Sorry, but I wasn’t talking about getting that iOS app to work with android ( it couldn’t be done anyway) I was thinking to sideload the iOS information to the iPad, which you say isn’t available to download from iTunes store for iPad, this is so easily available to do on android with android APK filesystem.
Oh OK. Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, maybe it’s doable but although I have an iPad, I don’t use it for streaming a lot anyway so it’s not worth trying to sideload to get it to work for the iPad. I just mentioned it as a point about even inside the Apple ecosystem, not all devices work with the Airpods Pro hunky-dori’ly either.
I’ll just add this to the long list of things that don’t make sense to me. The processing for hearing accommodations in transparency mode has to happen in the buds. It’s not like the audio is doing a round trip back to the phone. Therefore the parameters are kept in the buds- even if only temporarily. You’d think that it wouldn’t be much different for streaming? I can understand- sort of- that when the buds connect to a device the parameters get transmitted from the device and replace whatever’s there. If it’s not an iphone, no parameters get sent, so no hearing accommodations.
Having said that, I think that if Apple wanted to be nice to the people who buy their Airpods, they could make it so that the parameters stayed until they were replaced by other parameters. Protecting their eco-system is apparently more important.
I’m still not convinced that if you leave your phone on the table and simply go for a walk that at some point on your walk you’re going to lose hearing accommodations. I did try turning off the phone while watching a video, but I didn’t notice a difference. Not a biggie for me. I take my phone with me most of the time. But not having assisted hearing when using the computer or watching tv is a huge loss in functionality for me.
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I think you hit the nail in the head there, @d_Wooluf, that for the Transparency mode, the ambient sound flow as picked up by the buds’ mics probably doesn’t make the round trip back to the iPhone to get routed through the audiogram then goes back to the buds, or else it can cause noticeable latency when it’s just easier to just store the audiogram parameters in the buds themselves.
I also know this because like you, I’ve tested the Transparency mode with the iPhone in standby, and also with the iPhone completely turned off (to ensure no BT connection with the buds at all that can happen in standby), and like you, I can still hear the audiogram aided accommodation just fine in the Transparency mode, so the audiogram parameters must have been sent and stored in the buds. It’s nowhere as good as my hearing aids such that I would consider the Airpods Pro to be a HA replacement, but it’s there. For good measure, I even made up an test audiogram with a flat 90 dB loss across the board just to ensure that the audiogram accommodation in the Transparency mode is discernable even to by hard-of-hearing ears, and I can confirm that the audiogram accommodation is still there even with my phone OFF completely.
Therefore, to allow the ambient sounds in Transparency to get processed by the audiogram stored in the buds, but to deny the Bluetooth streaming audio from a non-iOS device to get processed by that same audiogram stored in the buds seems like a very done-on-purpose kind of thing. I’m sure if Apple really wants to allow the audiogram accommodation to be extended to non-iOS devices, they can do it easily. But they must have simply chosen not to allow it, maybe in hope of winning more iPhone sales. Well, I don’t know if they’re right about that or not, all I can see is that they will lose more Airpods sales than gain iPhone sales by doing that. But a new iPhone is easily 4-5 times the cost of the new Airpods Pro, so I guess they’re betting on the heavy-money iPhones over the light-money Airpods.
When I watch TV with Roku plugged into it and the Roku iOS app on the iPhone in remote mode the APP2 works just fine with my audiogram enhancement.
What’s the APP2 connected to? If the iphone, that makes sense. If the Roku, it doesn’t to me. I see something about “private listening” using the Roku app? I can’t get onto the Roku site for some reason.
Gotta agree on that. It would be nice if Apple just came out and clarified this sort of stuff. A white paper maybe? Doesn’t seem like their way though.
Yes “Private listening” on the iPhone Roku app remote function must be activated after APP2 BT pairing with the iPhone.
@e1405 → I just tried Boom 3D for Windows and unfortunately, its Equalizer section is only good for + and - 12 dB each way, giving me only a max range of 24 dB of adjustment which is nowhere adequate for my hearing loss compensation. That’s too bad because I really can’t find any viable option to stream my Windows audio to the iPhone in order to get my audiogram accommodation from the iPhone.
But speaking of using an equalizer as a compensation for hearing loss, even if you can find an equalizer with a much wider loudness range, for example 60 dB range total, that’s still not the same as compensating for hearing loss as normally done by hearing aids, because there would be no wide dynamic range compression going on to manage soft vs loud input levels. I think the Airpods Pro is much more sophisticated than just a linear equalizer. They probably have some kind of WDRC in place as well.
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@Volusiano: Have you tried VLC? I think you would be able to stream media from Windows PC to iPhone with it, but it would probably not help you with other sources (YouTube, Skype, teams, zoom, etc.).
Edit: I have also tried AirFoil but did not like it much.
If you are considering returning your AirPods, an Oticon Connectclip could be better for what you need, no? (I don’t remember if you already own one). As it is, I figure the AirPods are not good backups for you anyways.
Yeah, I already have the ConnectClip and have been using it with my Windows 11 laptop. My only reason to be interested in using the Airpods (with audiogram) on Windows 11 is to get the bass sound that’s been missing with the OPN/ConnectClip. I primarily want to use YouTube and VLC on Windows 11 only, so that’s why I tried Airfoil, but I guess they already retired Airfoil for Windows so that’s why it’s not working for me when I tried to install a retired version of Airfoil for Windows.
I’ve heard that VLC can stream to the iPhone, but I haven’t explored it yet because like you said, it doesn’t support Chrome where I play the YouTube. But probably just out of curiosity, I’ll look into trying it out with VLC to iPhone anyway just to see it even works as advertised. I’ll report back on this if I can get it to work.
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Another alternative to get good bass when streaming that I’ve been using successfully is to simply wear my OPN, then wear a Bluetooth over-the-ear pair of headphones. That way you pick up the good bass from the big headphones, and the mini-tcoil from the OPN picks up the normal high sounds from the headphones and amplify it like normal. Of course the only drawback from this is that the headphones are more bulky compared to the Airpods. In the summer time, it’s also hotter to wear the headphones because it covers the whole ears, making your head more prone to sweating if you wear it for a long time.
Music has been a big frustration over all those decades of hearing impairment. I was told I am am one of those with very sensitive ears, my HA’s volume rocker is tuned to 1 dB. At least I am quite happy now with the music program I came up for my guitars (I wear a pair of More 1). My instruments sound incredibly rich, just the sound of an open chord makes me very very pleased. I haven’t achieved the same level of satisfaction with music coming out of sound systems, nor from phones/streaming. I guess I haven’t put the effort there either. Fortunately my hearing loss allows me to enjoy my Airpods with the transparency hearing accommodation, at least to some degree. However, your posts @Volusiano made me go through my memories and realize that, indeed, the Airpods sounded better when connected to an iPhone.
Yes, you seem to have asymmetrical hearing and your left hearing loss is fairly flat, while your right hearing loss is better than the left ear in the lows and the mids but worse in the highs. In a way, your asymmetrical hearing loss kind of compensate one ear with the other. You can hear the lows and mids better already with your right ear to help offset your left hearing loss in lows and mids, and the left ear can pick up the highs to offset your right hearing loss in the highs. So what I’m saying is that even if the Airpods underperforms in one way or another, it may be not as easy for you to notice because your 2 ears complements the hearing loss of each other, so overall, as long as the Airpods provides some performance, you can be more easily satisfied with it.
But for those of us whose hearing losses are more severe, the underperformance of the Airpods especially in the transparency mode can become a lot more obvious to us very quickly compared to your experience.
@e1405 → I’ve been able to stream a movie with the movie file residing on the PC over to the iPhone. This is not the same as transferring the actual movie file over to the iPhone, then play the movie with the iPhone VLC app, in which case the iPhone would have to do the heavy duty work of decoding the movie. This is with processing the streaming video using the power of the laptop and the laptop does the decoding heavy duty work, and simply just stream the decoded video to the iPhone.
BUT, this is not really what I want to do. I want to watch the movie on the laptop’s much bigger screen. I only want to stream and send then listen to just the audio of the movie on the iPhone in order to drive my Airpods (with the audiogram loaded) on the iPhone. The approach above makes me watch the movie on the puny little iPhone screen which is not what I want when I have a much bigger screen laptop at home.
But there’s an easy workaround for this, I guess. Just start both the movie on the PC at the same time as the streaming to the iPhone, and the audio is sync up close enough to enjoy it in parallel.
But if you know how to send just the audio portion of the movie from VLC on the PC to the iPhone, please PM me with details. Thanks.
Now only if I can get the Google Chrome to work for YouTube on the PC streaming audio to the iPhone then I’m golden. I suppose I can always run YouTube on the iPhone then cast it over the PC, but I much prefer the more versatile controls available on the PC interface. Beside, I’ve tried casting from the iPhone over to the PC (to get a bigger screen) using Airdroid. But while it works, the video lag is not really acceptable. The VLC Streamer solution is much faster with virtually no lag because they optimize the video using the power of the laptop for streaming over to the iPhone, while Airdroid doesn’t have a way to do this.
I will give this some thought. For now, I would recommend you searching ways to use your iPhone as a bluetooth or wi-fi speaker, like discussed here and here.
Thanks. I tried your first link and it was for going from Android to iPhone, which is not I want. The second link for iSpeaker looks real interesting, although it’s not clear how the iPhone would see and stream the audio from the PC. It also seems like a very old product back in 2009 and I had a hard time finding a download for it. But I found it and installed it but could not find the Phantom speaker that it’s supposed to install to set as the default speaker anyway. So I removed it.
I’ve tried to watch a couple of TV shows via the VLC streaming method and it wasn’t too bad. Syncing between playing the VLC player on the PC and the VLC Streamer on the iPhone so the audio you hear on the iPhone is synced up with the video you watch on the PC is easy, but if you have frequent Pause/Play interruptions while watching, you’d need to resync each time, which can get old quick. I like to fast forward or skip scenes now and then frequently when watching to skip boring scenes and stuff, and the sync’ing doesn’t support this habit very well.
But boy, I’ll tell you, the superior bass and the spatial sound feature of the Airpods Pro 2 just blows me away. Spatial sound makes it seem as if the sounds are not right there at your left and right ears, but instead are in front and around you. Many times, I thought I had some other speakers inadvertently left on and playing somewhere else around me, but it was just from the Airpods Pro 2. It’s just so hard to believe that those 2 little buds can make the sound seem to be in front of you and to your left and right.
And I’ve also forgotten how nice and important the low bass can make the video seem so much more lively. I feel like even though I don’t have very bad hearing loss in the lows, streaming from my OPN hearing aids have been robbing me of being able to enjoy such rich low sounds that you can find in movies and music. Sometimes the quest for finding the highs in the name of speech clarity in hearing aids make you forsake and compromise so much elsewhere in the hearing range because the HAs make you miss out on the lows when you stream with them. Yeah, coupling the HAs with an over-the-ear set of headphones can give you back some of those lows, but I haven’t been impressed with lows from all the headphones I’ve used so far until I hear the lows from the Airpods Pro 2. And that spatial sound from the Airpods Pro 2 makes my prized Sony WH-1000MX3 headphones seem dead down boring with sounds presented right at my ears, instead of spatially in front and around me.
I’ve decided that this VLC Streamer workaround to enable me to use the Airpods Pro 2 with the audiogram accommodation on the iPhone to watch movies and TV shows from my laptop is a good enough workaround to justify keeping the Airpods Pro 2 now. Heck, I’m not going return the Airpods now that I’ve had a taste of its lively spatial sound feature and its lip smacking low bass. There’s no going back to streaming movies and videos and music now with my boring hearing aids for sure.
Yeah, whenever we shift the paradigm in our listening experience there is no going back lol. I am glad you are having such a richer experience with your AidPods. I agree with you, there is no contest between the AirPods and OPN or MORE for audio streaming.
I’ve read that there is a workaround to make AirFoil run on Windows PC. Have you fully explored this route? My mac runs Windows 10 via bootcamp, I will try it later. Problem is I do not have an iPhone, I will have to do it with an iPad. As I said, I tried AirFoil to stream music from my Mac to a bluetooth speaker but there was constant audio freeze, so I gave up and deleted it.
Edit: Ok, got AirFoil running in Windows 10. I am able to stream the audio to my iPad, and then to my AirPods. However, it streams to only one Airpod and audio/video are out of sync. Not impressed with the sound quality either.
Thanks for trying it out and for updating your experience with Airfoil. If you know what workaround you had to do to make Airfoil work on Windows PC, please let me know. On the Airfoil Satellite installed in my iPhone, it says that it only works with Macs, so when I wasn’t able to get the Airfoil Windows version send audio to it, I just chalked it up to this limitation to work for the MacOS only for Airfoil Satellite. I wonder if you are able to get it to work because you’re running it on your Mac, albeit through a Windows 10 emultor.
But even if I could get it to work on my real Windows 11 laptop, but I get the audio to lag the video like you do, then it’s really no good for me either.
I must be missing something but I just don’t get it. Sure I get the advantage of the form factor of small high-quality ear buds and the fact that they are getting better with each new generation. But, “Quality of sound” come on, they still do not match the quality of sound of good headphones that have been around for the last 40 years. And, the ability to tune them by entering your audioqram sounds like “Equalizer for Dummies” to me. There have been great equalizers and apps available for lots of years. And those here that just seem to have realized that hearing aids, while great for voice, don’t really work well for music and other audio, well, Yeah. But, OK, maybe I am missing something here. What?