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In my last post I briefly described my current quandary. To make my elderly in-laws happier I got them a giant voice-controlled Alexa TV... Size helps (vision issues); voice control helps (remote too complicated, too small to see, etc). It provides a minor amount of empowerment: "Alexa, TV off" instead of calling for help...
As I also mentioned, idiocy is built-in: when voice control is on, purchases are no longer password-protected. Why? I don't know. Somehow it is tied into 'parental controls', which should do the trick, but instead, makes things even worse. It will not allow starting apps without a password, completely defeating the purpose of the entire project. So I just have to chat with Amazon every now and then and insist that the purchases were made because of their own technical problems. So far it works -- when they see someone renting a dozen movies and not watching...
The TV speaker close to a wall makes the next room uninhabitable (hearing problems lead to "Alexa, volume up" until the house shakes). My partner and I had a great idea of getting small aux speakers and placing them closer to the impaired ears. How hard could that be?
Well, very, very hard! A soundbar is out - it has its own remote, needs to be turned on, etc. So speakers.
Finding something that is not bluetooth (with endless reconfiguration) is almost impossible. In the remaining subset, finding something without RGB lights is almost impossible. But I did it!
Imagine my surprise when I found out that plugging the speaker into the headphone jack disables volume control and mute on the TV! Voice controlled and otherwise, headphone output is just a separate channel.
Makes me long for the times when a headphone jack was a fancy way to physically disconnect the speaker and attach the headphone device. These days it's done with a computer.