Wow the granddad of the chemistry professor of the Periodic Videos[0] youtube channel invented this? wild.
Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
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Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#12I appreciated them in earlier hearing aids. Back when the programming of them was still average (voice focus tech was still infancy) they were a godsend. When I was in primary school and HA tech was super average, I had a mini version where a teacher would wear a mic and I had a receiver that went directly to my hearing aids. It was amazing being able to hear the teacher clearly over even average background noise. As mentioned some have gone with BT over induction loops which I can understand. However, on my Phonak, they are super disappointing range wise. As an aside the integrated mic in my Phonak is practically useless. Very disappointing given their cost of nearly $10k AUD.
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#13Amateurs in USSR 50 years ago made wireless and powerless headphones, which use wire lay on perimeter of room to transfer sound and power.
In headphones there is tiny coil.
It really work and very reliable, but result coil (size of room) have very large reactive resistance, so it is nearly impossible to transfer even high frequencies, only low (bass) and medium, so it workable for speech but music is heavily distorted.
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#14You can use a 9V battery powered amplifier with a loop around your neck to make a tiny permanent magnet placed in your ear canal vibrate against your ear drum.
It doesn't generate hi-fi sound, but speech is remarkably clear. Great for magic tricks. Or cheating at exams I suppose.
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#15Hearing aids are at a frustrating crossroads at the moment, IMO. In my experience, a lot of the recent hearing aids don't seem to support induction loops. It often seems to be a choice between that or Bluetooth... and Auracast isn't ready yet. I've had Phonak bilateral hearing aids for 5 years, and Starkey unilateral for ~5 years before that. None of those have supported induction loops.
Also because everyone now carries a computer in thier pocket with a very intelligent microphone and Bluetooth card. Anyone looking at hearing aids afresh today would start with that tech as the backbone.
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#16About a decade back I was writing embedded firmware for a telephone for the hard of hearing. We ran compliance tests to ensure the handset was compatible with T-coils. In the early days of say Bell 500 and Bell 2500 sets, the coil in the handset speaker was big, and naturally emitted enough for hearing aids to pick up. As speakers shrank, the size of the coils dropped, it takes active design analysis to make a handset that will work. IIRC, ANSI has a standard for this compliance, this link leads me to believe it was updated in 2019: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8906258
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#17From this article, it seems one can be made using only the right coil of wire and an ordinary audio amplifier:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-diy-audio-induction-loop-for-the...
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#18Amateurs in USSR 50 years ago made wireless and powerless headphones, which use wire lay on perimeter of room to transfer sound and power. In headphones there is tiny coil. It really work and very reliable, but result coil (size of room) have very large reactive resistance, so it is nearly impossible to transfer even high frequencies, only low (bass) and medium, so it workable for speech but music is heavily distorte…
Could you use multiple coils for different bands?
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#19Hearing aids are at a frustrating crossroads at the moment, IMO. In my experience, a lot of the recent hearing aids don't seem to support induction loops. It often seems to be a choice between that or Bluetooth... and Auracast isn't ready yet. I've had Phonak bilateral hearing aids for 5 years, and Starkey unilateral for ~5 years before that. None of those have supported induction loops.
Why is Auracast not ready yet?
A quick search suggests that most headphones and hearing aids don't support it yet. This will be your greatest problem - nobody can use it. This seems like the future though so you should probably install it in your venue and get a few headphones that do support it to test it and to borrow to those who need help.
That few support it implies that there are likely going to be implementation/interoperability bugs for a few more years at least - nobody knows how bad these will be. Maybe things will just work, but growing pains should not be a surprise.
They claim latencies as low as 40ms - this is unacceptably long for a lot of music applications. For listening to the sermon at church good enough, but people may noticed if you are singing along. I'm not sure if this will be an issue, but it is something to consider. You might need a different system though.
Re: Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?
#20There is a reason most in the US are going to using a translation wireless system. Channel one is English, channel eight is Spanish (8-64 channels are available depending on the system you buy). Unlicensed FM transmitters also work well for this. You need to make sure you don't conflict with other nearby users, but that generally is easy (and if there is a possibility you should have an agreement to have your "Christmas pageant" on different days so you can borrow each others receivers for the busy time thus saving both of you money).
Auracast looks like the future of this, so make sure anything new you get supports that. Those so few systems support it don't expect much of it - you should demand this to ensure the manufactures know there is demand, long term it is better for everyone to use one standard.