Is the purpose of this article anything other than to generate clicks from hipsters who will click on anything that paints digital in a negative light?
Duh no. And this article does a disservice to itself, as it looks like there could be a real issue of fidelity in the digital chain[0]. Bluetooth is known to cause issues (lag, bandwidth variations, …), and the processing chain might be problematic:
> the digital processor samples incoming sound at a rate far lower than that of an old CD player
I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it should certainly be investigated and if true fixed. It might also be that the perceptual models used in these hearing aids are not correct for, well, hearing aids.
[0] though some of the complaining could be a question of habit, the wearer's old hearing aids had a coloration to which they'd gotten more and more used, the different profile of the new ones is jarring even if it might be more correct
22kHz sampling isn't a problem in practice as:
- HAs focus on speech comprehension, not music. Speech doesn't high much content above 5kHz, so even 22kHz is double the Nyquist rate.
- Music is perfectly enjoyable at 22kHz (but obviously better at 44kHz)
- People getting hearing aids have hearing loss, and the majority of hearing loss is in the high frequencies
People often tell stories about playing a sound or being in a lab etc. they think they heard above 20khz, but mostly likely what happened is whatever inevitable non-linearity exists in their playback chain acts as a mixer creating frequencies well in the easily audible range.