It's pretty well accepted at high schools, large presentation spaces, and such that you need to equip them with assistive listening systems. They are indeed among the more underutilized features but their cost is low and the reason they get a bad rap is because patrons have learned to cope without them because of how terribly implemented they usually are. The last few high schools I've been working on I've put the same
ALS transmitter in the gym, cafeteria, football field, and theater. They can meet their minimum number of receivers for the theater, let's say that's 25, and then disburse a handful to each space (you can share receivers between spaces on a campus). That way you aren't buying 25 just to
throw in a box where 3-4 times a year only 1-2 people at a time may ask to use them.
The caveat though: don't bother if you're not going to have a process in placing for handing out receivers, setting up a quality audio feed for it, and posting signage and informing your patrons that this is available to them. If they use it once and it sucks, they'll never bother again. If they don't know it's available, almost nobody will ever ask.
By the way, when I say quality feed I mean setting up an aux/matrix mix on the
console that's typically vocals only. Then in the
DSP using the
house mic as as a primary source but ducking it and giving priority to the vocal
console mix when someone is speaking. Ambiance is nice in
ALS but what most people need is vocal clarity and intelligibility. Many people will wear the
ALS earbud on only one ear and use their other ear which may or may not have their hearing aid to listen to the room. They don't need drum kit or a crack of thunder
effect fed directly into their ears. Usually their are compressors in
ALS transmitters but a little compression in the
DSP also helps intelligibility by reducing the
dynamic range of speech.
A full FM kit with signage and charging stations is under $5k. If you don't have a
house mic or
DSP, then those are costs that also need to be considered but you can use those for much more than just
ALS like recording or backstage/
lobby feeds. It's really not an extravagant or unjustified expense. There are just a lot of people who it treat it like necessary evil and thus venues end up with hot garbage fires for
ALS.