Bluetooth dongle with Auracast support - FlooGoo FMA120

Here’s a summary of my experience using FlooGoo FMA120 with my ReSound Vivia 9’s on my Dell XPS 8940 desktop, Surface Pro 7+ tablet, and Pixel 7 phone using firmware 1.1.4:

• When using it with the phone Smart 3D app, it will recognize and stream from the computer using Auracast.
• If I turn off Bluetooth on the phone, it will immediately start working in one-to-one or broadcast mode directly from the computer without any reconfiguring.
• If I then turn my phone Bluetooth back on, audio will continue to stream from the FlooGoo to my HA’s, but I can’t connect my HA’s on the phone.
• If I unplug the FlooGoo device from the computer while streaming, I can reconnect my HA’s to both the phone and the 3D app without having to cycle Bluetooth.
• I can then plug the FlooGoo back in, restart the 3D app, and it will recognize that an Auracast is available. I can stream the Auracast to my HA’s through the phone.
• If I want to listen to any other audio on the phone, e.g. an audiobook, a phone call, music, etc., the phone will interrupt the Auracast stream and give priority to the other audio. When that audio is over or disconnected, the Auracast stream automatically restarts at the point where it was interrupted.

I have the Starkey Edge AI 24, and my Audiologist did speak with a Starkey representative. You can pair up to 2 devices, but you cannot use them simultaneously. You would have to turn off the BT on the other device to use the BT device you’re currently on. It is not like Phonak Audeo Infinio l90, which you can pair up to 8 devices and listen to up to 2 devices simultaneously. So far, I have the Starkey Edge AI 24 and Jabra Enhance Pro 30 hearing aids. But I have demoed Widex Allure 440 and the Oticon Inten 1 hearing aids.

Thank you for sharing this! I assume the representative was referring to using two iPhones with MFi or two Android phones with ASHA — and in that case, it’s correct that the hearing aids can’t stay connected to both at the same time. That limitation doesn’t apply in quite the same way when using the newer LE Audio technology.

From our side, we’ve tested the Starkey Edge AI and confirmed it can stay connected to two devices at once — for example, an iPhone or Samsung S23 plus the FMA120 — without needing to turn Bluetooth off on either device. Of course, it can only stream audio from one source at a time, but it doesn’t require manually disconnecting the other. As mentioned in the post about the new feature, it handles audio from different sources by applying built-in priority rules.

We also confirmed this behavior with a principal engineer at Starkey. Additionally, Starkey is also testing the FMA120 with each new firmware release to help ensure compatibility going forward.

As for the Phonak Audeo Infinio I90’s ability to “listen to two devices simultaneously,” I’m not quite sure how that works in practice — many Bluetooth headsets can keep multiple connections active, but very few actually mix audio from two sources and play them together at the same time.

So the Phonak Audeo Infinio l90 is the first hearing aid I demoed, and when I paired it to my phone and my tablet, I was able to hear sound from both devices simultaneously. This is the only hearing aid that I know that does it. This is outside of the FMA120, strictly the hearing aid by itself. I am not sure if it will work on the FMA120, although I could help test it.

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Yes. Phonak does use classic Bluetooth, which means it will pair with any device. =]

Yes, the FMA120 is a dual-mode device, so it also works with classic Bluetooth headsets.

I have happily used the FMA120 in the “High Quality (one-to-one)” audio mode to connect my Philips 9050 hearing aids with a few devices: two Windows (10 and 11) computers and an Android tablet, for a few months… until I lost my dongle. I had purchased the FMA120 in early
April, so I had been using the latest firmware version that was available at that time. I recently bought a new dongle and updated its firmware to version 1.1.3. It works very well with my Windows computers, but unfortunately it does not connect with my Android tablet. To be more precise, I was successful connecting it just a couple of times. It looks like something got lost from the first version of the firmware I was using (1.1.1 or 1.1.2?) to version 1.1.3.

Installing FlooCast on Ubuntu can be a bit challenging, as the required Python package wxPython needs to be built from source. However, the audio functionality should work as a plug-and-play device without extra setup.

We may update our user guide to include detailed instructions for Ubuntu, but since the OS runs on a wide variety of hardware configurations, we might not be able to identify the cause if it doesn’t work on a specific system.

I have FlooCast running on Linux, but as you said it doesn’t really matter because the FMA120 comes up with the last used settings.

And yes, I did start audio playback on Linux to trigger Auracast to start. No luck.

I have a USB hardware packet sniffer, in case you want me to capture what’s going on on the USB bus.

My android tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e (SM-T720). I have already tried firmwares v1.1.1 and v1.1.2 (after the initial installation of v1.1.3). With these two older versions, I could not connect to any device.

Now I am back on my feet. After reinstalling firmware v1.1.1, the setup with the FlooCast Windows app was successful after a few trials (the setup was more automatic with v1.1.3). And now, I can connect to all my devices, including the Samsung tablet. And it works also with a recent Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE (which would not connect when using firmware v1.1.3).

We’ll investigate and work on creating a checklist for Ubuntu. Thanks for offering to test with the sniffer — we may end up needing it if the issue is related to enumeration.

I think I found a workaround for Auracast on Linux and the reason why it’s not working.

Linux’s ‘pulseaudio’ audio engine has a dedicated volume and configuration tool (‘pavucontrol’) where one can select whether a sound device is used for input, output, or both.

The default for the FMA120 is ‘both’ (Analog Stereo Output + Mono Input).

When this setting is selected, Auracast does not work.

When selecting ‘Analog Stereo Output’, Auracast works as expected:

The USB sniffer reveals why this makes difference. With ‘output only’, the FMA120 gets enumerated and immediately afterwards Linux sends 0x00 audio data to the FMA120. Below is the transition from enumeration to sending audio data:

When ‘output and input’ are enabled, Linux will also read audio data from the FMA120. It seems that the FMA120 considers this incompatible with Auracast.

By contrast, a Windows host will not start sending or receiving any audio data until the user starts an audio-related application in Windows. Until then, the USB bus stays quiet.

Thank you, @wtolkien, for sharing the details. I initially overlooked your mention of “Auracast” when you said it doesn’t work on Linux, which led me to revisit the basic enumeration process.

In the current firmware, the USB microphone channel isn’t expected to be active in “Broadcast” mode, since there’s no input from any receivers — the broadcast is designed to be unidirectional.

In future releases, we’ll make the broadcast mode automatically ignore the microphone interface, so users won’t need to make any adjustments in pavucontrol.

This is also a valuable discovery for cases where Linux users experience reduced audio quality in One-to-one mode, including High Quality and Gaming. (The FMA120 now supports lower-latency streaming with compatible hearing aids in Gaming mode as well.) Many hearing aids can only handle 16 kHz playback when the microphone is active, but they can achieve 24 kHz when only streaming audio from the PC.

I’m not very familiar with pavucontrol, but it might be worth reaching out to its developers. An audio interface capable of two-way communication doesn’t need to keep both directions active all the time. These days, it’s also common for devices—both phones and PCs—to display an indicator whenever a microphone is active, for privacy reasons.

Thanks for looking into this! I kinda agree that it’s a strange choice to continuously read audio-in data even if no application requests it…

I suspect this falls under the purview of the pulseaudio developers, but I don’t know much about the Linux audio stack.

[EDIT]

Keys/Pins work - see my comment below

P.S.: could you also take a look at the broadcast key feature? It doesn’t seem to work for me either.