Oticon Connectline TV

The Streamer – The Problem – The Solution

The Streamer
If you rely on hearing aids, then a TV streamer is highly recommended. You will hear the TV more clearly. One use is to hear the TV while it is muted for everybody else in the room. You can, if you want, have just a little bit of sound coming from the streamer to add just a bit of extra clarity to the spoken voices .

The Oticon streamer is connected by an optical cable, so you get full Dolby sound. It is fantastic stereo sound quality.

The Problem
My streamer stopped working. I hadn’t changed anything, it just stopped sending a signal to my aids. The blue lights were on the box telling me all should be working. I did all the obvious things. I messed about with the app on my phone. I restarted the streamer box by switching off and on again. I reset the streamer by holding down the red button on the back, then doing the Bluetooth re-pair of the hearing aids with the streamer. I tried changing the optic cable. Another thing to try is to reboot the TV if it’s a smart TV. I tried all of those things but nothing worked.

The Solution
I was able to try another streamer which narrowed things down. The TV was at fault. I have a Sony Android TV and had been about to activate the guarantee.

Something else happened with the TV. I was unable to get the Netflix app to load. An instruction appeared on the screen that I should unplug the TV, wait for 30 seconds, then plug it back in. Being a bit of a computer geek I remembered that unplugging and waiting is more than a simple reboot. It gives time for all residual memory to clear. I figured that the TV must have had a software update without me knowing. Sure enough, after the unplugging, the waiting, and plugging in again the TV worked – and so did the streamer. At last! The TV software update must have interfered with the optical out signal.