We have one in our church, as all churches in the UK are legally required to have I think (many other venues too). As another commenter said you can get separate receivers, so I got one at one time to help with audio quality for live streaming. The loop signal comes straight out of the church PA, so from all the microphones and so the audio quality was very good, but there was a lot of hiss. I don't know if that's always the case with induction loops. At one time it stopped working - someone cut one of the connections back to the loop amp - so I was able to test it, which is handy.
We have several people who depend on it, including the church organist, so we soon hear if it's not working. He says it's working really well.
My Grandmother says the one in her church (which is nearby) doesn't work well at all and she usually doesn't hear much. I'm not sure why. She also finds the one in our church good, so I think they must have some problem.
I would think it could be worth contacting someone in charge of the venue(s) if it's somewhere you go regularly. I would imagine it heavily depends on how the whole thing is set up though - quality of microphones etc. We have lectern mics, singer mic, lapel mics for priest and a wide field mic. on the altar, so pretty good coverage, and they all go into an auto switcher thingy. I think it would need to be set up by someone who at least half knows what they're doing.
In February 2019 I decided to try retrieving some information from some 5.25" floppy disks for the Apple 2c we had since the 80s. They had some of the first bits of programming I had done amongst other things (school work etc). Using ADTPro I think I only encountered 1 disk which I couldn't transfer - I've got 19 of them. I was then able to get information off them quite easily. So you may have more success than you think.
I notice now the internal drive of said 2c isn't working and won't boot anything (I could get ADTPro onto a spare floppy without booting anything). I did use it to do the transfer in 2019. I can boot from an external drive with some patching from the monitor program. I suspect the drive either needs heads cleaning or some realignment, but I haven't had more time to try.
Sadly I no longer have my A1200 (or A600). I have a few disks from it still.
I've backed up a load of photos (mostly raw, 5 discs so far) onto 100GB M-discs. They seemed like a good choice for long term archival storage - they don't need to be kept in ideal conditions - humidity isn't supposed to be a problem, and leaving them out in the sun is apparently fine! Plus drives for reading them are cheap and readily available.
The discs themselves are quite expensive in terms of cost/TB - somewhere around 50-60 GBP from what I've found.
I have more confidence in their ability to not lose data if left on a shelf and forgotten about for several years compared to hard drives. I have the same data stored on a ZFS pool too.
You can still buy M-DISC branded discs - either blu-ray or DVD. I think it matters more for DVD than for blu-ray because blu-ray discs use a more reliable recording medium anyway. People say there's little if any difference between M-DISC BDXL and 'normal' BDXL. You can get 100GB or 128GB BDXL discs.
We have several people who depend on it, including the church organist, so we soon hear if it's not working. He says it's working really well.
My Grandmother says the one in her church (which is nearby) doesn't work well at all and she usually doesn't hear much. I'm not sure why. She also finds the one in our church good, so I think they must have some problem.
I would think it could be worth contacting someone in charge of the venue(s) if it's somewhere you go regularly. I would imagine it heavily depends on how the whole thing is set up though - quality of microphones etc. We have lectern mics, singer mic, lapel mics for priest and a wide field mic. on the altar, so pretty good coverage, and they all go into an auto switcher thingy. I think it would need to be set up by someone who at least half knows what they're doing.