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NuraLoop experience with online meetings

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I have typical old age hearing loss (dropping severely after 3 KHz) which means I don’t distinguish consonants well. My NHS Kinnect made-for-iphone work well for speech but are rubbish for music, and though one can stream onto them from IOS devices, one cannot from normal Bluetooth as on a PC or Mac. I have loads of video conferences at present, which don’t connect to my HAs unless I use a iPhone or iPad, which are not the best for meetings.

After various failures in finding a way to stream audio to the HAs, I abandoned them for meetings and tried out a set of Nuraloop in-ear buds. These make some self-measured compensation for hearing loss but are not touted as HA replacements. However, they have been very good for Zoom, Google and Teams meetings. They are not quite as good as the HAs for speech in the open, eg watching TV with no streaming connection, but very satisfactory for meetings, where people are usually making a bit more effort to speak clearly and one at a time, and Bluetooth delivers the sound direct to the ears. In fact they are a great improvement on large meetings, where even with HAs it is hard to distinguish what someone is saying on the other side of the room! They are comfortable to wear and don’t fall out, as conventional buds do on me. And of course they are excellent for music.

I hope this may help others facing the same questions. They do a 30 day trial, so there is no risk, and I am definitely keeping mine.

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I use a neckloop for my laptop and Zoom or Teams meetings.

Better then taking out my all the time for different things.

Starkey Kinect has a telecoil option and the neckloop is less then £20!

Yes I’ve found my Nuraloops useful for listening to Zoom but I have to take one half out or turn down the noise cancelling mode if I’m speaking so I can hear myself properly! I did read somewhere that the profile setup may not work for some hard of hearing people if it’s not able to measure the acoustic emissions, something to bear in mind for those who are severely or profoundly deaf

@keith.bowen said:

In fact they are a great improvement on large meetings, where even with HAs it is hard to distinguish what someone is saying on the other side of the room!

Just to confirm, you’re talking about face-to-face meetings here, not on-line meetings? Is so, do you have the sense that the sound from the microphones is going through the Nuraloop’s personalisation? I asked the founder of Nura if that would happen and his reply was no- at least not initially. I had them on pre-order but cancelled before they were sent.

Sorry to be unclear. I was talking about online meetings with Nuraloop, and face-to-face meetings with my hearing aids (in a large room possibly with poor acoustics). I thought the Nuraloop microphones would be used in pass-through sound and hence go through the personalisation, but I have no evidence for that. When listening to radio or TV with no Bluetooth, the sound is better with the Nuraloop than with no aids, but I can’t really tell whether the personalisation is in play.

Di the founder expand on what he meant by “not initially”? Is this a development to come? and when was this?

In reply to @keith.bowen

Here’s the reply to my question verbatim (hopefully I won’t incur anyone’s wrath for quoting it). This was about a year ago.

Regarding the social mode not being personalized, the issue is related to latency. For social mode to feel natural it has to be really low latency (short time between the microphones and the speakers). The types of filtering we do currently takes too long to feel natural when applied to the social mode signal. That is partly because they are complicated and partly related to power efficiency/battery life.

We originally planned for the nuraloop to have personalized passthrough from the start but have decided to launch with just a simple augmented hearing (no frequency shaping, just making louder). We will look at adding a personalized passthrough with a software update at a later date (like we did with adding ANC to the nuraphone last year) but I cant give you a timeline on that yet.

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