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An In-Depth Look At Current Wireless Speaker Technologies

Monday, March 17, 2014

By Mike Heller


Wireless audio has grown to be popular. Numerous consumer products for instance wireless speakers are eliminating the cable and also promise greatest freedom of movement. I will take a look at how latest wireless technologies are able to cope with interference from other transmitters and how well they will work in a real-world situation.

The increasing rise in popularity of wireless consumer gadgets like wireless speakers has begun to result in problems with various gadgets competing for the constrained frequency space. Wireless networks, cordless telephones , Bluetooth and other products are eating up the valuable frequency space at 900 MHz and 2.4 Gigahertz. Cordless audio systems must guarantee reliable real-time transmission within an environment which has a lots of interference.

FM type sound transmitters are usually the least reliable relating to tolerating interference since the transmission doesn't have any means to cope with competing transmitters. Nonetheless, those transmitters possess a rather restricted bandwidth and switching channels may steer clear of interference. The 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz frequency bands are utilized by digital transmitters and also are getting to be rather congested of late as digital signals occupy more bandwidth than analogue transmitters.

Several wireless systems for example Bluetooth products and wireless telephones incorporate frequency hopping. Therefore just changing the channel isn't going to prevent those frequency hoppers. For that reason contemporary audio transmitters use specific mechanisms to deal with interfering transmitters in order to ensure consistent interruption-free audio transmission.

Another strategy utilizes bidirectional transmission, i.e. each receiver sends data to the transmitter. This strategy is only useful if the quantity of receivers is small. Additionally, it requires a back channel to the transmitter. The information that is broadcast has a checksum. From this checksum the receiver can easily decide if any specific packet was received correctly and acknowledge. If a packet was corrupted, the receiver will notify the transmitter and ask for retransmission of the packet. As a result, the transmitter has to store a certain amount of packets in a buffer. Likewise, the receiver will have to have a data buffer. Employing buffers brings about a delay or latency in the transmission. The amount of the delay is proportional to the buffer size. A larger buffer size improves the dependability of the transmission. Video applications, nevertheless, need the audio to be synchronized with the movie. In this instance a big latency is problematic. One constraint is that systems where the receiver communicates with the transmitter can usually merely transmit to a few cordless receivers. Furthermore, receivers have to add a transmitter and generally use up more current

To steer clear of crowded frequency channels, a number of wireless speakers watch clear channels and may change to a clear channel when the current channel gets occupied by a different transmitter. Since the transmitter has a list of clean channels, there is no delay in trying to find a clean channel. It is simply picked from the list. This method is frequently called adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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