Can you hear me now?

Or rather, can you hear the TV now? I have a customer with hearing loss and needs to turn up the volume in order to hear dialog through the built-in speakers on the TV. Unfortunately the volume is then too loud for his wife. The underlying problem is that most TV speakers are poorly made and dialog gets lost in the background music and sound effects. Many people have surround sound audio systems or sound bars to replace TV speakers. With a surround sound system, you can 'tune' the speakers to provide the best sound for the room. Part of the tuning is to turn up the volume of the center speaker which is where the dialog comes out. Many sound bars have similar ways to enhance dialog and some, such as Zvox, are designed specifically for that purpose. Zvox sound bars are also are designed for use with Bluetooth enabled hearing aids. A while back I helped a customer set up his Zvox sound bar and pair his hearing aids.

The current customer I was helping had Bluetooth enabled headphones and wanted to know if I could connect them to his Samsung TV so that his wife could listen to the TV speakers and he could raise the volume in his headphones to his liking. I was able to connect the headphones, but unfortunately, once the headphones were enabled, the sound no longer played through the speakers. It was 'one or the other'. This would not work. I told him about my other customer's Zvox sound bar and said that I would try to find a lower cost sound bar for him.

Well, I could find only one sound bar for less than $100 that might work for him, but it was from an unfamiliar brand and reviews were not encouraging. I felt there had to be another way, so I searched in the Samsung TV e-Manual, but could find nothing relevant under Sound Settings. I searched the Internet for a workaround and lo and behold, I came across several posts in the Samsung user forums indicating that you need to go to the 'Accessibility' menu and enable "Multi-output Audio". Once I enabled that on my customer's TV the sound came through on the Bluetooth headset and the TV speakers at the same time. Success!

The TV volume works independently from the Bluetooth headset volume. If the TV volume is raised the volume in the headset is not raised at the same time. Now the wife can set a comfortable volume on the TV and her husband can adjust the headset volume to whatever level compensates for his hearing loss.

I did some additional searching and found a very good article on the Australian Samsung support website that describes step-by-step how to do this: Multi-output audio on Samsung TVs.

I tried looking for the same article on the U.S. support website and could not find one. However, I did find an additional article that describes an 'accessibility shortcut'. Look in the first section under "Use the Accessibility Shortcuts" at this webpage: Turn on captions and other accessibility settings for your Samsung TV

That's if for now; thanks for reading. I hope I helped someone else find this rather simple solution to ending 'TV volume wars'.

Stay safe; be well.

Phil