Having trouble hearing your favorite shows or your teacher at the front of the class? A device the size of a little finger, the HeartLink, can do you a great service by relaying sound via Bluetooth. With, let’s say, minimal quality and some somewhat confusing commands.
WE love
In its simplest use, the HeartLink is a small rechargeable Bluetooth microphone, with a battery life of 6 hours or 120 hours on standby, which is placed near a sound source. This will be, for example, a television, a speaker in a room, any interlocutor within 10 meters. We turn on the HeartLink, pair it via Bluetooth with headphones (not supplied) and we then hear, transmitted and amplified, the sound source.
You can listen to TV without having to turn up the volume until the neighbors and the rest of the family scream, or hear your teacher whispering on the other side of the classroom. This is a device designed for people with varying degrees of hearing loss, offered at an affordable price.
In our tests, the Bluetooth connection proved easy to make and stable. Every sound in the room, from the television to footsteps on the floor, was amplified until it reached our ears clearly. A pin on the back of the HeartLink allows you to hang it. For the exercise, Jabees also sent us bone conduction headphones, an absolutely astonishing technology where the sound resonates in the bones of your skull rather than directly in your ears.
Plugs are added to these headphones so as not to hear sound sources twice. Not having significant hearing loss, we used them but they did not attenuate the live sound sufficiently. On the other hand, with Sony headphones equipped with the ambient noise cancellation function, the result was satisfactory.
Even though the TV was at a very low level, almost inaudible live, we were able to hear the dialogue and sounds of the broadcasts. The sound quality was decent, nothing more. We will come back to this but the HeartLink is clearly not a device for everyone.
This little microphone has other advantages. First of all, it has an auxiliary input, which allows it to be plugged directly into the RCA output of a device. This is the best solution to get better sound without the interference of all surrounding noise. You can finally make it a receiver-transmitter by plugging headphones with a microphone into this auxiliary input.
We tested it with a partner, this system is functional although its usefulness does not seem obvious to us. Two people, one with their headphones connected in wired mode and the other in Bluetooth, can talk to each other up to 10 meters away. Both pairs of headphones must of course have a built-in microphone.
We like less
The sound transmitted by this microphone really cannot be described as high fidelity and that is not its goal. We found it rather “canny” and it tended to amplify all the noises in the environment, from the television to the music played by our young people in their room.
Connecting via RCA to the television corrects this problem, but this audio output is rare in today’s models.
The two switches on the HeartLink, one for power and the other to switch from the internal mic to an external source, are similar. Most of the time, we turned off the device wanting to change sources. In short, confusing.
As there is no app associated with the HeartLink, which can be an advantage for ease of use, we do not know the status of its charge or its connection. You have to rely on LEDs that flash in different colors to know if it is in pairing mode, if its battery is low or if it is retransmitting from its internal microphone.
One buys ?
The HeartLink can obviously be very useful in everyday life who would like a simple system to compensate for hearing loss. We place it near the sound source, turn it on, put on the headphones and that’s it.
We can doubt its usefulness if the television already allows you to connect Bluetooth headphones while broadcasting on its own speakers. Note that applications for iPhone and Android already do what the HeartLink offers, by broadcasting on headphones what the phone hears.