Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Article (trade association news item built on one user's account)

Why is a visit to the theatre still such an anti-climax for hearing instrument users?

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/bihima-2023-theatre-visits/ · record checked 9 October 2026

  • BIHIMA
  • British Irish Hearing Instrument Manufacturers Association (BIHIMA)

Trade body (BIHIMA, the association of hearing instrument manufacturers in the UK and Ireland, calling for a minimum standard of service at theatres; the account is from one hearing device user, Susan Hamilton, working with BIHIMA on that project)

Summary

A hearing-instrument makers' association reports one hearing device user's theatre visits over three years and calls for an agreed minimum standard of assistive listening service at UK theatres.

Key findings

  • Reports that the user, who contacts venues ahead of time and visits to test the system where possible, had two problem-free visits out of 12 performances attended in three years, with problems ranging from out-of-date systems to ineffective technology and a night when the headphones provided picked up every backstage call along with the performance audio.
  • Quotes the user: front-of-house staff were usually eager to help, but the systems "seem to be managed or tested by people who don’t fully understand hearing loss", nor know what to do when they fail.
  • Quotes the user that a "loop system (telecoil) using hard wired headphones" usually worked and was easier for staff to test, but that headphones suit only people who do not use prescriptive hearing devices; using the hearing aids' T setting with "a dongle around my neck" to receive infrared or radio was intermittent, poor in quality and often dropped out. Once the house lights go down, controls are hard to see and help hard to ask for.
  • Quotes the user that friends with different hearing devices, at the theatre together, each had a different outcome with the same system.
  • BIHIMA's chair says the access information on theatre websites shows that for some venues support is a priority and for others "almost a tick box exercise", and calls for a collective agreement on a minimum level of service until new technologies such as Auracast can be tested.

Limits

One person's account, gathered by an association whose members make hearing aids, with no record of which venues, systems or receivers were involved and no measurements. The sentence on headphones and the loop is ambiguous in the original. A rewritten version published by ENT & Audiology News on 23 October 2023 rewords the user's quotation so that it reads as a statement about loop systems; this record follows BIHIMA's own text.

Read the original

www.bihima.com/why-is-a-visit-to-the-theatre-still-such-an-anti-climax-for-hearing-instrument-users

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Cited in

Cite this source

BIHIMA. Why is a visit to the theatre still such an anti-climax for hearing instrument users? British Irish Hearing Instrument Manufacturers Association (BIHIMA). 9 October 2023. https://www.bihima.com/why-is-a-visit-to-the-theatre-still-such-an-anti-climax-for-hearing-instrument-users/ (accessed 9 October 2026).

The accessed date is when this library last checked the link; use the date you read it. To point readers to this summary instead, link to https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/bihima-2023-theatre-visits/

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