Not surprisingly, I’m confused. So, last week, I tried pairing the Roger Select iN I have to trial until the end of the month with the older version of Roger Select that my friend Janis makes the pastor wear at church. Janis then hears the pastor through a myLink thingie she wears around her neck. Nothing worked for me, so I presumed I’d done something wrongly in the pairing.
So, after choir warm up and putting on robes and stuff, I waddled into the sanctuary a few minutes early to catch the pastor and Janis and try a modification of the pairing dance. Low and behold, I didn’t need to. As I walked in the door, the two of them were conversing on the other side of the sanctuary, and I was hearing them just fine. So, even though last week’s attempt to pair didn’t appear to work, apparently the gadgets just decided to take their sweet time and wait for today…or something. I’ve no idea.
But it was weird how well the system worked. I heard the pastor just fine. It was like she was funneling her voice into my ears. There was a problem, of sorts, but I’ll learn to live with it. I got snookered into doing a flute accompaniment on one of the handbell pieces we did. That went ok, but then the organist got the bright idea of having me play along on the hymns as well. That’s where the “problem” arose. I could hear the pastor’s singing as I was playing. It is a bit distracting to be trying to sight read music while someone is singing, not always quite on tune, in one’s ear. 
I actually had an earlier test on Friday evening. We had a large turkey dinner at church. I was at a round table of 8 people. I plopped the Select iN on the table, and I could hear people quite well. The only problem was when two people on opposite sides of the table decided to talk at once. The Select iN couldn’t figure out where to focus. But if only one person was talking, they were clearly audible.
On another note, I discovered that the optical audio thingie for TVs and such only works if the little docking station for the Select is plugged into power. It’s not obvious from the Roger Instruction Manual that this is true. I don’t actually have an optical thingie on my TV, but I do have one on my cable box. So, if I plug into the cable box output, I get the audio, so long as I’m actually watching TV and so long as the docking thingie is plugged in. Of course, we mostly watch stuff on Netflix and BritBox, in which case the optical audio on the cable box doesn’t work (well, it does, but it’s some random program we never would watch in a million years, and which bears no resemblance to the dialogue and music in Sheltand or Midsomer Murders). But, I can get that audio from a phone jack on the side of the TV, just not in stereo, or so it seems so far.
The thing seems to be pretty cool. The only problem is the price. Do I really want to give up wine for a year or two so that I can hear people?