No, my Yamaha receiver does not have an optical out, but my sony bravia tv has. My current setup is: cable box to sony bravia tv, and tv to yamaha by hdmi (eARC). Then when I play cable, I get sound output to yamaha that my wife enjoys, and I get zone2 out directly to my hearing aid. I keep the balance of hearing aid at 50/50, i.e. 50% I get surround from yamaha reciver and 50% from hearing aid which gives me speech clarity. When there is no distortion, this is a great setup.
Unfortunately, in news program like MSNBC, I get distortion, so the analong output from zone2 to TV connector must be getting distrorted.
I took your advice. My cable box does not have optical out, but TV has. So I connected TV connector to Sony TV with toslink. I have to use digital out to PCM for hearing aid to get sound from TV connector. My wife can also get eARC surround sound from yamaha receiver. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a problem. The PCM sound to hearing aid, and eARC sound to yamaha are out of sync. So although the hearing aid sound does not get any distortion, the delay between yamaha and sony toslink is intolerable. I did not have these problem of sync when the zone2 was connected to my hearing aid and zone 1 to speakers.
I can of course turn off yamaha and get sound from sony speakers for my wife and hearing aid through toslink. Then there is no sync issue, and no distortion, but sony speakers are awful compared to my yamaha system for surround sound. Actually, even with the hearing aid, surround from yamaha with speech clarity from zone 2 without sync problem is great whenever there is no distortion.
So I am back to my original setup. When I upgrade my yamaha receiver, I will look for toslink out.
Thanks for your insight into this issue. Now I know that it is not the setting in Phonak Target software, so I will stop wasting time with that.