Jacoti Lola® deployed at Symphony Space

On May 21, 2017, 20 iPod Touches equipped with Jacoti Lola® were deployed at a Sign And Sing concert during the New York Opera Fest at Symphony Space, New York. Sign and Sing is a nonprofit performance program that merges a classical opera/aria recital with staged American Sign Language (ASL) and captions. Seven devices were checked out, mostly by people who had mild to no hearing loss. Users were impressed with the sound quality of the Jacoti Lola® system.

SIGN & SING Presents 2nd Annual Concert at Symphony Space for NY Opera Fest

20 iPod Touches were deployed in Listener mode, 1 iPad Mini in Sender mode was hooked to the house sound mixer, plus 2 wireless access points were set up in order to transmit the sender signal to the Jacoti Lola® listeners.

Set up was uneventful and straightforward and the deployment easily covered both the entire theatre and the outside lobby. The sound quality was rated as excellent or good by the majority of the assistants who tried Jacoti Lola® (40% excellent, 40% good). It is also remarkable how testers without hearing loss declared on the survey at the end of the concert that their ability to hear the music was improved and the sound of voices became more intimate than without hearing assistance.

Marty Roller, the Head Projectionist and Digital Media Presentation Expert of Symphony Space, was deeply impressed with Jacoti Lola® and said it was the best-sounding Assistive Listening System he’d ever heard.

Still, several times the signal stuttered and the signal was occasionally weak and affected the enjoyability of the concert.

From this experiment, we analysed how the placement of routers could cause the stutter effect and started to investigate how to minimise it in large venues such as Symphony Space.