Streaming Audio from TV or Hifi to Halo 2

No answers, I see. 😟

I've spent some time investigating this, now, and the short answer seems to be that you can't do this (although there is a rather clunky work-around). One can get frustratingly close, but sadly a weird feature/bug of iOS causes you to fall at the final hurdle.

Here's the approach I tried:

- Get hold of some sort of USB audio device that has sufficiently low power requirements that it can be powered by the iPhone's Lightning port. (I chose a Behringer UCA202, which has stereo RCA analogue inputs (and can also act as a DAC, although that needn't concern us here).

- Get a "Lightning to USB Camera Adapter" cable.

- Download some sort of sound recording app for the iPhone, for example Voice Record Pro.

Now, let's say I disable hearing-aid streaming, connect the Behringer to the Lightning port via the Lightning to USB Camera Adapter cable, run the recording app, hit REC, then go into the sound-level check (which allows you to input sound and monitor it without actually creating a recording); then I connect a pair of wired headphones into the iPhone's headphone socket. Then (with a little juggling of settings in the app) it *is* possible to monitor the incoming sound over the headphones: you've got stereo sound going into the Behringer, the phone pulls it through the Lightning port and gives it to the app, the app sends the stereo signal out over the headphones, and it's all working.

So, problem solved, right?

Wrong. 😠

If you now activate hearing-aid streaming, for some utterly insane reason, this changes the way that the iPhone receives sound from the Behringer device! What you now see in the recording app is no longer the result of capturing both of the incoming stereo channels; instead, it captures just one of the two channels, and feeds that to both ears! So, although it is still pulling sound in through the Lightning port, and is sending it to the hearing aids, you can only pull in one of the two stereo channels Switch off hearing-aid streaming, restart everything, start recording, and plug in wired headphones, and it's capturing in stereo again.

I tried this with more than one recording app, and they all did the same thing, so clearly it's the phone itself that's going haywire, not the app.

Intensely frustrating.

Notes:

- Use of a "Lightning to USB Camera Adapter 3" cable allows the iPhone to be charged while the device is connected to the Lightning port, and may possibly also allow the use of devices that require more power than the Lightning port can provide. Device power requirements can also be dealt with by using a mains-powered USB hub; but the phone can't charge from that while something is connected to the Lightning port.

- If for some reason you do want to capture only mono sound, there is an easier way to do this: you can get a cable with built-in attenuation that connects to the iPhone headphone jack (and mimics an external microphone).

- I haven't tried this, but if you want to try a stereo sound-capture device that has a digital (rather than analogue) input, the Hifime UX1 might well work.

I mentioned there was a clunky work-around....

There's an app called RemoteSound (full version is 79p, trial version is free). What this does is allow an iPhone to act as a wireless sound-card for a Windows PC. You download a separate Windows application and run it on the PC, then launch the app on the phone, and the two connect to one another over the Wi-Fi. (The PC needs to be connected to the same local network as the phone). Any sound sent to the PC's default sound driver is also sent over the network to the phone, and you hear it there.

This *does* work in stereo with hearing-aid-streaming enabled; the sound quality is comparable to what you get streaming directly from the phone; and, while there is some latency, it's not as bad as you might expect. However, this only works well if there isn't too much other traffic on the network; if there is, the sound can break up. (There's an option to compress and/or buffer the sound, which makes it less prone to break-up, but also increases latency).

In theory you could feed sound from the TV into the PC, and from there send it to the phone via RemoteSound; but that isn't exactly portable!

A final possibility for some users might be the Tunity app. This is a clever idea: you point your phone's camera at a TV screen, and it identifies the channel you're watching, and then streams the TV channel sound over the Internet to your phone.

But this only works for some channels; it only works for live broadcasts, not recordings, DVDs, etc.; and it only works in the United States.

There are various possibilities if you're willing to put up with mono sound; it's stereo that's the problem.

And there are, of course, many hearing aids that are not "made for iPhone" and which do a far better job of streaming sound from other sources than the MFi variety does. But that's getting a little off-topic!

I'd be happy for you to email me, Karen, but I don't really want to publish an email address on here for the harvester-bots to pick up!

Er...

Well, take this "address" and move each letter backward 1 in the alphabet, so b becomes a, c becomes b, etc. Leave punctuation as it is.

****

If you get it right, it should sound like an upset fish. 🙂

I should emphasise, though, I don't think I have anything useful to say about streaming to Halos that I haven't already posted in this thread.

<Personal Information Edited by Host>

There is no dedicated streamer device for the Halo or Halo 2 other than an iPhone. For other hearing aids (e.g. the Z-series or Muse range) Starkey make streaming devices like the SurfLink Media and SurfLink Mobile; but they work on a different radio frequency - 900 MHz rather than 2.4GHz - so they aren't compatible with made-for-iphone hearing aids. I'm told they plan to make 2.4GHz versions of those devices, but they won't be released for 18 months or so.

If your Halos have a T-coil, there are various devices that can drive that.

I guess it's possible that another manufacturer might make a 2.4GHz streamer that's compatible with the Halos, given that the communication protocol with the iPhone is probably the same - that hadn't occurred to me. Did your expert have any specific suggestions?