The sanctuary at Grace Lutheran Church in Woodstock, Illinois, is a good space for the organ. Many of those spaces have a reverberation, either by chance or design, that makes the music come alive, says Andrew Bellavia, a member of the congregation. 

“However, what’s good for music isn’t good for the spoken word,” he says. “Voices, especially higher-pitched ones, can become harder to comprehend without straining. Hence our need for assistive listening despite having a good sound system.”

For years, the church answered that problem with an FM system and a set of handheld receivers. So, by the time Bellavia and AV team leader Bill Nattress went looking for a replacement, the old system was suffering from static and interference. What Nattress eventually mounted in the sanctuary was a small white box, about the size of a Wi-Fi hub, that broadcasts the church's sound system over Bluetooth to anyone in range with a compatible hearing aid, earbud, or receiver.

That box runs Auracast, the Bluetooth LE Audio broadcast standard AVIXA explained in "What Is Auracast?" 

What's new is the field record. Over the past year, Auracast has gone into service desks at the Kitchener Public Library in Ontario, a second Grace Lutheran in Albuquerque, a hearing clinic's waiting rooms, and at much larger scale, more than 200 cinema screens in the UK and Ireland. The small rooms are where the change is easiest to see, because there, the assistive listening device is increasingly the one the listener walked in wearing.

One established assistive-listening option is a hearing loop, which uses a cable to transmit sound magnetically to the telecoil in a compatible hearing aid. It works well, but in an existing building with an intact floor it is expensive to install. Especially for a place like Grace Lutheran.

The church considered a loop, but cost proved a major barrier. FM and infrared systems generally require a separate receiver, while Wi-Fi systems can deliver audio through an app on the listener’s smartphone.

So, the church bought an Auri system from Ampetronic and Listen Technologies, with one transmitter, eight receivers, a charging rack, earpieces, and neck loops. Bellavia and Nattress tied the transmitter into the existing sound system, networked the charging rack for configuration, and adjusted audio levels and transmitter power to cover the room within a few hours. After a trial, the church made the installation permanent and retired its FM system. It also registered the sanctuary on the Bluetooth location directory and on Google Maps, so people looking for an accessible service can find it.

In Albuquerque, the installs came from opposite ends of the trade. Grace Lutheran Church chose a Williams AV Infinium system, installed by local firm Pace Audio, and ran it alongside its existing hearing loop, Hearing Health & Technology Matters reported in July. Visitors can listen on their own compatible devices or borrow a receiver. 

Across town at Albuquerque Hearing and Balance, Mike Langner, a licensed, retired radio engineer, put MoerLabs TVHearMore transmitters in the clinic's East Side and West Side waiting rooms. The units are marketed mainly as TV streamers. But in the clinic they also let prospective hearing aid buyers hear an Auracast broadcast before they choose a device.

Kitchener Public Library went small in a different way. Canadian Hearing Services launched its Auracast-based assistive-listening offering across Canada on 1 October 2025, naming the library among its early adopters.

The library's AuraLoop counter units sit at every service point in the Central Library and at the service desk of each community branch. When staff speak into the desk microphone, the library says, patrons whose hearing aids or cochlear implants support Auracast or have a telecoil hear the conversation directly.

David Mason, who works as a strategist for inclusive experiences at the library, put the reasoning in the launch announcement. Accessibility, he said, is "central to lifelong learning and community wellbeing."

The common thread is scale. A service desk, a sanctuary, or a waiting room can often be served by a single transmitter connected to an existing audio source. A church's own AV team, a local integrator, or a retired engineer can do the work.

The biggest change is who owns the receiver. With FM or infrared, a listener has to ask for a device, wear it, and hand it back. With Auracast, anyone whose hearing aid, cochlear implant, earbuds, or headphones support the standard can tune in the way they would pick a radio station.

And that matters beyond hearing aid users too. Only about 20% of people with hearing loss use hearing aids, Bellavia noted, which is one reason the church wanted a system that worked with ordinary consumer earbuds too. He expects more people to "bring their own" over time, which will reduce the need for handheld receivers.

Sound quality has held up in early use. Juliëtte Sterkens, an audiologist with more than four decades in hearing rehabilitation and assistive listening, tested an Auri transmitter in a small Illinois church sanctuary in February 2025. 

With the lower bit-rate stream meant for hearing aids, she wrote in HearingTracker, she heard speech quality "similar to what I have experienced in well-installed hearing loops with properly adjusted telecoils." 

The signal also spilled past the walls, which has a practical upside. You can step outside the sanctuary "to comfort a fussy child and still hear," she wrote.

At Woodstock, the congregation noticed. "The system performed in an impressive way," Bellavia told Worship AVL, and another listener gave a thumbs-up during a service when the pastor mentioned it. By November 2025, Bellavia wrote, "the system is used more than our FM radio link."

For integrators, the equipment looks familiar. Williams AV's Infinium CT1 pairs a rack controller with a remote transmitter on a single CAT5 run that carries power, audio, and control. It takes Dante and AES67 audio, broadcasts two independent mono streams or one stereo stream per transmitter, and supports open or password-protected channels.

Williams specifies end-to-end latency under 40 milliseconds with its own receivers and central management of up to 150 transmitters, with an open API for control systems such as Q-Sys, Crestron, and Extron.

But one setting matters more than the rest. Every Auracast transmitter must be able to send "standard quality" audio at 16 or 24 kHz, and the Bluetooth SIG's transmitter guidance says public broadcasts should provide that stream because "some hearing aids may only receive" it.

Higher-quality 48 kHz audio is optional. The Hearing Loss Association of America tells venues to confirm their systems are configured that way.

Large venues are now applying the same building blocks at scale. Vue has installed Auri across 20 cinemas in the UK and Ireland, covering more than 200 screens and more than 28% of the chain's admissions, according to the companies. Patrons without compatible devices get Auri receivers, and the system can also carry audio description. Craig Davey, national sales manager for the UK and Ireland at Ampetronic and Listen Technologies, called it "one of the first large-scale deployments of Auracast in cinemas."

The loaner receiver has not disappeared. Woodstock still bought handheld receivers and neck loops, Albuquerque's Grace Lutheran lends receivers, and Vue keeps them for patrons. The Bluetooth SIG argues that Auracast is "fully aligned with the ADA" because the law sets performance requirements rather than naming technologies. In practice, both churches and Vue still provide hardware for people whose own devices can't connect.

Plenty of devices still can't. Canadian Hearing Services projects that half of hearing aids will be Auracast-compatible by 2026 and all of them by 2030. When Bellavia wrote in late 2025, one major hearing aid brand had compatible models and the others were coming. 

Connection isn't always simple either. Some earbuds and hearing aids need a phone to join a broadcast, while many newer Auracast hearing aids connect on their own when only one broadcast is in range.

Sterkens has argued that the hearing industry still needs a push-button way to join a broadcast, similar to switching to a telecoil. The HLAA's advice reflects the transition. Existing loops, FM, infrared, and Wi-Fi systems "will remain in use for some time," and anyone buying new hearing aids should look for a model with both Auracast and a telecoil. The Albuquerque church kept its loop, and Kitchener's desks serve both kinds of listeners.

Back in Woodstock, the sanctuary still flatters the organ more than the spoken word. The sermon now has another way in, through a church receiver for now, and Bellavia expects more and more through the hearing aids and earbuds people arrive with. Several people have already asked him about compatible models.