EduMic usages

I will try the instructions says the microphone will work up to 65 feet away. That is what anout 30 meters. I have been using it with the audio cable connected to my fire tablet and the sound is still good when I worked a good 50 or so feet out to the mailbox front where the EduMic was laying on the end table in the house.

Could you compare the sound in the microphone mode of ConnectClip and EduMic? Connectclip is built on a Velox platform, and EduMic is built on Velox S platform with more aggressive settings of Open Sound.

Aren’t those platforms for the aids, not the accessories?

@Zebras said:

I’m worried that it will only work on line of sight and so will be of no use to me when outside with my friend walking, if she is in front of me.

I would venture to guess that the EduMic will not require line of sight but more likely be transmitting via RF. Reason being that if they designed it for the classroom, there’d be plenty of time when the teacher would turn his/her back to the classroom to face the board to write something. But that’s just my guess.

@anon33641277 said:

Could you compare the sound in the microphone mode of ConnectClip and EduMic? Connectclip is built on a Velox platform, and EduMic is built on Velox S platform with more aggressive settings of Open Sound.

I would suspect that the ConnectClip and EduMic would sound the same. There’s no reason for them to reinvent the wheel and come up with a better mic for one compared to the other. The reason they come up with the EduMic is mainly for the classroom situation where 1 EduMic must be able to connect to several Oticon hearing aids, actually to an unlimited number of Oticon hearing aids. And also the addition of the 3.5 mm miniplug audio connector to allow more non-BT devices to be connected to it to broadcast to the whole class. As well as the FM/ADI broadcast option (requires an external plug in device) as well as a telecoil to pick up sounds from a teleloop and rebroadcast to the entire class.

As for whether one is built on the Velox platform and the other on the Velox S platform, I think that only applies to the hearing aids and not these accessory devices. Having said that, I did notice that in the datasheet of the EduMic, they did list the Processing Platform as the Velox S.
However, I think that’s just a marketing gimick. The main communication protocol the Oticon hearing aids use with their accessory devices is the Riviera BLE technology that Oticon licensed from CEVA. I bet you that both the ConnectClip and the EduMic uses the same transmitting chip to broadcast this Riviera BLE protocol to the Oticon hearing aids themselves. It uses the 2.4 GHz Twin Link technology that’s available in all Oticon hearing aids.

This is all totally independent from the hearing aid platforms like Velox (for the OPN) or Velox S (for the OPN S) or Polaris (for the More and Real) or Sirius (for the Intent), and that’s why the ConnectClip and EduMic is totally compatible backward and forward to any of these 5 generations of hearing aids, regardless of the platform that Oticon claim they developed it on.

From here https://wdh01.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon/main/pdf/master/whitepaper/65216uk_wp_edumic.pdf?la=en&rev=FD50&hash=88596B21D4085738B50336C6F6E7B1F25

There are 2 aspects for the EduMic and ConnectClip to function on, one is to stream a sound content from a source device (like a laptop or smart phone or table or even FM transmission or teleloop), and this content is closed source and is just streamed directly to the hearing aids and accepted and present by the hearing aids to the user “as is” without any processing because this is a closed source that’s already supposed to be processed for consumption directly already.

The other aspect of the EduMic and ConnectClip is the sound picked up by their own mic. Now this is where it’s possible for Oticon to decide to use the same processing technology available at the time to process the incoming sound from the mic then process it to weed out the noise and improve the speech before transmitting it to the hearing aids, which is the OpenSound Navigator technology. But that’s really because it’s cheaper to reuse the same sound processing technology instead of having to come up with a different one.

But you will notice that Oticon requires the person speaking into the ConnectClip or EduMic to clip it on their front pocket or wear it on a lanyard around their neck such that the device is right there below the mouth. So I really doubt that they need the power of OpenSound Navigator to clean up the voice extensively because the voice is RIGHT THERE next to the mic, so it will give a very high signal to noise ratio already just due to the close proximity. It’s not like the voice is 10-20 feet away mixed in with the noise that would need such a processor like the OpenSound Navigator to clean it up to such a necessary degree. But of course, if they’re reusing the OpenSound Navigator to process the EduMic’s mic pickup, then that gives their marketing an opportunity to harp on about it. Of course you can try to put the EduMic or ConnectClip 5 to 10 ft away from a person’s voice in a noisy place to see if you can still get the same clarity compared to it being right on the person’s chest or not. Somehow I doubt it. But if it’s noisy all around, then maybe the noise reduction would help a little bit. But nobody in their right mind would just leave something like that in the middle of the table and hope that it’ll pick up all sounds around the table cleanly. The whole point of these devices is to wear them next to the body for the best voice pickup.

By the way, even if the EduMic is based on the Velox S platform because it came out around the time of the OPN S, and the ConnectClip is based on the Velox platform because it came out around the time of the OPN, the OpenSound Navigator technology is one and the same for both the OPN and OPN S. The only difference with the S is that it has the new Feedback Manager functionality that is based on a preventive feedback management technology instead of a reactive feedback management technology. This new preventive feedback technology would not help any bit at all to make the EduMic better than the ConnectClip because there’s no output speaker on either device to cause any feedback in the first place to take advantage of this non-S and S difference.

I did a test today, I engaged to EduMic microphone and set it to face my TV which is 25 feet away from my easy chair. The EduMic mic picks up the sound and amplifies it even better than using my TV adapter. I tried the same thing with the connect clip and it doesn’t pick up sound near as good. This isn’t scientific but a real world observation.

I don’t notice any delay in sound at all and don’t really notice any difference in sound either. The range for both is way farther than I ever expected. I can walk anywhere in my house and ven out to the mailbox which is over 60 feet from the front of the house and my house is built out of cinder blocks and is over a foot thick walls.

@P_L said:

The question I have is. Is there much difference in sound quality / latency between the Edumic and TV Adapter 3.0 and LE Audio / Auracast?

You can find some info in the Technical data sheet for the TV Adapter 3 at the Oticon Download center - click on Wireless Connectivity and find the document at the bottom of the page: Literature & Video Download Center | Oticon1

The latency for the TV Adapter depends on the input source and is the delay between the input source and the hearing aid speaker output:
Analog: 25 ms
Digital: 28 ms (TOSLINK PCM)
Dolby Digital: 45 ms

The audio bandwidth is specified as 10 KHz/stereo from input to hearing aids.

As the TV Adapter is older than Bluetooth Low Energy Audio, I expect it uses a proprietary form of the old bluetooth low energy that minimizes latency (small packet size for example).

I haven’t found a similar doc for the Edumic but the one for the ConnectClip states an Audio Quality of Stereo/10 kHz sampling and an Audio bandwidth of 80 to 10kHz with a footnote that the actual performance depends on the hearing instruments.

I can’t find a doc I once saw for the new Codec for LE Audio but I remember that the latency depends of the settings of the encoder and a test result I’ve read about shows longer latency than the TV Adapter 3 especially if your input is analog or digital optical PCM.

@P_L said:

I have a question. I don’t think the Edumic / TV Adapter 3.0 use Bluetooth Low Energy to transmit audio to the hearing aids. Think it uses a proprietary 2.4Ghz wireless technology Twin Link? , as it allows multiple devices to be paired to it. The question I have is. Is there much difference in sound quality / latency between the Edumic and TV Adapter 3.0 and LE Audio / Auracast?

“The TV Adapter contains a radio transceiver using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and a proprietary short range radio technology both working at ISM band 2.4 GHz.”

BLE is a very general tem for Bluetooth Low Energy, and there are many protocols that uses the BLE technology, like MFI is one protocol, and obviously the CEVA Riviera Waves is another proprietary protocol that Oticon licensed from CEVA in 2016 for its accessories like the ConnectClip and TV Adapter, and I’m fairly sure the EduMic later on as well. The TwinLink technolog is just the Oticon marketing name for its combined communication strategy (hence called TwinLink) for binaural processing AND for direct connectivity (streaming) to the hearing aids that uses the CEVA Riviera Waves BLE technology. This is different than the BLE Audio protocol that recently was released in the Oticon Intent and other HA brands that is supposed to be compatible with AuraCast. So don’t get the old BLE protocols like MFI, RivieraWaves, or even the more modern ASAH, confused with the latest BLE Audio. They’re all BLE-based but they’re all different protocols.

I would think that the sound broadcast quality of the CEVA licensed RivieraWaves BLT technology used in the TV Adapter, ConnectClip and EduMic would sound the same, except for the difference in mic quality and sensitivity between theConnectClip and EduMic. But any same direct streaming content from a source device into either the TV Adapter and ConnectClip and EduMic probably would sound about the same. However, the new BLE Audio protocol that supports AuraCast is different and should be better.

Below is some screenshot of the RivieraWaves technology that Oticon licensed from CEVA for its streaming accessories like the TV Adapter and ConnectClip, EduMic. Also including the full link:

Oticon deploys CEVA BLE technology to stream smartphones and DTVs to hearing...1

CEVA, Inc., a licensor of signal processing IP for smarter, connected devices, reported that Oticon, the provider of BrainHearing™ technology has licensed and deployed the RivieraWaves Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology. The technology is for use...