No sound when using hearing aid dongle "Widex SoundConnect"

[wilberforcep]

Hi there,
I am a hearing aid user and am trying to use a USB bluetooth dongle (called Widex SoundConnect) to connect my Widex hearing aids to my computer so that sound is transmitted to them directly.

Sound works fine when through the monitor speakers, but the hearing aid sound settings don’t, even though they are shown in a couple of entries in the system settings (see attached screen grab). I have tried re-pairing my hearing aids to the dongle, and tried the two relevant entries in the desktop sound settings.

I contacted Widex, and they seem to think that it is due to no suitable driver being available for the dongle on Linux. Does anyone know if there is anything I can try to get the sound to work?

I am using Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS with the GNOME desktop.

Any suggestions gratefully received,
Will

[him610]

Don’t know if I can help or not. What does blueman-manager show?

[wilberforcep]

The bluetooth on the motherboard is turned off in the settings, as the dongle is designed to be plug and play (when I use it on Windows, for example, the PC bluetooth is off and the dongle ‘just works’). I think it’s very common for computer bluetooth not to work with hearing aids (probably because they use things like ASHA - Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids), which is why the dongle is required. The hearing aids do work natively with smartphones, however.

The discussion here might be relevant? https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/asha-for-linux-systems/88522/30

Is Pipewire sound server (1.4.0 version) available for Ubuntu? I’m fairly new to Linux and Ubuntu, so I’m not entirely sure if installing things from source is a great idea (e.g. from https://pipewire.org/)

[rubi1200]

Have you tried booting without the dongle plugged in, logging in to the desktop first, and then plugging in and checking whether it appears as a new audio output device under Settings >> Sound?

Any change?

Open a terminal and post the output from this command once the dongle is plugged in:
lsusb

Post the output here, highlight, and then Ctrl+E to add code tags.

[wilberforcep]

Thanks for the suggestion.

It turns out, something to do with the settings on the hearing aids. Basically, I opened the smartphone app that controls the hearing aids, reset all the media sound settings in that and suddenly SOUND! It seemed to be automatically muted on first use (very helpful).

Thanks for all your help @him610 and @rubi1200, and apologies for the completely unrelated to Ubuntu question!

Will