Creative Connectivity

The UK ponders Proportional Representation

On Friday 30^th January we are finally going to see a debate in Parliament about changing the UK’s “first-past-the-post” voting scheme, which will probably suggest some form of proportional representation, more commonly known as PR.

Two years ago, when it was looking pretty certain that the Conservatives would lose the 2024 election, I wrote an article suggesting that Rishi Sunak should devote his final term to bringing in Proportional Representation. If he had, we might have a very different Government to the one we have today. In 2024, Labour won the election, gaining 411 seats with 33.7% of the votes, The Tories slipped to 23.7% of the total votes, which gave them only 121 MPs. One reason for their poor performance was that the right wing vote split between them and Reform, with Reform picking up 9 seats for 14.3% of the vote. Had Rishi gone for Proportional Representation, and then found a way of working with Reform, their combined 38.0% of the vote would have given them 247 seats, compared to 219 for Labour.

Welcome to the year of PC landfill

Now that we’re into 2025, Microsoft is ramping up its reminders that we only have nine months of Windows 10 support left, so now’s the time to go out and buy a shiny new Windows 11 PC. The implication is that after 14^th October, when security updates for Windows 10 stop happening, every hacker around the world will be stealing your data, turning this into the new Y2K disaster. (For younger readers, Y2K was the belief that computers would stop working on Jan 1^st, 2000, sending the world back to the stone age.)

So, we all need to plan for the W10 Armageddon, whether you’re a PC owner, a hacker, or just the manager of the local landfill tip.

Hearing Aid Compatibility is coming for all US Phones

At the end of November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US issued a mandate that all mobile phones sold in the US will soon need to be able to work with hearing aids. It’s a massive advance for hearing loss advocates and hearing aid manufacturers, who have been working towards this goal for more than a decade. (The full mandate is available on the FCC site.)

The UK’s Heat Pump Strategy is in DEEP Trouble

Here in the UK, the Government is trying to persuade householders to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps. It’s a key part of their net zero strategy, tackling the 13% of CO2 emissions that are attributable to gas-based home heating. The “one size fits all” message is “Heat Pumps Good, Gas Boilers Bad”. The Government has set a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps each year by 2028, rising to 1.6 million annually by 2028. To help achieve this, they have introduced a Boiler Upgrade subsidy, but the latest Government statistics show that only 16,959 applicants have replaced an existing gas boiler with a heat pump since the scheme began in May 2022, which is a little bit short of the 1.4 million target for that period

These targets were set without much understanding of the difficulty or cost of retrofitting heat pumps. Much of Britain’s housing is old and not very suitable for conversion. Having set the policy, the Government initiated a major study in 2019 called DEEP – the Demonstration of Energy Efficient Potential, to provide evidence to justify it. DEEP’s remit was to quantify the real effects, costs and returns of upgrading the structure of older houses. They’ve just published the results, which basically says it’s not economic for these older properties. It suggests that the payback time for heat pumps in older homes, along with the insulation upgrade to make them suitable is “generally over 100 years”. So, where does that leave the plan?

Auracast™ Audio. Better than the original?

If you’ve not heard of Auracast™, it’s time to find out about it. It’s part of the new Bluetooth Low Energy Audio specifications which support broadcast audio. What that means is that it allows individuals and places to share an audio stream, so that multiple people can listen to the same thing.

Auracast builds on the telecoil experience, which has been part of hearing aids for many years, but supports a new codec, called LC3. This can be used to generate high quality audio with such a low latency that the Bluetooth stream can reach your ears at the same time as the ambient stream. Last week, Auracast had its first major public demonstration in the US at a performance of Richard Einhorn’s “Voice of Light” in the Lincoln Centre in New York. A number of users, both with and without hearing loss were able to hear how it works. I was one of the lucky few to try it. Talking to others after the performance, it was obvious that not only did it work exceedingly well, but the audio quality was so good that we were starting to have some fundamental questions about how live music is recorded. Andrew Bellavia has already written about the devices which were used. I was fascinated with the resulting experience.

Why can’t the Audio Industry be more inventive?

The audio industry is constantly telling us how great its products are. Their latest wheeze is to push the message that we all need even higher quality. That’s despite the fact that nobody can hear the difference. Unfortunately, the major players so believe their own PR that over the last century they’ve largely missed the fact that there’s more to the listening experience than just extending frequency response. On the few occasions we’ve seen real innovation in audio, it’s almost always come from outside the established audio industry. So how do we put innovation back into audio?