Wednesday 12 March 2014

Are Wireless Speakers Reliable In Real-World Scenarios?

By Mike Heller


Wireless audio happens to be popular. Numerous consumer products for example wireless speakers are eliminating the cord and also promise ultimate freedom of movement. Let me investigate how most up-to-date wireless technologies can address interference from other transmitters and just how well they will perform in a real-world situation.

The buzz of wireless gizmos just like wireless speakers is mainly responsible for a rapid increase of transmitters which broadcast in the preferred frequency bands of 900 MHz, 2.4 Gigahertz and 5.8 Gigahertz and thus cordless interference has turned into a serious issue.

Several cordless systems for example Bluetooth gadgets along with wireless telephones use frequency hopping. Thus just changing the channel isn't going to steer clear of these frequency hoppers. Thus modern audio transmitters incorporate special mechanisms to deal with interfering transmitters to ensure consistent interruption-free sound transmission.

A frequently employed technique is forward error correction where the transmitter transmits supplemental data with the audio. Using several innovative calculations, the receiver may then repair the information that may partly be corrupted by interfering transmitters. As a result, these systems can easily broadcast 100% error-free even if there's interference. Transmitters making use of FEC may transmit to a huge amount of cordless devices and does not require any feedback from the receiver.

An additional technique uses receivers that transmit data packets to the transmitter. The data packets include a checksum from which every receiver may see whether a packet was received properly and acknowledge correct receipt to the transmitter. As dropped packets will have to be resent, the transmitter and receivers have to store information packets in a buffer. This buffer will cause an audio delay that will depend on the buffer size with a larger buffer increasing the robustness of the transmission. A large latency can generate problems for many applications however. Particularly when video exists, the audio tracks should be synchronized with the movie. Additionally, in multichannel surround sound applications in which some loudspeakers are cordless, the cordless loudspeakers ought to be synchronized with the corded loudspeakers. Cordless systems which incorporate this technique, nonetheless, can only transmit to a limited number of wireless receivers. Generally the receivers have to be paired to the transmitter. As each receiver also requires broadcast functionality, the receivers are more expensive to fabricate and also use up more energy.

Often a frequency channel may become occupied by another transmitter. Ideally the transmitter will realize this fact and switch to yet another channel. To achieve this, several wireless speakers continually check which channels are available so that they can immediately change to a clean channel. Since the transmitter lists clear channels, there isn't any delay in trying to find a clean channel. It's simply selected from the list. This technique is often called adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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