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Auracast for old unsupported hearing aids

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This is an idea, I don’t know how feasible it is.

If you have a new smartphone. It is strong enough ram and battery. To be like some kind of bridge, it would receive the stream and decode and encode the signal so that it can be received, for example, by hearing aids that use Bluetooth classic.

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Edited

Never mind. I see what you are asking. I don’t see phone manufactures spending a lot of resources on doing this. So probably isn’t going to happen.

the smartphone would receive the signal and decode it so that the hearing aid can receive them. a hearing aid would receive normal communication

Unless a smartphone has dual bluetooth chip, it’s going to be a dongle system like the floogoo and co.

A dongle that receives an stream, then send it to the smartphone via USB, the smartphone then send a signal to the hearing aids using classic bluetooth or LE audio.

That’s my understanding, I could be wong.

When using the FlooGoo FMA120 as a receiver with a phone, the added latency is around 5ms—so if you’re comparing audio from your phone’s speaker and a headphone with native support, you’ll notice virtually no delay.

However, additional latency can occur when transmitting audio to hearing aids that rely on older Bluetooth technologies. This is a trade-off for using legacy hearing aids. Even so, the total latency is still less than half (or even more) compared to traditional A2DP connections, which should be acceptable for most use cases.

Yes, even older Android devices have more than enough processing power to handle a stereo audio stream — all they need is a compatible receiver to bring the audio in.

This setup also works well on a PC. Tools like Audacity or VoiceMeeter can easily route the audio input to your local speakers. You can find more details in the Receiver Mode section on the FMA120 support page9.

Quite a few users are already using this configuration, and several have shared their experiences. @firenzel also posted a link to the main discussion thread with more insights and tips.

In reply to @Ranson

Good work and that’s amazing! We have been doing experimental projects with some users at selected venues. Latency caused by our iOS app is ~20ms and Android is ~35-50ms (depending on phones). Latency for is 30ms (anything less than 30ms would choke some Auracast headphones on the market). Bluetooth Classic hearing aids like Phonak in A2DP mode SBC codec can be as much as +200ms. HFP would half that. and hearing aids are much better than Bluetooth Classic but the results vary among models. I would say, 120-150ms better than A2DP.

The feedback from beta users is quite positive so far. But some users reported that they had to switch off the mic of their hearing aids to avoid echo. And it depends on how far they were from speakers of the hall. Sound travels at a foot per ms. If you are >30 foot from the closet speakers placed in the hall, the latency won’t be bothering at all.

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