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Phonak TV Connector vs. generic Bluetooth transmitter

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Edited

Hi all, had a look through a lot of the threads and cannot see the answer, apologises if it’s been asked before. I’m getting my paradise P90s fitted at the weekend and am looking at the TV streamers! I notice the Phonak 3.0 which it’s fairly expensive especially as I would need two for living room and bedroom. I have seen lots of generic Bluetooth streamers on Amazon for a quarter of the price. Has anyone had experience trying any of these or both and have any feedback or suggestions? In addition when you are Bluetooth streaming tv do the hearing aids still pick up external noise for example if you chatting to someone else in the room? Thanks all in advance

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Yes I have the Phonak tv adapter. Yes you can hear other people to have conversations, and you can adjust the volume balance of the tv versus what the microphones pick up - or even turn the microphones off completely.
The tv adaptor has very low latency indeed and is quite unnoticeable. Other tv streamers may possibly have higher latency which would be annoying if not impossible to use without turning off the microphones - so be careful!

If you have a friend who has the KS9 aids they might be able to get the TV connector that works with both the Marvel and Paradise aids at Costco.
Should save you some money.

The generic transmitters will work but- as @Hooby said- with significant latency. The transmitters are usually paired with headphones that support AptX Low Latency- which your Phonaks don’t. So they’ll use the default SBC codeec. Latency is a non-issue for some people and a big issue for others. Listening by yourself with no external speaker playing the same content all you’ll get is lip-sync issues. With other people listening to a speaker playing the same content at lower latency, you’ll get a boomy effect. Very disconcerting for me.

Another advantage to the TV Adapter is that the interface with your aids is NOT bluetooth. It is more stable, uses less power, and does not take up one of your limited allocations.

Jim

If you know someone who has the KS9 at Costco, you can ask them to buy a Phonak TV connector - it comes out of the box unpaired to any hearing aids, so you can just take it and pair it to your Paradise P90s. The KS9/Marvel and Paradise all use the same TV connector.

Recommend the TV connector rather than an Amazon bluetooth transmitter because you won’t get any lag

When you are bluetooth streaming from the TV, I think you can choose if you want to pick up external noise or not by going to the myPhonak app and increasing/decreasing the volume of sounds around you

Having used Phonak-provided bluetooth connections as well as multiple others with various TVs, I found that the Phonak one was at the high end of the quality chain but also highly expensive. Mine came free from the V.A. but when I investigated the price online, I was shocked. I have purchased others for as little as $15-$25 and they worked acceptably.

Before buying one, check if your TV has built-in bluetooth. I contacted Samsung after buying my last TV because connecting any bluetooth device (optical or RCA) cut out the speakers so my wife could not hear anything. That was not the case with an older TV. I contacted Samsung and they told me the new TV had built-in bluetooth. The setup to enable both speakers and bluetooth simultaneously was unintuitive but it works well.

Well, that post intrigued me! I had to give that one a try. My Samsung UHD8 series TV has Bluetooth. Would my new P90’s connect directly and allow me to listen without an intermediary device? NOPE!
After many unsuccessful tries I was finally able to get the TV to recognize my right aid - still, no sound. After many more attempts I finally heard some sound bytes appear, but even though the TV volume control was finally functioning through the aids, the sound was nothing more than a bunch of indecipherable and garbled sound bytes that played in a stuttering sequence about one-per-second. A total fail. Unfortunately

Edited

Not surprising…. The TV could well be using an old Bluetooth protocol (4.0 or even earlier) and could also be using an older or slower or incompatible codec.

Even if you got it to work, then the latency would be horrible … you would need to turn off the sound from the tv into the room to prevent horrible echo and then you would still lose lip-sync to the video.

This is why Tv connectors for hearing aids usually have their own proprietary wireless transmission. It is not really Bluetooth at all but something Phonak or Oticon etc has drastically tweaked to combat (successfully) the above problems.

I guess one day Bluetooth will maybe solve this… but don’t hold your breath just yet … start saving for a new TV , phone, hearing aid etc and buy it all when LE Audio is seen to be working!

However, It may well be that the current proprietary TV connectors will still be better… we will see!

I have got the impression that the sound quality through my TV-connector is better than the sound quality through the Bluetooth on my Marvel devices.

In reply to @Hooby

You note the use of wireless connection not being Bluetooth. Does their proprietary solution (must be something in the 2.4 GHz range seem to and typically use for talking to each other) eliminate the annoying sync problem Bluetooth has? Watching a movie in English but feeling like a translation was dubbed over another language is impossible for me. Obviously streaming music isn’t an issue (although it has other issues) but in order watch a video on my tablet or phone, I have to take the aids out and put on headphones.

There is no discernible sync problem (latency). The quality is way better also. Just hassle free TV watching.

You cannot connect the TV connector to your phone or tablet though unless you have an audio analog out… in other words a headphone jack socket. These are increasingly rare these days!

On the matter of latency. My TV has an adjustment for this, and once you got speaker and bluetooth into sync, all is good. It took me a while to find the adjustment buried in the depth of menus, but it may be worth your while to fossick through the sound settings.

I can stream from the TV directly, but then the volume control adjusts speakers and in tandem.

I can stream through a sennheiser -T100, in which case the speaker volume can be adjusted independently from the HA. The outward appearence of the BT-T100 looks identical to the Phonak TV connector, judging from pictures.

Is there any authoritative evidence that the Phonak connector uses an unusual equivalent of Bluetooth?

Disclaimers: I do not consider myself a critical judge of sound quality.
I only played with my trial paradise P90 for a few days so far.
The TV is an LG CX, just under a year old, but the delay adjustment must be older than that (and I did not find it in the manual). Google ‘How do I Fix Bluetooth Audio Delay?’

TV connector uses “AirStream” which is a wireless signal developed by Phonak. It’s a derivative of their Roger protocol. It’s not Bluetooth and actually overcomes many limitations of current generation Bluetooth audio streaming including latency, power consumption and multiple receiver point distribution.

Unbeknownst to many, Phonak develops wireless communications devices for security, telecommunications, television, defense contracts etc. and as such they have a lot of experience with this type of thing.

This arm of Phonak are also responsible for the development of their SWORD technology, allowing the one hearing aid chip to manage multiple 2.4 GHz inputs.

In reply to @Hooby

@Hooby said:

You cannot connect the TV connector to your phone or tablet though unless you have an audio analog out… in other words a headphone jack socket. These are increasingly rare these days!

Plugging a connector into the headphone socket usually mutes the TV’s internal speaker, which is a problem if you want a non--user to be able to hear the program normally. But TVs often have RCA connectors for the audio out as well, and you can get RCA-to-headphone-plug adapter cables.

In reply to @Hooby

@Hooby said:

You cannot connect the TV connector to your phone or tablet though unless you have an audio analog out

Good info…

I am using pcm digital audio out to drive the 7.1 amplifier and speakers for our media, and I have found that the TV’s coax (analog) audio out has no latency with the digital output.

Beverly Howard

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