Can a Person Who Does Not Have Hearing Aids Hear Via a Room Loop?

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D. A man asked,

Can a hard of hearing person who does not wear hearing aids benefit from a room loop system such as the Contacta HLD3?

The short answer is “Yes”. You see, there are actually two ways you can benefit from a loop system. Obviously, the most common way is to wear hearing aids that have t-coils in them. To listen to a loop system, you just simply switch your hearing aids to t-coil mode. That’s it. However, if you have a hearing loss and don’t have hearing aids, you can still hear wonderfully well via a loop system. In this case, you’d need to get a loop receiver and then wear headphones or earbuds plugged into the loop receiver. For example, I have looped my home, but typically (since I seldom wear my hearing aids) I use one of my several loop receivers and earbuds rather than wearing my hearing aids with t-coils when I’m watching TV. This is my choice. Both ways work very well for me. Two of the best loop receivers I’ve tried are the ET-LR and the RX-20.