OK, so that means that the issue is that it used to work because your AIR app was overriding the audio session in some way that it requires after OpenEars first established it, and it had the random luck to not break recognition (or if it had a negative effect on recognition, which is possible, we aren’t directly aware of it) but now that OpenEars does a sanity check for the required settings at every recognition round, the AIR app doesn’t control the audio session setting so it can’t do its audio playback in whatever the form is that it requires.
You have a fix ,which is to break AudioSessionManager, but this will also probably have negative effects on OpenEars’ performance. However, the previous AIR overriding that was working with the versions before 1.0 most likely also had the same effects so it might not seem like a problem. My random guess about the iPad is that of all your 4.x compatible devices, it may be the only one with only a single mic and whatever the AIR audio session settings are, they may force recognition to occur on a second mic.