Can't Get Bluetooth to Work on My Desktop PC

In My Humble Opinion
41

Sooooo… I am very sorry, I didn’t know this (just learned it). You were right! Hearing aids actually DO use a proprietary connection to talk to phones. It’s still technically part of Bluetooth LE (low-energy), but Apple and Google made proprietary extensions to standard Bluetooth: For Apple, it’s part of their MFi (“Made for iPhone”) program and for Google it’s ASHA. Neither one will work with a Windows PC :frowning: Some recent Macs do support MFi, but that doesn’t help you here.

So you’ve correctly identified your options:

  1. You can use a device like the Oticon ConnectClip, which handles the connection between itself and your hearing aid, and then relays that to your Windows PC via traditional Bluetooth (which is what your USB dongle does). Seems to be $200+ though :frowning:

  2. Or, yes, you can try to find a way to stream audio from your PC to your phone and do it that way.

  3. There is a third way, but it’s risky: Some versions of Windows support Bluetooth LE audio streaming to some hearing aids, which is a cheaper way to do this than the official ConnectClip (but it’s one-way, only for listening for computer audio and not talking to it). But it’s not clear to me if your Oticon Real (or any other model, except maybe the newest Intent) supports this… their website is indeed terrible (and seemingly going through some updates, so a lot of the Google results are wrong right now). You’d also need a compatible special kind of Bluetooth dongle, which I don’t think the TP-Link one is… it’d be something like this Avantree one or this other one. But that’s a lot of “maybes” for something that might not work at all.

None of these are great options. Hopefully if you find an app that works for streaming audio to your phone via Windows directly… that would probably be the cheapest :frowning:

I had no idea the hearing aid Bluetooth situation was so complicated :frowning: Sorry, OP!

42

That quite all right. I really apprciate your help. Do you suppose something like AudioShare (linked above) might work? It’s suppose to route audio from PC to phone. The sourceforge page says:

Audio Share can share Windows/Linux computer’s audio to Android phone over network, so your phone becomes the speaker of computer.

But I haven’t found much more info on it. I suppose even if it DID successfully port my PC’s audio to my phone that doesn’t necessarily mean that my phone-controlled hearing aids would then play back that audio. But they do already playback phone calls, music, YouTube videos, etc.

43

Yeah, exactly. I can see it going both ways (working or not)…

Worth a try, since it’s free anyway? I think Audio Share would have better luck than the AudioPlaybackConnector, because AudioShare uses WiFi to stream the audio to your phone and doesn’t touch Bluetooth at all, so hopefully the phone will just keep doing its normal thing to your hearing aids. But try them both if that one doesn’t work…

If that still doesn’t work and you do end up having to spend more money… one more alternative you could consider, for a similar price as the ConnectClip, is to just buy some Airpod Pros 2. You do need access to an iDevice (like from a friend) to set up the hearing aid feature for the first time, but then you can pair them normally to any Android or PC to use as normal Bluetooth headphones. The music streaming quality might be better than your hearing aids (while still being tuned to your individual hearing profile) if you don’t have very severe hearing loss. And it would be a lot easier to use with any other Bluetooth source. Just a thought…

But hopefully the audio sharing will work for ya.