Streaming from PC to Philips 9030 aids

I’ve had no luck connecting with my desktop PC. The PC ‘sees’ the 9030s in Bluetooth, but won’t connect.

Yea it’s not the right Bluetooth.

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@401todd said:

So to reveal my ignorance of things technical, would the capacity to run HearLink on a Windows 11 PC enable me to stream? Or is that not the real problem?

Not sure what you meant by “run HearLink” on a Windows 11 PC means. Are you talking about the HearLink app for the smart phones? How would you run it on Windows in the first place if it’s only an app for smart phones?

And to clarify, you don’t want any device in between like the AudioClip streamer or the TV Adapter, right?

I’m only aware of direct streaming from iPhone via MFI, and direct streaming from Android via ASHA. Windows 11 doesn’t support ASHA so unless you have an AudioClip or TV Adapter, you can’t stream from your PC to the 9030 directly.

If a TV adapter would allow me to stream from my PC to the hearing aids, that would be an excellent, and relatively cheap, solution. Do you know that it would work?

Microsoft says that you can run Android apps on Windows 11, so in theory I could install Philips HearLink on a new Windows 11 PC (mine is Win10 only).

But I’m not sure that would actually allow me to stream to the hearing aids, or if there is still a Bluetooth compatibility problem.

If the TV adapter suggested by Baltazard would work, that would be the easiest solution. I will check it out.

On streaming from a computer, I didn’t think it would matter much to me. But I’m trialing the Phonak Lumitys and it’s easy to hook them up to a computer. I’ve been serving as the secretary of our neighborhood association board for the past year. My modus operandi has been to record the audio of the Zoom meeting, to feed the .MP3 audio to the online MS 365 Word for Web audio transcription, then use the text from the audio transcription to do the meeting minutes. The A.I. of the audio transcription identifies speakers, eg., Speaker 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., and you can globally replace the name of a speaker in one go throughout the whole transcript, i.e., tell the transcription program that Speaker 1 = Jim Lewis.

The only problem is that the A.I. does a very good but imperfect job. There is some wrong speaker identification, particularly when speakers are interrupting each other. And some incredible transcription bloopers.

So, what I do, is I play back the audio transcript (which is in text snippets with effective play buttons for each snippet linked to its timestamp). When I find a speaker misidentification from the global replacement or an incorrect transcription, I correct it using voice recognition software. But listening to the audio behind a transcript segment streamed directly from the cloud to my trial Lumitys is fantastic. I don’t have to drive the wife crazy (my monster computer setup is on one end of our dining room-sized kitchen table) and as other Lumity users have been praising the device, the audio quality is better than my computer speakers, better than over-the-ear BT headphones, etc. The only downside is there is a definite lag of half a dozen words or so before the audio reaches the Lumitys when I click the “play button” for a particular transcript section. Whenever BT LE Audio with its low latency gains a foothold in computers and HA’s, that would make what I’m doing A LOT better. Right now, if I want to go back to a text snippet and hear the full audio, I have to start replay a snippet or two before the point where there’s a problem, and if the preceding snippet was particularly long, I waste my time just waiting to get to the audio I really want to hear again.

I’ve done lots of Minutes long ago into the past using tape cassette recorders and Sony digital recorders where’d I’d just replay the audio using skip forward, skip back buttons either on the recording/playback device itself or in a Windows media player. Playing back the exact audio snippet directly out of the audio transcription applet for MS 365 Word online into my HA’s is great and much more efficient at finding exactly what I want to replay in what would otherwise be a linear stream. The computer and the Word transcription GUI convert the linear stream into an audio random access device and the streaming quality of the Lumitys over anything else I’ve tried so far helps me get what was said right (almost all the time) when the audio quality sometimes isn’t that good for a variety of reasons including the ability of a particular speaker to speak clearly, loudly, directly into their computer microphone, not be interrupted by anyone else attempting to talk over them, interject, or affirm what the original speaker is saying, etc.

@401todd said:

Microsoft says that you can run Android apps on Windows 11, so in theory I could install Philips HearLink on a new Windows 11 PC (mine is Win10 only).

But I’m not sure that would actually allow me to stream to the hearing aids, or if there is still a Bluetooth compatibility problem.

If the TV adapter suggested by Baltazard would work, that would be the easiest solution. I will check it out.

Maybe I misunderstood what your original goal is in the first place, but your first post stated that you’re aware of the “dongle et al” solutions and implied that you DON’T want to use the “dongle et al” solutions on your Windows 11 PC.

My interpretation was that you were implying the “dongle et al” solutions to be the Philips AudioClip, which is the intermediary Bluetooth streaming device option offered by Philips that would allow you to hear audio from your Windows 11 PC, assuming that the PC has BT support to begin with. @Baltazard 's post shows a picture of it.

If your Windows 11 PC doesn’t support BT (which would be rather strange because most modern PCs that can support Windows 11 should have BT support), then you can buy a BT dongle to plug into one of its USB-A ports to provide the BT support you need to connect to the Philips AudioClip.

The AudioClip would be a better option to use with your Windows 11 PC than the Philips TV Adapter because you would not need to run an audio wire from the PC to the TV Adapter, so it’d be a true wireless solution all around, at least from the source to the intermediary device. Plus you can use it for your TV as well, assuming that your TV is modern enough to have BT support in it as well, and avoid needing the TV Adapter for the TV. The AudioClip would also be useful for older Android phones that don’t have ASHA support yet.

I sincerely doubt that the fact that you can run Android apps on Windows 11 will guarantee that you can install the Philips HearLink Android app and magically have it work directly with your 9030 without an AudioClip. That’s because the ASHA support is not inside the HearLink Android app, it’s in the Android system. An Android system emulator for Windows 11 that lets you run Android apps on Windows 11 does not necessarily guarantee ASHA support, unless it’s stated to be an Android 10 or later emulator and it specifically stated to provide ASHA support as well, which I find unlikely because most emulators rely on the host’s (Windows 11) physical hardwares for IO support since it’s just a software emulator; and ASHA support not just requires Android 10, but also requires hardware support that only exists in newer Android phones to work with it.

At any rate, since now you’ve restated that you’re willing to use a TV Adapter if that would work with your Windows 11 PC, that clarifies that you’re open to use an intermediary device, hence I would recommend that you buy and use the AudioClip to help stream from your Windows 11 PC instead for better versatility compared to a TV Adapter.

@pvc said:

I’m curious to know what is on your computer that you wish to stream to your hearing aids? For me, it seems like a nuisance picking up sound like email notifications, and other unwanted sounds.

Is it movies, or videos, or music, or something of that nature? If so, then maybe connect your computer and your TV to the same WiFi network, and then use your TV remote to play movies, or videos, or music (that reside on your PC) and then watch/listen/stream all on your TV using the TV Adapter.

I know that this question is directed at the OP and not me. But I just want to say that I watch a lot of YouTube videos on my Windows laptop even though I have a big TV at home, because the big TV is reserved for watching things together as a family like movies, and I’d rather watch YouTube video contents that I watch alone on my laptop for convenience because I can be anywhere in the house with my laptop, but I must be in the great room to watch the TV.

So streaming from a laptop is not very different than streaming from a smart phone, and in my personal situation, it happens far more often on a daily basis than using the TV.

@Volusiano said:

So streaming from a laptop is not very different than streaming from a smart phone, and in my personal situation, it happens far more often on a daily basis than using the TV.

I would still like to know what the OP/Original Poster is seeking?

Lots of info for this non techie to digest, but thank you all.

To the question of what exactly am I trying to do, it is to stream audio (news stories, Zoom calls, youtube videos, etc) from my Windows 10 (not 11) desktop computer to my hearing aids. To do that now I have to use headphones, which is a nuisance, and somewhat uncomfortable to wear over my hearing aids. And before someone asks why I don’t just listen to the audio over the PC speakers, I don’t want to disturb my wife, whose home office is next door to mine (we are retired).

I originally said I wanted to avoid more hardware because I would have rather invested the money in buying a Win 11 PC (thinking that running Philips HearLink on the PC would solve the streaming problem, but that may not be the case). So if it has to be external hardware, I will do it, but would like to get the best bang for the buck to do that. I think the answer is probably in what some of you have said above, but I need to dig in to better understand that.

Thanks again to all for your comments and suggestions.

I have done this with a 9030. I used the AudioRelay app on PlayStore to get the audio from the pc to the phone that is connected to the 9030. The connection from the pc to the Android phone can be a usb cable or wifi. I think that this is what you want. The downside is that there is a few hundred millisecond delay between the video and the sound. If you’re just listening to music, that’s OK, but watching a movie would be disconcerting.

That works! And I don’t watch movies on the PC, so the latency isn’t a major issue. But if you found the best settings to minimize it, please let me know.

Thanks a bunch