Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Peer-reviewed study (live concert)

Evaluating a hearing loop implementation for live orchestral music

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/mcweeny-2025/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • McWeeny S, Trainor LJ, Armstrong S, Bosnyak D, Tawfik H, Bruce IC
  • Ear and Hearing 46(3):808-816

Independent (McMaster University; AGE-WELL Canada grant); in-kind hearing aids and fittings from Sonova Canada

Summary

Tested whether a hearing loop improved sound quality for hearing-aid users during a live orchestral concert by switching the loop feed every 5 minutes.

Key findings

  • 20 adults with moderate-to-severe hearing loss used study hearing aids with telecoils, and 8 used their own hearing aids without a telecoil; all rated sound quality and naturalness during a Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra performance.
  • A temporary loop covered six rows in the upper balcony of a 2,200-seat hall, about 27 to 37 m from the stage.
  • The loop carried a stage-microphone mix, the hall's balcony-microphone feed for its infrared system, or nothing. The no-feed condition was rated significantly better than the balcony-microphone feed for sound quality and naturalness; the stage mix did not differ significantly from no feed.
  • The authors conclude that a loop did not seem crucial for orchestral music; participants remarked that spoken introductions were hard to follow without an assistive feed.
  • The authors' manuscript reports that loop feeds were delayed to match the direct sound at the loop, that balcony microphones may have added about 40 ms of uncorrected delay, and that a Wi-Fi-to-phone-to-hearing-aid path tried in pilot work had about 350 ms latency.
  • Gives uncorrected delay as another possible explanation for the lower ratings of the balcony feed: the distance from the stage to the balcony microphones, likely around 40 ms, was not accounted for (preprint p. 12).
  • The verified OSF preprint (doi:10.31234/osf.io/ru49x, published 22 January 2024) dates the concert to 13 May 2023 in Procedure (p. 6). Its Future Directions section (p. 13) attributes most of the approximately 350 ms Wi-Fi-device-to-phone-to-hearing-aid delay to the phone-to-hearing-aid portion, without measuring that portion separately in a reported number. The pilot timing method, device models, date and sample size are not given.
  • The verified preprint, Data Cleaning and Summary and Results (pp. 8-9), excludes one of the 20 telecoil participants from the repeated-measures analysis for missing stage-condition responses, leaving 19. After Bonferroni correction, no feed rated above the balcony feed for quality and naturalness; the stage versus no-feed difference was not significant.
  • The verified preprint’s Data Cleaning and Summary (page 8) excludes one telecoil participant with no valid Stage responses from the repeated-measures analysis, leaving 19 of the 20 telecoil participants. Results (page 9) report that only the No Feed versus House differences remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons; the separate eight-person own-device group was a descriptive baseline.
  • Discussion (page 12) offers greater captured reverberation in the balcony-microphone feed as one possible explanation for its lower ratings, alongside uncorrected microphone-path delay. Neither mechanism was isolated experimentally.

Limits

One concert, one hall and one study hearing-aid model; ratings showed ceiling effects that limited the statistics; orchestral music only. Method and latency details come from the verified 23-page OSF preprint, read alongside the published abstract; the full journal article was not read. The preprint was downloaded and verified against the public OSF file hash on 13 October 2026.

Read the original

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39868727

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Cite this source

McWeeny S, Trainor LJ, Armstrong S, Bosnyak D, Tawfik H, Bruce IC. Evaluating a hearing loop implementation for live orchestral music. Ear and Hearing 46(3):808-816. 27 January 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39868727/ (accessed 13 October 2026).

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