The Listen Everywhere system by Listen Technologies is designed to use the end user’s own smartphone or tablet as the receiver.
In every congregation there are people with hearing challenges, whether it be from age-related hearing loss to environmental hearing damage. This can make attending a worship service a frustrating experience, making full engagement (or ANY engagement) extremely difficult. For those people, there are a variety of technologies available from which a church can choose to provide hearing assistance.
While many systems use a specific receiver that the user would need to pick up from a location in your church to use the assisted listening system, the Listen Everywhere system by Listen Technologies is designed to use the user’s own smart phone or tablet as the receiver. Other than initially needing some directions on how to connect their phone with the system and access the audio feed, the user needs nothing from the church in order to use it. It operates over WiFi, and the user would bring their own ear buds or headphones with them.
This certainly adds a level of convenience to the system, eliminates any capacity issues (as you aren’t limited to whatever number of receivers you could afford to purchase), eliminates issues with users accidentally leaving with the receivers, and also provides some interesting features that a church might find useful. In this review, we’re taking a look at the LW-100P-02, a two-channel system. Other configurations available are 4-channel, 8-channel, 12-channel and 16-channel servers.
Overview
The Listen Everywhere system has one component: the streaming audio server box, which is about the size of a typical single-channel wireless mic receiver. The box contains the audio streaming encoder, an Ethernet interface, and audio server. It does NOT contain the WiFi transceiver. Instead, you connect the server through its gigabit Ethernet port to a commercial-grade WiFi system of your choice. The documentation lays out the requirements of the WiFi system in good detail; this is critical to read before purchasing to know what you will need to set the system up successfully.
In addition to the Ethernet port, the box has two stereo unbalanced audio inputs and two mono balanced audio inputs. By default, the system is setup for a single channel stereo broadcast. You do have the option of setting the system up as a two-channel system, where left and right are summed together into a mono signal for encoding. .
And that’s it for connectors—very simple to physically set up.
For the listener, they need to install the Listen Everywhere app on their smart device, and connect to the same WiFi network that the Listen Everywhere server is plugged into. On launch, the app will identify a Listen Everywhere server on the network and automatically connect to it once found. In theory the system supports up to 1,000 users, however, the actual number of effective connected users will more likely depend on the WiFi setup you use with the system.
On launch, the app will identify a Listen Everywhere server on the network and automatically connect to it once found.
The server simply works out of the box and streams audio on your WiFi network. For full app customizations and configuration, you have the option to put your Listen Everywhere system on an Internet-accessible network and set up a Listen Everywhere cloud account. Oddly, you have to email customer support to set up an account, because there’s no option for setting it up yourself online. However, I literally heard back within minutes of contacting them to get my account set up. The instructions included with the device for setting up the account were not entirely accurate. They said you needed to provide the serial number of the system, which I sent. However, what they actually need is a different number from the label on the receiver, and also the specific model number. Once I replied back with that information, my account was set up and I was ready to go. Listen Technologies states that they are working on a self-registration system, which will be a nice improvement. And as stated, the system will work out-of-the-box without needing this account.
In addition to providing the streaming audio channels, the system can also be set up to deliver a variety of advertisements. One is a welcome “ad” that plays when it connects to the server; you can also create offer “ads” that get presented through the app in a non-obnoxious way. While traditional advertising isn’t usually a goal of a church’s assisted listening device, I did find it could be interesting to use. For example, I created a “Welcome to First Baptist Church” five-second video that plays as the Welcome “ad” and displays a logo with a little motion added. And I created an offer “Ad” that invites the user to come to the welcome desk after service for more information about the church. However, given the low percentage of people who would likely use the system each week, these features aren’t that important for promotional efforts in a church situation—but kind of fun to play with. These options are set up by logging into the cloud account via a web browser for that server.
Also through the cloud account you configure your audio channel names; add icon images to your channels; specify whether you want two mono channels or one stereo channel; and other IT/QoS (Quality of Service) options.
Once you’ve configured your server, it shouldn’t need to be on the Internet any longer.
Let’s talk about the WiFi now. The system does rely on a quality commercial-grade WiFi router, which is made clear in the details of the documentation. It also makes clear that the system will not work well on consumer-grade WiFi routers. To this I can attest. I have a Netgear R7000 router, which when purchased a few years ago was considered amongst the cream of the crop for consumer routers. And, unless I was within a few feet of the router, I had audio dropouts with my iPhone 6. Given that the listeners will be using this system in the same room as the live event, achieving as low an audio latency as possible in the system is a priority, and my router was not up to the task with my iPhone 6. Fortunately, Listen Technologies also provided me with a fully configured demo system containing a router that meets their specs, and performance was much improved with this system.
However, I did find that my home router did work OK when I used the Listen Everywhere app on my Samsung Tablet and my wife’s older Samsung Note phone. My wife’s iPhone XR worked better than my iPhone 6, but still had more range and dropout issues than the two Android devices I used. And it’s important to reiterate that my home Wi-Fi router does not meet the stated requirements of the system, so that it worked at all is a plus, not a minus.
Experience
Setting up the system was pretty easy, especially if you don’t care about custom images and ads. One annoying thing, though, is that if you don’t provide a custom Welcome ad, the default Welcome ad will always play, which is an ad for the Listen Everywhere system. This is obnoxious. Listen Everywhere does have a one-second blank ad that you can download and set up on your system. It would be nice if they simply had a configuration option that says, “No Welcome Ad.” It seems silly to have to upload a blank ad to get rid of it. Or at least used an ad that simply said, “Welcome to the Listen Everywhere system”, instead of trying to sell your hard-of-hearing congregation on purchasing a system. But like I said, there are easy options for dealing with it.
Using the demo system, it became pretty apparent that line-of-sight from the WiFi router to the end users can be critical for good performance. If, for example, a sheetrock wall is between you and the WiFi router, the audio may start breaking up. Even the plastic Pelican Case that the demo system was built into caused range interference when used with my iPhone 6. When I pulled the WiFi router out of the case, however, I found I could get as far as ~100 feet from the WiFi router and still get a signal with few dropouts. This was all using my iPhone 6 as the test device. However, the two Samsung smart devices I tried worked much better even with my home router, and the iPhone XR I tested with fell somewhere in between the iPhone 6 and Android devices in performance. So, “your results will vary” depending on the device each listener uses.
I could easily see a multi-cultural church using one channel for their main service audio and adding a second language VO translation on the second channel.
The latency of the system was quite low, which is impressive for streaming. There is a small delay (a fraction of a second), which is understandable especially in a wireless networking environment. Especially for the target user—someone with hearing disabilities or who is using it for language translation—I do not feel that the little bit of latency will be an issue at all.
Having two channels available is a nice feature. I could easily see a multi-cultural church using one channel for their main service audio and adding a second language VO translation on the second channel. With one of the larger systems, you could add several different language translations as options.
One thing I ran into is that when an iPhone’s screen locked and turned off, audio breakup and drop-outs were significant. Listen Technologies technical support says that when the phone locks, the app is sent into background mode, and this prevents it from being able to keep up with the audio stream without dropouts. The product manager for Listen Everywhere did add that this should be a rare occurrence, and that the system may not have been optimized for the iOS devices. This did not appear to be an issue with Android, however. So, your iOS users may need to keep their smart device awake for the duration of the service for this to be an affective assisted listening device. This does not happen automatically—my phone still went to sleep if untouched in its normal amount of time. It would be great if they could find a work-around to this issue.
In these times of COVID-19 and social distancing, Listen Technologies comments that their Listen Everywhere system is being used for churches conducting “Drive-In Church” services in their parking lots.
Summary
In general, I really like the concept of the Listen Everywhere system. In these times of COVID-19 and social distancing, Listen Technologies comments that their Listen Everywhere system is being used for churches conducting “Drive-In Church” services in their parking lots. Another great example of how technology is keeping church services happening while honoring the authorities guidelines to slow the spread of the virus. God Can Provide—even through WiFi!
Performance will depend SIGNIFICANTLY upon the WiFi router and the smart device you use with it. And therefore, it’s critical to involve your IT team prior to purchase to see what you need to do to ensure a proper WiFi system is set up for success with the Listen Everywhere system. I suspect that an ideal situation would be to install a dedicated router, along with enterprise-grade WiFi access points that are be centrally located. This would provide consistent coverage to each user of the system and reduce the performance differences between listening device types.
At the MSRP of $967, this can be a very flexible and cost-effective solution to providing assisted listening services or language translation for your congregation.
