Albuquerque Little Theater Patrons Get Looped

December 2009

Editor: The grassroots groundswell for looping public facilities in the US continues to grow. This press release from the folks at Loop New Mexico announces a new loop at the Albuquerque Little Theater. For more information on Loop New Mexico, please point your browser to www.HLAAbq.com/LoopNM.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unless they wear hearing aids with telecoils, patrons attending performances at the Albuquerque Little Theater (ALT) may not realize that they are looped. Looped not in the vernacular but in actuality - they're surrounded with a discreetly hidden hearing loop that makes the performances more accessible to the hard of hearing. Josh Bien, Assistant Technical Director at the ALT, contacted Steve Frazier with Loop New Mexico, an initiative of the Hearing Loss Association of Albuquerque, who put him in touch with radio engineering consultant Mike Langner. Langner engineered and then very generously donated a loop system to the theater and the rest, as they say, is history.

Hard of hearing theater goers to the ALT's current production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas have had the option of hearing the production using the telecoils in their hearings aids. One recent ALT patron remarked that he could understand only about fifteen percent of the words in the musical using just the mics on his hearing aids but about ninety-five percent using his telecoils and the hearing loop.

This loop system replaces an infra red assistive listening system in the theater that malfunctioned several years ago and has not been useable since. Henry Avery, Executive Director of the ALT said, " We're thrilled that ALT is once again able to serve a valuable part of the Albuquerque community thanks to Stephen Frazier's tireless efforts to educate us on the system and Mike Langner's incredible donation."

A hearing loop is a thin strand of insulated wire that surrounds an area and creates a magnetic field that can transmit sound being carried through that wire from a PA system. The voices of performers are received by microphones, passed through an amplifier into the looped wire and then picked up by small copper coils found in most hearing aids that are called telecoils or, sometimes, t-coils. The majority of hearing aids have telecoils that can be used in place of the microphones in the instruments to receive sound from a telephone ear piece or a variety of loop devices adaptable to cell phone use, TV viewing, in church sanctuaries and other settings and, in settings like the ALT, negate the need to borrow and wear a headset to access an assistive listening system.

The telecoils are activated by turning on a t-switch (sometimes called the telephone switch) which also, in most cases, turns off the device's built in microphones. The result is that pretty much the only sound the user hears is that being transmitted by the public address systems's microphones with other extraneous sounds such as others rustling papers, coughing or talking during a performance are nearly eliminated as is reverberation in the hall. The hearing aids also correct the sound from the loop to correspond to that individual's particular hearing loss or curve, providing the most amplification to those tones the wearer has the most difficulty hearing.

For those who don't have telecoils in their hearing aids or cochlear implant (or have a hearing loss but no hearing aids), headsets can be borrowed from the ALT and worn that will pick up the magnetic signal just as infra red headsets can be borrowed in most movie theaters. A supply of these receiving units/headsets has been generously donated to the ALT by the Albuquerque based nonprofit assistive devices retailer ATS Resources.

Loop New Mexico, partnering with the ATS Resources and with the involvement of many members of the Hearing Loss Association of Albuquerque, has played a major role in the looping of nearly three dozen churches not only in Albuquerque but in Santa Fe, Las Cruces and other communities. Other venues have also installed loops or, in the case of UNM's Popejoy Hall and the Journal Theater at the Hispanic Cultural Center, have supplement their existing infra red or FM assistive listening systems with neck loops that transform that system's signal into a magnetic signal that can be accessed using the telecoils in hearing aids rather than a borrowed headset.