Inside the Auracast Debut at the Sydney Opera House: A New Era in Hearing Accessibility

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Hearing from Sydney, Australia, a city and a country whose varied history invites contemplation from multiple points of view. One of those in modern context is that Australia is one of two countries that has been punching far above its weight in terms of audio and hearing innovation. The other country is Denmark and today the two are brought together to celebrate a seminal event in accessibility for those with hearing challenges and beyond. The launching of Auracast at the World. Famous Sydney Opera House with thanks to GN for inviting me to cover the event, Come along as I experience for myself and then talk with one of the people at the Sydney Opera House responsible for choosing Auracast. Along with GN, Google and the National Acoustics Labs, GN, the primary sponsor along with Audiology Australia and the National Acoustics Labs, staged a wonderful launch event and concert in the Drama theatre for over 100 hearing tech and health journalists, industry leaders and hearing aid users. Google and Samsung were there, providing attendees without hearing aids the opportunity to try Galaxy Buds 3 Pro with a native tuner in Android 16, which is in beta at this time. Others tried the Auri receivers and headphones that form part of the complete assistive listening system provided to the Opera House by Ampetronic and Listen Tech through their Australian AV distributor Jans. Those with GN hearing aids could tune in using the GN app. Thus several listening methods were used. Auracast was helpful during the opening speeches, but so would have been the loop in place for those with T coil hearing aids. It was during the concert where Auracast really stood out. In a repeat of my experience at the GN trial at the Lincoln Center, New York, I found the music quality using Auracast with GN hearing aids to be amazing when set to music mode and dialing in a 5050 mix of live and Auracast. For me, as an actual hearing impaired person, listening with Auracast disabled did not deliver the best clarity. Listening through hearing aid microphones is okay but not great with music from distant speakers. On the other hand, with 100% Auracast it sounded like a studio recording with a 50/50 max. The music came alive. I felt present in the concert hall, yet there was greater clarity from the stream. Another key point is that the Auracast stream was in stereo, so unlike with a mono hearing loop signal, streaming did not ruin the sense of space and distance that one goes to live events to experience. Speaking of hearing loops, I attempted to capture the difference in sound quality between the loop signal and Auracast. With apologies to friend and colleague CARL Van Gogh. Once again, I did not bring him to Australia. Not only is he bulky, but even though I had permission to record, I thought that maybe that would be seen as going a bit too far. A bit grudgingly this time, CARL did allow me to take one of his ears. While I couldn’t demonstrate stereo streaming with one ear, I could still capture the difference in bandwidth and therefore music quality. I tuned a loop using GN’s remote microphone, which has a T, coil input And Auracast output. Other people actually saw my mic as a second Auracast channel, and a couple asked me about it afterwards. If they had tuned in, they would have heard the loop signal. When I listened to the two streams live with either my hearing aids or Sennheiser earbuds, the music quality was definitely better with Auracast. For voice, the loop does perfectly well, but for music, no contest. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that with the ear outside the mannequin, too much direct audio passed through to the microphone. Therefore, the difference between loop and auracast was not apparent in the recording. When I popped a Sennheiser into the ear, CARL got his revenge. But the difference was real. As a longtime music lover, I came away from this experience even more excited about Auracast for live concerts than I was in New York. Consider also that the Sydney Opera House does not do things capriciously. They have a process and need data to support major decisions. Some of that data came from the National Acoustics Labs, as you will hear from Pádraig Kitterick, whom I spoke with at their offices the day before. But before we hear from him, here are Janelle Ryan of the Sydney Opera House, Peter Karlstromer of GN and Noelle Chun of Google. I caught each of them in the corridor after the event for a short conversation about their role in Auracast development and deployment. Also see the resource links in the show notes. Enjoy. So I have with me Janelle Ryan. She’s the senior manager of Impact Programs and Operations at the Sydney Opera House. Thank you for joining me. It’s an absolute pleasure. So the Opera House is already really progressive in terms of accessibility overall. How did Auracast come to your mind and what was the decision making process to implement it? I think as with everything at the Sydney Opera House we listen to community. It’s a constant dialogue. We are everyone’s house. And I think that part of that. I love that, by the way. Yeah. And we truly live that value. And so it came to us because there was feedback this was not something that, I mean, I’d heard word that there was a technology out here and so had community. So I was actually getting calls and emails from, from people saying they didn’t know what it was, but they knew. They were like, does my hearing aid connect to this? And I’m like, well, what is this? What are you asking for? And after a bit of research, I realized they were talking about the development of Auracast. So they were asking you about it. And that seems to imply that they were not satisfied with the loop or the FM system you currently have in place, is that correct? I think the loop and the FM system have their place. But I think that the lack of any real development in the space really has. You know, when you’ve got technology that’s just forging ahead so far in terms of nuance of music and listening experience, there’s only so far you can go without legacy technologies. So it sounds like you’ll run all three systems. Absolutely. Okay, you’ll run all three? Absolutely. Because there are those who we will offer the Auracast receivers pre show as our standard. But the FM is still working, so if someone asks for that. Absolutely, we’ll offer them the FM. Okay, and what other use cases are you thinking about for Auracast besides the obvious one, which is hearing impaired people? Yes, absolutely. Was really interesting to hear them talk about creative aspects. We’re deeply interested in integrated accessible tech, like integrating accessibility into art. So we’ve done things like we’ve had haptic vests. And so at a concept we’ve had Deaf users wear the haptic vest so that they can feel the beat of the music. So I’m really interested to see potentially where this could go creatively, which I know is kind of not this initial stage, but it’s an interesting thought. In terms of what we could use it around the house. I have heard there are other features to it, whether that be translational or we might be able to use it for audio description. But at this stage we’re just doing the initial into there. No, that’s 100% correct. Because even the transmitter you’ve installed here is two channels. So you could run descriptive audio for low vision people on the second channel with no issue at all. Right. And then if you think about the way these AI description systems work, you would record it once for performance and then you could have the descriptive audio running without having to have a human do it at every single performance. Yeah, potentially. Like there is so much potential in. But I think you know, we’re right on the ground floor. We’re right at the starting point. I didn’t expect, you know, I don’t know, this happened in a way that’s come about in a really organic way with GN Resound and coming to us being a Danish company and we were already looking at it and I think they were the, we were already looking, they were the catalyst, they were the, the that got us to go. We’re going to do it. We’re going to be one of the first. So. Okay, and what other theaters is it installed today and what are your plans for the future? I mentioned that this was done in a drama theater. Yes. So we’ve installed it in the drama Theatre, the Playhouse and the studio, which is our three western foyer venues. And the reason we’ve done that is that is where our greatest use is. So we have resident companies of some of our major like theatrical companies across Sydney in those three venues. So their audiences are just users of the service. So we really wanted to start where it was going to get the most feedback and where it was going to get the most use. The main halls, the concert hall and the Joan Sutherland Theatre are still, still to be determined. But super excited about just letting people being able to email those people back and go guess what, it’s you. Let’s go. Yeah, absolutely. And I understand like the main concert hall is going to be more complex because it’s going to be a multi transmitter installation too. I think it’s going to be much more complex. I think the only thing about the major halls is going to be range. I really don’t think it’s going to be very complex like a gen. And I’m, I’ve got a whole team of people who install that I’m not installing but they are, you know, they are absolutely confident. So what they’re saying is when you decide to do those venues, it’s not going to be a problem. No, it’s just going to be how many we choose to use. And my final question for you is because you’re on the inside, I wonder if you’ve been actively thinking about the global impact this will have. I think and I said it to someone just then in a conversation is like making. Making access not, not invisible. But when people, people don’t have to come pre show, they don’t have to find out what seats they can walk in and just use the system, you know, and that’s how telecoil was originally defined. You know, was meant to work as well. But I feel like with Auracast this is just going to enable people the freedom to just, you know, not have to do all those extra steps, which is the barriers really. And I’m excited about that. You’re not gonna have to identify, you’re not gonna have to say oh, I need this or I need that or what seat, walk in, have an enabled hearing device which you know, could take a few a while for that to roll out. But yeah, it will come, it will come. And, and that freedom of just providing barrier free access to that space, that’s everything we’re doing. Well, I love that and it’s funny. I will tell you. When I was here last May, I bought a ticket while I was still on the flight inbound for Sydney. Bought a ticket, dropped my bags, ran to the matinee in the main concert hall and I was sitting, I got a single seat in dress circle row A, which was a beautiful seat and outside the loop. All right, so this is brilliant in that respect. What I meant by global impact was do you appreciate how influential this will be on other venues? Yeah, I mean we are a symbol of modern Australia and I think you’re. Actually a worldwide respected. What you do here has an impact around the world and I hope you appreciate that because I’m very hopeful that this will spur installations in other theaters and other music venues in other places. And I wonder if that was part of your thinking. To be out in front. Yeah, absolutely. To be at the forefront of accessible technologies was absolutely part of the thinking. We were thinking probably more Australia wide because we are a symbol of modern Australia. But you’re right, this will go wider. This, you know, because I’ve seen a lot of testing but not a lot of installation of this system more widely. And I think it will only take one or two and I think that will just start like I honestly think that community will drive engagement in Australia and I hope that also happens overseas. Well, I hope people see this and. Go, I am so excited as, as a hearing impaired person. Right. Who appreciates just how good the sound quality is with auracast. I’m just thrilled that you have done this and I really thank you very much and thank you for spending some time with me. Oh, no, Absolutely. Absolute pleasure. So I have with me Peter Karlstromer. He’s the CEO of GN in Denmark. Thank you very much for joining me today. That’s my pleasure. Great to be here. Well, GN is really way out in front on Auracast. I mean you started developing this years ago and in some ways this must feel like a culmination of all of that work. I mean tell me what it means to you to have this launch at the Sydney Opera House today. I think it means a lot to us as a company, but it also means a lot to many people being here that worked on this for a long time. And I would actually start with the people we have, people that have been having the vision together with other key players in the industry to actually make this a reality. So how did that actually come about? Like what was the decision making process to embark on the Auracast journey, especially as early as you did? I think we have been big in Bluetooth as a group of course for the hearing aids, but also in our enterprise product and also consumer products in gaming in particular. So we’ve been always very active in the Bluetooth SIG, the special interest group. And when Bluetooth low energy were kind of revealed and the kind of roadmap for that, we started to realize that Auracast could have a fantastic potential for the hearing industry and in particular for the people with a hearing loss of some kind. So that’s essentially how it started. And I think we took the role of being the advocate of people that had hearing impairment to make sure that that really got the place in the conversation around the standard. And then it’s been a lot of long work and needed work to make the standard also very work nicely for Auracast. So it is literally both a longer period of time we worked on it, but also a lot of people involved from GN. But I also need to recognize also other great players caring about this basically. Yeah, 100%. And, and really, I mean you highlighted something that GN not only developed Auracast in their devices, but you’re also advocating for the installation of Auracast. Right. This today at the Sydney Opera House was in part due to GN’s efforts. Yes. And, and what made you think so proactively about it versus just developing the devices and like what made you think, why did you choose that as a path? Because it doesn’t directly affect hearing aid sales. Right. But no, not directly. I mean we are doing this to help people and of course if we help People. Well, that is also business win, but it really starts with helping people. So we got the question from many. You’re so early on Auracast. I mean, okay, that’s nice that you have it in your hearing. I’ve met it long before there was any way to tune it. Exactly what would I use it for? why is this big? So I think we realized we are not done yet. We need to also evangelize. And actually this came out as an idea in a conversation here in Australia that what a better place could we do than the Opera House? And then of course made contact with Opera House. And we’re very grateful also for all the leaders here at Sydney Opera House to see the potential. And it wasn’t anything we needed to convince them long and hard about. They quite quickly realize themselves that this is big. This is something we like to do. And that’s what’s bringing us here today. And the reason why we were so keen to do it here is of course of the signaling value, the iconic place this is. And then we hope that this will help others to get inspired that have kind of an influencing ability of other venues so we can get this to snowball a bit. Well you actually anticipated my question, and that is, by working with the Sydney Opera House, were you anticipating that they would be influential in other venues around the world implementing Auracast? I mean, nothing we could know, of course, but we hoped for that. And I actually think the event today I mean, it’s fantastic there. People from all over the world basically showing interest in what we’re doing here today. A lot of media and a lot of industry professionals with different kind of influential capacity like yourself. And we were very encouraged with the reception we have had today. Oh, well, the reception’s been wonderful from what I’ve seen. And I have to tell you, right, sure, I’m a media person and an industry person, but I’m also a hearing impaired person. And I can tell you that the musical experience is like nothing else. Yeah, right. I mean, it is wonderful. Even listening with hearing aids with nothing. The musical experience with some Auracast dialed into the mix is really something so very much my hat is off to you and of course the Sydney Opera House as well. Because I believe this is going to influence other venues. I certainly hope it does because it will make the experience that much better for many, many people. Let’s spread it together and the stories like your own from your personal side, that makes us really convinced we’re onto something big. Here you definitely are. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Appreciate you spending some time with me today too. Nice talking to you and congratulations. Thank you. So I have with me Noelle Chun, she’s the senior product marketing for Google. Thank you very much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So you and your partner Samsung have been way out in front here on Auracast. I mean it was a year and a half ago where I was able to use the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. I actually did a sports bar demonstration how Auracast could be used in a sports bar. But like really like it was so far in front of any live venue having Auracast. What was Google’s rationale for embarking on the Auracast development path so early? Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. For one, we are super excited to be, you know, the first mobile OS to integrate LE audio and Auracast together. We’re excited because of the promise that you mentioned. You know we know that many people use Android, there are billions of folks use Android out there in the world. And so what a special opportunity is it for us to support the adoption of something like auracast so that it can be ubiquitous, so it can be easy for users to go into sports bars, to go into train stations, to go into cinemas and to be able to easily connect using their phone to the Auracast stream. So it’s, it’s one of many reasons why we’re very excited. Okay, and did you look at it as a mass market application or an accessibility application or both? I mean like, I think both were excited that LE Audio is the latest. Right. Bluetooth protocol and it has many benefits including that within hearing aids. Right. And today we talked about Auracast, but in January actually you might know, we announced some other cool features that we were able to use using the LE Audio protocol. Hands free calling. We talked a little bit about presets for your hearing aids baked directly into your phone OS. You know, these are all things that we’re able to do using this new standard. So we’re excited about what other things we can do integrating your phone’s technology with LE Audio. And I’ve explored them all with my S23. Have you? So I was for example able to use Auracast with the hearing aids before GN had their app running because I could tune with the S23. Yeah. What was your experience? Oh, the experience was good. What I would say is, but like, I’m a person who can go deep inside the menus, Right. So that the present system where you had to go multiple menus, deep, I think, was a little bit. Not mainstream, but I gather with Android 16 you’ve got a different experience coming. Yeah I don’t know if you had a chance to try the demo we had inside today, but QR codes, you know, is something that we are bringing in. With Pixel Devices you’re able to actually just snap a quick photo of that QR code and go directly into the broadcast. So to your point, we think entry points are really important to make it easy for folks to connect to the streams that they want to connect to. So you’re totally right that these are things that we think about. Okay, so the Android 16 experience is going to be a more user friendly experience than the present one. Yeah. In fact, currently with Pixel devices and Android 16 beta, you can already use that QR code experience, so. Absolutely. Okay, and so then how do you see the future for LE Audio on Auracast? Now you’re starting to implement hearing aid control functionality, for example, like what do you see ahead for the future and Google’s role in that future of Auracast? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. Were excited that LE Audio brings some of the benefits that it does. You know, battery, you know, efficiency. Right. We think a lot around how we can, you know, create the most battery efficient experiences both for phones, but also the devices that you use with your phones. Right. Hearing aids are a prime example. We don’t want hearing aid users have to worry to, to the extent that it’s possible about their battery. Right. Latency. Right. And we see that with hearing aids as well. Faster connections, better connections. So we love that around the LE Audio experience. And yeah, we’re excited to see what else we can do with that and what else we can bring with Auracast and LE Audio. Well, my hat’s off to you for being a part of this event. I think it’s a seminal moment on Auracast to have the Sydney Opera House deploying auracast on a permanent basis. It is seminal and we feel very grateful to be a part of, you know, this partnership and launching Auracast. You know, just hearing from folks who were using the Auracast streams for the first time, it was incredible to hear what emotional experience it was for them. You know, I think you might have heard the folks who experienced tears for the first time, you know, listening to the concert and it’s, we’re really grateful to be a part of it. We’re excited to become a part of this open standard. So can I anticipate that Google will then continue to be Proactive as the Sydney Opera House influences other venues, we. Really want everyone to be able to use Auracast and we’re excited, you know, especially with Android 16, to see more OEMs adopt it. So we’re excited about this open standard. We hope many people adopt it. Well, terrific. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks for spending some time with me. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Pádraig for joining me. This is really exciting, the launch of Auracast at the Sydney Opera House. Now you’ve been involved in evaluating Auracast and thinking about how Auracast can improve the user experience for a person with hearing loss. Like, give me a little bit of background on NAL’s role in Auracast and what you have found that’s beneficial. Yeah, thanks. And thanks for having me on I think when we looked at this, we wanted to understand what the potential for this kind of technology would be and where would it fit in to the existing technologies that we have for people who use hearing devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants. And so we start to look at the technology and started to open our eyes and just realize that this is far more than just a telecoil replacement or a replacement for FM systems. This has huge opportunities to be used in all sorts of different ways across different environments in different sort of use cases for people. The actual technology of Auracast itself has just got so many applications. But one of the key things that it brings is much improved technology for how you stream audio. In particular the quality of the audio. And there was two things that jumped out at us. The first is that if you’re a hearing aid user or a user of a cochlear implant, for example, or any other hearing device, and you go to a concert hall, you’ll probably listen for through a loop system or an FM system. So with comparison to a loop system, those are great systems and they’ve operated for years and they’ve been really critical bit of infrastructure. They’re wonderful for the spoken word, absolutely. Wonderful for the spoken word, but they’re monaural. So that’s one thing. So you get a single channel of audio. And so we really want to open up full stereo audio, full binaural audio. When you’re listening to music, enjoying the ambiance of the. Particularly in a beautiful venue like the Opera House, you know, that’s part of the experience, isn’t it? And the second thing was about just the quality of the audio. This is NAL. So you obviously Tested it. We did. So what we did is we got people who are hearing aid users and expert panels of listeners and we did some A/B comparison testing. So we got a whole range of different stimuli. So we looked at speech and noise, we looked at music and we looked at speech in quiet. We compared listening through a hearing aid microphone to listening through a telecom coil system optimized as best as we could get it. Listening through auracast but also listening through a previous generation of typical hearing aid streamer which was based on technology that’s more similar to Bluetooth Classic for example. So it’s proprietary technology. Lower latency version. Lower latency version but still more voiced than anything else. That’s absolutely right. So what we find is that you know those older technologies, Telecoil, those older streaming technologies are very good at voice in quiet as long as there’s nothing else in the background. But we saw significantly better preference and quality for auracast for listening in noise and for listening to music. Particularly we published some of this result. Yeah we’ve put that out there and we’re really sort of confident that in a blind comparison and we do all of this blind, we use a method where people can switch live between all these different ways of listening and people rate auracast is significantly better in sound quality and noise and for music which doesn’t surprise us. If you just look at the technology, it’s got great way of encoding the sound at a high quality, at a really low energy. So it’s perfect for these kind of devices. It’s got a broad bandwidth and so for us it’s that delivering that better experience for people who use hearing devices. That’s awesome. That’s really really great. And we think that this is now finally bringing first class listening experience. Well and it’s, it’s funny actually because I’ve also been playing with auracast since the very beginning. But only recently have I had a couple of experiences which I think really bear this out. One was GN’s demo at the Lincoln center in New York. First time I had heard live music through Auracast and the stereo meant a lot and the high bandwidth meant a lot. And I actually found in experimenting that going 50/50 was great because I still got room ambiance but a lot more clarity with half auracast being put in. And then I went to a concert here in Australia at the City Recital hall and the person performing, she spoke a lot in between the songs and I was Using the in house loop system. Well, I actually had to go back and forth. Right. The loop system gave me a lot more clarity of her speech, but it did me no favors in the music. So I was actually turning the loop off for the musical part and turning the loop on for when she was speaking. And with Auracast in that sort of mixed environment, you really can have it both ways. You can, but it also opens up a lot of different opportunities even within that use case. So with Auracast you can have multiple streams. And so if you think about how AuraCast is used because it isn’t just one stream, you know, we’re thinking that, or we’re used to thinking that there is the telecoil and that telecoil just sends out one stream and you receive whatever’s put on it. This could potentially bring choice. You could choose between different options. Oh sure. Movie theaters, for example, you might run a dialogue enhanced stream. Exactly right. And live, you might have descriptive audio for low vision people. Yep. I actually think sports. Right. Sports always had descriptive audio before people knew what descriptive audio was like. When I was younger, I remember we’d go to a match and there would be people holding the transistor radio to their ear listening to the play by play. Yep. Right. And now in the Internet era, you can’t do that because the Internet stream is 30 or 60 seconds behind the action on the field. But you could actually broadcast the play by play through auracast. And then you could have, even if you’re a low vision person and it’s descriptive audio for you. So you hear the smells and the sounds of the stadium are there. Plus you get that radio broadcast if you will. But even people with normal vision love to have all that. Right. There’s a lot of things that are explained in a match in the background that you love watching on tv. All very exciting stuff. Now how did it come to pass that NAL got involved in the Opera House launch? So we were looking at Auracast technology and exploring all the various different benefits it could bring and use cases it could bring. And we were doing these comparisons and so we were more than happy to sort of lend our experience of what we had found worked really well. The kinds of things that you want to consider consider when you’re making this technology available to people who use hearing devices and just try to offer our support and our insights to sort of make their installation a success. Excellent. Well, this is super exciting and I know because the Sydney Opera House is globally influential as well as being forward thinking about accessibility, that this is going to have a meaningful impact around the world. I’m sure it’s going to accelerate deployments. Thanks a lot for your role in making this happen. Absolute pleasure. Thank you.