serve to help everyone to hear the world and its sounds as well as they can within their own particular limitations.