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Android LE Audio users: does the pocket your phone is in decide which aid drops? No dropout counts too

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In reply to @luogangan

Both hearing aids had no problems while walking and streaming music. Left or right pockets no problem.

Inside house can leave phone on table while in phone call and go 30+ feet inside through wood/sheetrock walls. Didn’t try any farther.

A. No. But rarely…

I get the exact same range on LE to (Widex) as Classic to HA (Phonak and Widex). Yeah, I was surprised too. Running the microwave is the only interference I get, and get with both.

So far, so groovy.

LE has a energy level negotion in it’s protocols so any sudden extreme changes in what’s required to maintain the connection could lead to a drop-out. What I have experienced is; the lower that signal level is, the more “delicate” the connection.

My experience with this is not typical as I use only one HA. Imagine this scenario, a single HA wearer with phone in a pocket on the same side as the HA with a direct line of sight to the HA, then the LE signal will be close to minimal power level… and when I twist my body the signal now has to travel through shoulder which is gonna need a jump in signal strength required, and that’s the ONLY instance I ever get a drop-out and it doesn’t even happen every time. If I keep my phone in the pocket opposite my HA, then it never happens as it’s already not on minimal signal strength.

What L&R HA wearers with different brands and models, etc. may experience using will vary. My experince is BLE drop out is extremely rare and simply managed enough that it’s a non-issue.

I haven’t gone through all the posts in this thread in detail so I apologize if this is repeating anything.

Bluetooth low energy (not audio, I’ll call it BLE next) uses a PHY value in the connection which can impact the power, range and throughput. My understanding is that BLE doesn’t recover well from missed packets and that was one of the big improvements offered by BLE audio. I know different brands, along with different phones, try for different PHY. PHY 2 seems to be used with the brands where people like the streaming quality better but also seems to be where people complain about dropouts.

From what I’ve seen with BLE audio so far, it has quirks. Things like not disconnecting in the charger, poor audio quality on phone calls, random disconnecting. Sometimes it works great, sometimes its a mess. It feels like when hearing aids some years ago when the connections were unreliable.

Also some people have these thick cell phone cases, and along with a certain luck of the draw with the bluetooth radio inside the phone, it can cause further issues because of the attenuation.

In reply to @luogangan

I wish I had better data for you. It’s not something we’ve been tracking and additionally to that because of early concerns with connectivity through , the huge majority of Android users who come to our clinic have been put into sonova and there hasn’t been a huge shift yet as things have moved to LE. But we do get these patients coming in on the side too. Off the top of my head the most frequent failure to reconnect is probably Starkey. But note that these patients are not generally highly skilled with their devices and reconnecting is usually as simple as unpairing and re-pairing or turning their bluetooth off and on.

There are sound quality differences that are usually evident from the beginning. I would have said that the sound quality of classic bluetooth beats MFi and ASHA, but the sound quality of the sonova bluetooth classic is much better than the Signia BTC which uses bluetooth classic, so it isn’t just the streaming protocol. The sound quality of the Oticon Zeal LE I found very nice and we haven’t had patients coming in with connectivity complaints about that yet.

A lot of the sound quality complaints that we get about crackling or static are actually resolved with repairs. But it may well be that patients simply don’t come to us with small drop-out complaints (e.g. one ear, temporarily once in a while) because bluetooth is generally seen as twitchy.

In reply to @Hooby

This is the most useful thing anyone has handed me in this thread. And I sat on it for a day and a half. That’s on me.

The single field I keep asking people for is which protocol was live at the moment of the dropout, and in the last day that field’s failed twice on me in public. One person on iPhone said plainly that he doesn’t know how to check. He’s right. There’s nothing on an iPhone to read. Another pointed out that the support matrix itself is undocumented, so plenty of Android users can’t know whether they actually got or quietly fell back. I’ve been asking people to report something a lot of them structurally can’t know.

An RSSI trace against the clock removes the guessing from at least part of that. It also gives something none of the written reports can. Where in time the drop sits, relative to a movement.

One thing I’d like to check before I put this in front of more people. Classic versus is a clean split in that app, but LE Audio and both ride on BLE. Does it separate those two, or does it just show you a BLE link either way? If it doesn’t, the trace is still worth having, but I’d be telling people it answers a question it doesn’t answer. I’d rather hear that from you than find it in the data.

Either way it’s going in the method section next time I ask anyone to test anything. Thank you for it.

In reply to @user715

This is the first account in the thread that predicts the opposite of what I claimed, and it does it with a mechanism rather than a counterexample. Let me make sure I’ve got it right.

What I said was that the aid on the far side from the phone drops first, because your body sits in the path. What you’re describing is that the fragile link is the near one, because it is already negotiated down to minimum power and has no headroom, so the moment a turn forces a step change in required power, that’s where it breaks. Phone in the opposite pocket never drops for you precisely because it isn’t running at the floor.

Those two stories predict different things for the same pocket. That’s the useful part. Body shadow says direction follows whichever side is blocked. Yours says it follows whichever side has less margin to give. And yours also predicts the drop lands at a moment of movement rather than during steady blockage. I never asked anyone to note that.

I can’t separate them with what I’ve got. Every report I hold says which ear went and where the phone was. Not one says what the person was doing in the second it happened.

Your other line is doing quiet damage to my framing too. Same range on LE as on Classic. The microwave hits both. I’ve spent a month sorting reports by protocol. If range and interference behave the same across both, then protocol isn’t the variable I thought it was, and I’ve been filing things under the wrong heading.

You wear one aid, which you flagged yourself. That makes your case cleaner for isolating this, not messier. There’s no second link competing. But it does mean I shouldn’t generalise from it until someone with two aids notices the same timing.

In reply to @Neville

Two things in here are worth more than the caveats you put on them.

The first is Sonova classic sounding clearly better than Signia classic. Same protocol, different result. I’ve spent this thread sorting everything by protocol, and that one comparison says the label isn’t carrying the weight I’ve been putting on it.

The second is your last line. Patients don’t come in for a single ear dropping out occasionally, because bluetooth is assumed to be twitchy. I hit the same hole from the other side this week. Someone told me he simply stopped wearing his aids on walks and uses AirPods instead. He never returned anything, so the return rate I’d been quoting can’t see him. Your clinic can’t see him either. Two instruments. Same blind spot. And they’re the two the industry actually reads.

I’m not asking you to start tracking anything. Impressions from someone who sees a hundred of these still beat my spreadsheet.

In reply to @luogangan

All I can add, I missed including :man_facepalming:, is I’m on Pixel.

I have wondered how a set of recieve/distribute stereo channels over . I would presume brand/models to vary on this, and impact differently from signal degredation.

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