This world is loud. We get out of bed in the morning and crank up some music, we get in the car and listen to loud music on the way to work (or church), we walk through loud construction zones on our way into the office (and sometimes the loud construction zone IS the office). We go to concerts and airshows and sports events that inundate us with high SPLs as well. One result of our increased exposure to the high SPLs of the modern world is that younger and younger people are experiencing the same kind of hearing loss that was formerly more common only in our honored senior citizens — the older folks who’d spun around the sun a few more times than the rest of us all.
The net result is that there are more people in the world than ever before with diminished capacity to hear. And for those of us who have been tasked with making sure everyone can hear our church services clearly, this means that going forward, we will have more folks in need of assistive listening systems than ever before. And unfortunately we can’t just turn it up louder and hope for the best — if we did that, we would cause hearing difficulties for even more people!
In certain scenarios, the clarity of speech in our sanctuary can be less than optimal due to reflections, which means that for people with hearing loss, what should be clean, clear speech comes across as reverb soup. We need to deliberately and methodically deploy technology to ensure that everyone in the sanctuary can hear everything they’re supposed to hear. Let’s take a look to see what options are available and desirable.
RF Systems
A common solution for churches and secular settings to provide assistive listening is via RF. It’s comparatively less expensive than other options, primarily because the necessary infrastructure can simply be carried into the room. There’s a transmitter (or two or three), and there are receivers. There’s no need to physically build anything into the sanctuary. We just send signal to a transmitter, and our listeners tune in with a receiver (provided to them by us) and hear our signal at a level that’s comfortable (and clear) to them. We’ve been doing radio for something like 130 years now, and we’ve got it pretty well sorted out.
Of course, every option has a drawback of some kind, and in this case, it is the maintenance and administration of numerous receivers. It’s likely we’d simply place our transmitter(s) in a semi-permanent location and not worry about them again, but the receivers our congregants use must be charged and ready for use every time we have a service. Moreover, when we hand them out, we need to get them back, and as we know from our experience with both IEM receivers and bodypack transmitters, they have a tendency to “walk off.” Another consideration is the issue of available bandwidth going forward. It seems like the FCC is squeezing our spectra more at every turn. Luckily, most RF assistive listening systems operate in VHF bands that aren’t likely to be affected much, yet it’s still something to think about. RF remains a popular solution, but processes must be put in place to make it effective.
IR Systems
Similar to RF is infrared, or IR. It essentially works the same way as RF, but transmitting with light waves rather than regular RF frequencies. As a result, the same type of system administration as with RF systems is necessary in the case of IR — that is, handing out and retrieving receivers from congregants and ensuring that they’re properly charged and ready to go. One additional consideration in the case of IR is that it requires line-of-sight transmission. RF permeates around, over, under and through solid objects, but light does not. In order to make sure the sanctuary is covered, multiple IR emitters may need to be deployed. IR does help us overcome the issue of shrinking RF bandwidth, however, so it may be worth considering.
In the Loop
Loop systems are yet another viable solution to consider. A fair percentage of folks with hearing impairment use electronic hearing aids, so it only makes sense to leverage those devices to improve aural clarity for them. Of course, hearing aids capture and amplify every sound that happens in the room, which unfortunately includes the cacophony of reflections and other extraneous, non-musical or non-speech noises, and hearing aid users frequently report that sometimes the background noise overwhelms the desired sound because it is indiscriminate — it simply turns everything it hears up louder for the listener.
The loop system helps to overcome this problem. It takes advantage of induction to transfer energy into hearing aids, facilitating the transmission of an audio signal of our choosing — and that’s where the additional clarity comes into play. We send a carefully crafted mix of audio through the loop system, the hearing aids inductively “receive” it and the hearing aid users get nice clear audio — free of the amplified background noise they normally suffer.
There are however, two primary drawbacks of loop systems. First, in order to take advantage of the inductive transmission, hearing aids must have a special additional feature known as a “telecoil” or “t-coil.” Not all hearing aids have them, and without them, no inductive signal will be heard by the user. On the bright side of that, t-coil receivers can be attached to other systems to make loop system audio available to the listener. The second drawback is the comparatively more costly installation of a loop system. Copper wire or tape must be deployed throughout the sanctuary so parishioners with hearing aids can sit anywhere and receive the inductive signal.
Wi-Fi
As you might imagine, Wi-Fi solutions continue to grow in popularity. Wireless routers have become very inexpensive, and can be deployed in numerous locations throughout a sanctuary to ensure complete coverage of the space. Churchgoers can “tune in” with smartphones or tablet devices, and get the audio into their ears via earbuds, wired or wireless. As Bluetooth technology continues to improve, it is becoming a viable option as well. In the past, Bluetooth has suffered some moderately serious latency issues, but continues to improve, hopefully to the point that it can become an additional contender in the domain of wireless digital audio for assistive listening. An obvious benefit of these types of solutions is that most, if not all of the parishioners who use it to improve hearing will do so with their own “receiver,” hence the maintenance and administration of RF or IR receivers becomes largely a non-issue, and folks can feel a lot more comfortable using their own device to listen to a nice clear version of the audio.
The Final Word
Of course, it is our goal and our pleasure to ensure everyone in the room can hear the message and the Word clearly, but there’s an additional consideration. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legally requires certain public venues to provide systems that enable the hearing-impaired to get the message with the same clarity as everyone else in the space. At the federal level, churches are exempt from this requirement, but there are a couple of states at this point that do require churches to provide assistive listening mechanisms. Presuming that government will continue to regulate more and more over time (as it does), being prepared to comply with potential future laws is a good idea. But indeed, the real and important reason we should go out of our way to ensure clarity for all congregants is that we truly do want all to hear the Word.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
