Last night I made the wonderful discovery that Linux handles Bluetooth streaming to HAs, way better than Microsoft ever did.
The setup I have is quite modest by modern standards, which is why I suppose Microsoft decided not to support it with an upgrade to Windows 11 from 10. Just fine by me — 11 is garbage in my opinion. Mint likes it, however. Mint has handled everything I've thrown at it, hardware wise. The hilarious part about all of this - the entire Bluetooth stack is enabled by a USB key. That's it — the motherboard has no built-in support.
When I attempted to stream audio to my hearing aids under Windows 10 a couple of years back, it would sputter, staccato audio. Unlistenable & unusable. I'm here to inform you, early in the A.M. I tried connecting the HAs to the PC again using the Blueman-manager widget provided by the Mint developers. Activated the hardware handshake and the name of the product popped up in the list of available devices. Right click, connect and PAH! It WORKS. I now have access to higher fidelity audio on my PC than I did previously.
Thanks again, Linux.