Sound goes to the room, not to you
A speaker system fills a space and leaves the sound to find you. By the time it arrives it has crossed thirty feet of air and collected every conversation, air handler, and chair scrape on the way. None of it was aimed at you.
1 in 5
people live with hearing loss
The standard fix is a copper ring buried in the floor. You have to be standing inside it.
The fix most venues bought is a copper ring in the floor
A hearing loop is a copper wire run around the perimeter of a room, cut into the floor or buried in the walls and driven by its own amplifier. It throws a magnetic field into the space inside it, and a telecoil in the listener's hearing aid picks that field up. Step outside the wire and there is no signal at all.
Inside it, the sound is thin. The standard is 100 Hz to 5 kHz, in mono. Steel and concrete drain more than 15 dB out of the field, worst at the high frequencies that carry consonants. Tilt your head 45° and you lose 3 dB more; turn 90° and it goes quiet. Installs run $2,500 for a small room to $150,000 for a concert hall.
| Hearing loop | FM or IR receiver | splitR Pro™ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio bandwidth | 100 Hz – 5 kHz | Narrowband, mono | Up to 20 kHz |
| Channels | Mono only | Mono | Stereo, each ear its own stream |
| In a concrete building | 15–25 dB loss, highs worst | Unaffected | Unaffected |
| Turn your head | −3 dB at 45°, silent at 90° | No change | No change |
| Interference | Hum from dimmers, wiring, transformers | Dropouts, line-of-sight for IR | Digital, none |
| What the venue installs | Copper loop cut into the building, plus an amplifier | A transmitter and receivers to hand out | A hub and an audio cable |
| What the listener brings | A telecoil hearing aid | A receiver from the desk | The hearing aids or earbuds they own |
Broadcast audio replaced the wire
Bluetooth LE Audio did to assistive listening what it did to everything else: it made the broadcast digital. Auracast™ lets one transmitter reach an unlimited number of listeners at once, and joining works the way joining a Wi-Fi network does — pick the stream, start hearing it. No pairing dance, no receiver, no cap on how many people tune in.
What arrives is a real signal: LC3 at 48 kHz, in stereo, each ear receiving its own independent stream straight from the source. A loop cannot do stereo at all — one wire makes one magnetic field, so both ears get the same mono channel. And because it is digital, a dimmer switch, a transformer, or a steel floor does nothing to it.
The standard is already shipping. This generation of hearing aids and earbuds supports broadcast audio out of the box, so a growing share of any audience arrives able to listen on hardware they own and already know how to use.
48 kHz
LC3 audio
Stereo
To each ear
9
Streams at once
∞
Listeners
What a venue actually installs
splitR Pro™ is the hub. It takes the sources a venue already has — HDMI ARC, Ethernet, 6.35mm and 3.5mm, WiFi with AirPlay 2 — and broadcasts up to nine independent streams at once, so the main hall, the lobby, and a breakout room can each carry their own audio. Units link over Ethernet to cover a whole property, indoors and out. Nothing gets cut into the building.
Venues will still want listening units on hand, and they should. What changes is what those units are. A splitR® is a pocket-sized transceiver that joins any broadcast and feeds it into whatever someone already brought — headphones, a portable speaker, a hearing aid that predates the standard — over 3.5mm or USB-C, on a 12-hour battery.
It is still useful to the person who borrowed it after they walk out of your building. That was never true of a loop receiver.
