There has been a lot of fuss recently with Apple's announcement that their latest Iphone will not have an audio jack. and there has been a lot of public outcry and misinformation spread but it turns out that they will come with a pair of earphones which connect to the phone through the charging port. It will also come with an awkward looking adapter to use with traditional 3.5mm audio cables. Apple's goal however is to have people splurge on their fancy new "courageous" wireless earphones. They are not the first company to make wireless earphones/headphones but it amuses me that this is the big new thing. This is because I have been listening to music tirelessly for well over 10 years now!
At this point I feel like I should reference an old post:
http://1in50000.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/my-gear.html
However reading it again makes me think I didn't explain things very well. Basically starting back in primary school I was given an fm radio system (I also call it my mic system, my radio etc,) which is a device designed to help me hear a teacher better. So originally the teacher wore the system with a microphone and I wore a separate box with a cable connecting to my hearing aid. Of course technology moves quickly so after a while I no longer needed a box, instead the teacher had the mic system and I had a receiver which attached to my hearing aid via an electronic shoe (you can see a picture in the post I've linked to). So this allowed me to hear the teacher clearly without any wires! The great thing was that this also meant I could listen to music wirelessly. With the original system I could swap between the microphone cable and an audio cable and with the current system it has a separate audio jack which means I can use any normal 3.5mm audio cable to connect it to my ipod or the audio jack on my laptop etc.
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| My fm system connected to my ipod by way of a normal 3.5mm to 3,5mm audio cable |
On the whole there are many advantages with my set up, I don't need to splurge on expensive noise cancelling headphones, I can just select the setting on my hearing aid which only gives me the sound from the receiver and mutes the hearing aid microphone, nobody can tell I'm listening to music (there is a funny story about a time when I was listening to music too loudly in high school but the teacher couldn't figure out where it was coming from) and I don't have to worry about tangled headphone/earphone cables. There are also disadvantages for example it is a bit of a pain to have to carry the fm system as well as my ipod, especially in warmer weather when I'm not wearing a coat/jacked with an inner pocket, the fm system needs to be charged, the audio cables whilst cheap have a habit of breaking after a number of months due to not being very flexible and whilst it is cool being able to listen to music without people knowing, there are many times when someone will start talking to me and I'll have to quickly change settings on my hearing aid to switch it back to normal and then apologise to them and have to explain that I was listening to music so I missed what they said.
It is somewhat ironic that despite being so ahead of the times with being able to listen to music wirelessly that I sometimes wish that I could just plug my ipod straight into my hearing aid and not have to worry about carrying my fm system. I did spend a lot of money on a special cable which was meant to do just that however it had a lot of annoying background noise and was awkward to connect so I ended up getting a refund. Unfortunately I don't think there is much incentive for the hearing aid companies to come up with a receiver with a normal audio jack, maybe it is something I'll look into.
Thanks for reading.
