I have a hearing impaired client asking for wireless earbuds or headphones that can be fed by Dolby Digital encoded throughout of HDMI (only) sources fed through a Denon AVR-X4200. Given that the HDMI ins are normally not avaialable on Zone 2 outs unless duplicately fed by Toslink or analog (not possible to add in this case), I'm struggling with how to make this work. I also haven't had luck finding a wireless headphone rig that can accept DD.

Can anyone share solutions that have worked for this scenario?

TIA

Look into the headphones for hearing impaired people from vendors who sell to the Educational and House of Worship chain. These take an analog audio signal and transmit it over RF to a small receiver that has a headphone jack.

HDMI audio de embedder on the output?

Good luck with the surround decoding

He's asking for something very specific but it might not be possible to do exactly as he states it. Does he know better than you how to deliver multichannel audio to two earbuds, such that he should be specifying anything? I don't think so.

Dolby Digital, like DTS (and analog and even FM), is a means of getting audio from one place to another. All audio has to be converted to analog at some point before it gets sprayed into his earholes so that his eardrums can respond.

If I were building wireless earbuds, I would be damn sure I could take an analog input way before I would spend a cent on a model that would take digital inputs. Everyone can use two channels of analog audio for headphones, but not everyone has Dolby Digital, so such a product would not sell as well as an analog-only product. That might be why you're having trouble finding them.

Fred's comment about surround is on the mark: there are two earbuds. They go in the ear. Therefore, the physical placement of sound sources around the listener is not possible.

What IS possible, though, is for his brain to interpret the two channels the way we normally interpret sounds coming into our ears, and determine where the sounds seem to come from by their phase and volume relationships.

Put the HDMI output of the Denon through an audio extractor and feed that to the headphones. (You might need to add a small preamp if they won't play loudly enough.) The volume control on his Denon won't control the volume of his headphones, but that's just how it is.


One thing to be cautious of with hearing-impaired clients: you know that idea floating around that people who lose one sense seem to be better with other senses? It's true. The brain's abilities are very flexible, and if sounds from, say, his right ear are highly attenuated, his brain won't use a lot of horsepower trying to interpret what that ear hears unless he makes a point to feed sound to it. That is, it's possible for a person with hearing loss to also lose the ability to localize sound, or even to understand speech in that ear! You should read some on "brain plasticity."

The specification from the client was, "I need some way to hear my TV better that doesn't blow out my wife and kids sitting alongside me also watching/listening [to a 5.1 surround system]." The technical reality is that there's not a [cost effective] way to add duplicative analog or PCM-Toslink feeds from remotely-located source equipment to this Denon AVR, all of which output Dolby Digital encoded audio to the AVR via HDMI.

As such, I need a device to take a switched, muxed output of the AVR and convert or transcode it into some format that can be fed to a set of wireless headphones. I asked about toslink/DD inputs specifically because SONY once made a set of wireless cans with DD-capable Toslink in, but they were long ago discontinued.

As suggested by Fred Harding, an HDMI Audio De-embedder on the AVR's Zone 2 HDMI output feeding a set of wireless cans with stereo inputs may be the best solution.

Oh, I see. Your initial post made it sound like he was giving component specs. Got it. And this is NOT a rare problem. We do need a go-to solution.


I'm tempted to say more info is needed, but... it also looked like the AVR was somewhere in the neighborhood of the TV. You have an added issue, which is the range of the wireless headphones. If your AVR is a hundred feet away....

Can the receiver send audio to the AVR amps while also sending it to the TV via the HDMI signal? If so, then an audio extractor near the TV, feeding a wireless headphone, might be the answer. I'm having some issues with exactly that right now. It looks like I haven't properly controlled the format of the audio part of the HDMI signal, so I sometimes get audio. Sometimes get silence.


That would be the audio on the HDMI output

That's the audio extractor.



I like it even better on the main HDMI output, but mostly because that would put it right next to the TV without running any added cabling.

I recently was asked to quote some headphones for an "Hdmi only" system. I tested the Yamaha avr and Sony 4k TV. I set the AVR to send audio to the TV on the Hdmi monitor out. Then I turned the TV speakers on, and I had sound on every source. So I can just use the headphone output on the TV.

One thing I did not try was a Blu-ray with trueHD or dtshd track and see how it behaved.

Not sure how the denon handles that. I have seen some AVRs that will send audio to the TV, but it disabled audio at the AVR. It was one or the other. The Yamaha I tried it on was an rxv481 I believe. I also tested this with an integra dhc 40.2 and Sony 4k TV.

That's what I'm concerned about.

HDMI output 2 could perhaps be used, but then we're dealing with the range limit of the headphones.

@Mogul

If the AVR has pre-amp outs you can use an analog 6/8ch mixer to do a custom down mix and then feed the output to a wireless headphone transmitter or Bluetooth headphone transmitter. This takes care of the customers needs and makes any input on the AVR available via the mixed output.

If the customer just has issues with the dialog you can use this set up with open back headphones. You can adjust the center dialog independent of the AVR while still letting the surrounds in naturally through the open back headphones.

[Link: amazon.com]

I wonder if you could use the tv to decode the signal. Tv Ears will accept a digital input from the tv. I'm not sure if the Denon will pass the audio thru or not?

As with all ideas of genius, this looks so simple and obvious now that someone has thought of it! Yeah, I'll bet he's not having problems hearing that dog back over his left shoulder, or the occasional cricket all by itself off to the side. This actually argues for center channel only, or whatever gives him the least rear channel info!

Good alternate ideas, guys! Thanks for the feedback [in the figurative sense].