Also because everyone now carries a computer in thier pocket with a very intelligent microphone and Bluetooth card. Anyone looking at hearing aids afresh today would start with that tech as the backbone.

There are wifi-based systems (like Sennheiser MobileConnect or Williams WAVECast), and my experience has been universally awful. The latency is so high that if you have any ambient hearing you get an echo that makes sound impossible to understand.

If you're ever considering installing one of these systems, please think again. Or at least trial it with a real situation, so you know what the experience will be like for the users.

Why is Auracast not ready yet?

A quick search suggests that most headphones and hearing aids don't support it yet. This will be your greatest problem - nobody can use it. This seems like the future though so you should probably install it in your venue and get a few headphones that do support it to test it and to borrow to those who need help.

That few support it implies that there are likely going to be implementation/interoperability bugs for a few more years at least - nobody knows how bad these will be. Maybe things will just work, but growing pains should not be a surprise.

They claim latencies as low as 40ms - this is unacceptably long for a lot of music applications. For listening to the sermon at church good enough, but people may noticed if you are singing along. I'm not sure if this will be an issue, but it is something to consider. You might need a different system though.

It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Not many devices have it, so not many venues install it. Not many venues have it (perhaps because they've invested in other systems), and there's no pressure to change until there are many people wanting to use it.

At the same time, those that have hearing aids often complain that T-coils aren't properly set up or turned on, even in public building where they are required to (at least in Norway).

"Yes, we have T-coils, but the person responsible for it isn't here right now, and no one here knows how to use it."

So, still quite a few limited factors to their actual usefulness in society unfortunately.

A friend who installs loops complains they are largely pointless, because in practice nobody with a hearing aid ever wants to use them. Apparently the quality of a good hearing aid magnifying the audio in the room is substantially better than an induction loop.

No hearing aid magnification comes close if the induction loop is properly installed and integrated with the PA system. With an induction loop it's as if the microphone is directly connected to the hearing aid.

Yes, but you only have the PA on that, not the ambient.

Yes, it's amazing how often hearing assistance systems are either unusable (due to bad sound, e.g. hiss or distortion or volume issues) or just flat-out don't work here in the UK.

> ... those that have hearing aids often complain ...

When I do sound at church, I always wish they would complain more. I assumed it was working, but one day found that the power cable for the loop system was not connected. I plugged it back in, and spoke to a hearing aid user about it and they said it hadn't been working for weeks. Why they (or all the other hearing aid users) hadn't mentioned it before I don't know...

And unfortunately, Auracast must be installed in the venue or Auracast is useless.

I just got my first pair of HAs in November and I opted for the T-coil enabled model. It also (already) has working Auracast (not just "available in a future firmware update" like the other mfgrs). The T-coil model was not much bigger than the one without, and it also had two buttons on each unit rather than one on the T-coil-less model.

411, "Loop systems" are hard-coded in the US's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) so they are not going away anytime soon. When Auracast does proliferate it'll be alongside loop systems; not a direct replacement. (Not at least until the law is amended and we all know how long that takes.)

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My HA model is the Starkey Omega 24 RIC-RT (the `mRIC` is the smaller version of the same, sans T-coil).