We have one in our church, as all churches in the UK are legally required to have I think (many other venues too). As another commenter said you can get separate receivers, so I got one at one time to help with audio quality for live streaming. The loop signal comes straight out of the church PA, so from all the microphones and so the audio quality was very good, but there was a lot of hiss. I don't know if that's always the case with induction loops. At one time it stopped working - someone cut one of the connections back to the loop amp - so I was able to test it, which is handy.
We have several people who depend on it, including the church organist, so we soon hear if it's not working. He says it's working really well.
My Grandmother says the one in her church (which is nearby) doesn't work well at all and she usually doesn't hear much. I'm not sure why. She also finds the one in our church good, so I think they must have some problem.
I would think it could be worth contacting someone in charge of the venue(s) if it's somewhere you go regularly. I would imagine it heavily depends on how the whole thing is set up though - quality of microphones etc. We have lectern mics, singer mic, lapel mics for priest and a wide field mic. on the altar, so pretty good coverage, and they all go into an auto switcher thingy. I think it would need to be set up by someone who at least half knows what they're doing.
My experience is using a neck loop plugged into the venue’s hearing assist receivers. This eliminates the need to have Telecoil installed in the venue.
They are a pain in the arse to set up properly and you really need a (edit: very patient, thank you for putting up with all my sine tones, Tommy) deaf person with a suitable hearing aid to help you set it up. If the loop is the wrong length and has the wrong impedance you'll never get the amp balanced up properly, and you can't just take the installer's word for it.
Beyond that I have very little experience of them.
Hearing 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.
At the same time, those that have hearing aids often complain that T-coils aren't properly set up or turned on, even in public building where they are required to (at least in Norway).
"Yes, we have T-coils, but the person responsible for it isn't here right now, and no one here knows how to use it."
So, still quite a few limited factors to their actual usefulness in society unfortunately.
I just got my first pair of HAs in November and I opted for the T-coil enabled model. It also (already) has working Auracast (not just "available in a future firmware update" like the other mfgrs). The T-coil model was not much bigger than the one without, and it also had two buttons on each unit rather than one on the T-coil-less model.
411, "Loop systems" are hard-coded in the US's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) so they are not going away anytime soon. When Auracast does proliferate it'll be alongside loop systems; not a direct replacement. (Not at least until the law is amended and we all know how long that takes.)
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My HA model is the Starkey Omega 24 RIC-RT (the `mRIC` is the smaller version of the same, sans T-coil).
This is a potential public good category that could be (mostly) provided at-cost or fixed profit by a multi-country non-profit consortia. Hearing aids and assistive devices are too damn expensive and proprietary, way too expensive for most poor, disabled, and elderly people worldwide.
Edit: I honestly don't know how I will function when I get older because I'm likely to be alone and blind from ARMD.
I see them less and less.
Recently an acquaintance got hearing aids and when asked about the T functionality (to listen to induction loops) they didn't even know about it.
I 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.
Amateurs 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.
You could transfer different bands via different coils on different frequencies, but unfortunately, capacity of information channel is limited by frequency. Because of this, radio using high frequency waves as carrier (radio or light, or even some sort of invisible rays), not coil, and have hassle with some sort of modulation of waves.
This mean, you could not transfer more information than half of maximum frequency.
Very good channels with very high signal to noise ratio, could handle more bits than Shannon limit (on engineers slang "channel is ringing", such example is fiber channel).
Most modern research also consider some digital techniques of sound (information) compressing, like use LLM as (de)compressor (google llm compression algorithms).
they also made microphones work like this. place em behind the panels of sockets on the wires. some accounts of such devices being found can be found in the book Spy Catchers (by some ex MI5 science officer during cold war). pretty interesting tech!
You 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.
About 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
There 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.
I use a neck loop plugged into a hearing assist receiver with my hearing aids set to Telecoil. This eliminates having to install a Telecoil in the venue, but they must have a hearing assist system. My experience at church services is that sound is substantially better than using the hearing aids by themselves.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadCurious around the technology and value of Audio Induction Loops.
Would love to hear anyone’s experiences, insights and thoughts on the tech.
One of those niche technologies that you don’t use, unless you do use it.
We have several people who depend on it, including the church organist, so we soon hear if it's not working. He says it's working really well.
My Grandmother says the one in her church (which is nearby) doesn't work well at all and she usually doesn't hear much. I'm not sure why. She also finds the one in our church good, so I think they must have some problem.
I would think it could be worth contacting someone in charge of the venue(s) if it's somewhere you go regularly. I would imagine it heavily depends on how the whole thing is set up though - quality of microphones etc. We have lectern mics, singer mic, lapel mics for priest and a wide field mic. on the altar, so pretty good coverage, and they all go into an auto switcher thingy. I think it would need to be set up by someone who at least half knows what they're doing.
Finding someone like that is hard for many churches.
Beyond that I have very little experience of them.
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.
"Yes, we have T-coils, but the person responsible for it isn't here right now, and no one here knows how to use it."
So, still quite a few limited factors to their actual usefulness in society unfortunately.
411, "Loop systems" are hard-coded in the US's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) so they are not going away anytime soon. When Auracast does proliferate it'll be alongside loop systems; not a direct replacement. (Not at least until the law is amended and we all know how long that takes.)
--
My HA model is the Starkey Omega 24 RIC-RT (the `mRIC` is the smaller version of the same, sans T-coil).
Edit: I honestly don't know how I will function when I get older because I'm likely to be alone and blind from ARMD.
0: https://youtube.com/@periodicvideos
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.
This mean, you could not transfer more information than half of maximum frequency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...
Very good channels with very high signal to noise ratio, could handle more bits than Shannon limit (on engineers slang "channel is ringing", such example is fiber channel).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...
Most modern research also consider some digital techniques of sound (information) compressing, like use LLM as (de)compressor (google llm compression algorithms).
It doesn't generate hi-fi sound, but speech is remarkably clear. Great for magic tricks. Or cheating at exams I suppose.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-diy-audio-induction-loop-for-the...
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.