An In-Depth Look At Contemporary Wireless Speaker Technology

By Mike Heller


Wireless audio has become widely used. A multitude of consumer products including wireless speakers are eliminating the cable plus promise greatest freedom of movement. I am about to analyze how most up-to-date wireless technologies are able to cope with interference from other transmitters and exactly how well they will function in a real-world situation.

The most common frequency bands which are used by wireless products are the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 Gigahertz frequency band. Mostly the 900 MHz and 2.4 Gigahertz frequency bands have begun to become clogged by the ever increasing amount of devices just like wireless speakers, wireless telephones and so on.

FM type audio transmitters usually are the least robust relating to tolerating interference considering that the transmission does not have any method to cope with competing transmitters. However, these types of transmitters have a relatively constrained bandwidth and switching channels may steer clear of interference. Digital audio transmission is usually utilized by more sophisticated sound systems. Digital transmitters generally work at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz. The signal bandwidth is higher than 900 MHz transmitters and thus competition in these frequency bands is high.

Merely changing channels, on the other hand, is no dependable remedy for steering clear of certain transmitters which use frequency hopping. Frequency hoppers like Bluetooth systems or a lot of wireless telephones are going to hop through the whole frequency spectrum. As a consequence transmission over channels will likely be disrupted for short bursts of time. Sound can be considered a real-time protocol. As such it has strict needs with regards to dependability. In addition, low latency is critical in several applications. Consequently more innovative means are required to guarantee dependability.

Another strategy makes use of bidirectional transmission, i.e. each receiver sends information to the transmitter. This method is only useful if the quantity of receivers is small. Furthermore, it requires a back channel to the transmitter. The transmitters contains a checksum with each information packet. Every receiver may decide if a particular packet was received properly or damaged due to interference. Next, each wireless receiver will be sending an acknowledgement to the transmitter. Since dropped packets must be resent, the transmitter and receivers need to hold information packets in a buffer. This buffer will cause an audio delay that depends upon the buffer size with a bigger buffer improving the robustness of the transmission. Then again a big buffer will result in a large latency that may cause problems with speakers not being in sync with the movie. Devices that incorporate this mechanism, however, are restricted to transmitting to a few receivers and the receivers use up more power.

In an effort to better deal with interference, a few wireless speakers is going to monitor the available frequency band as a way to decide which channels are clear at any given time. If any certain channel becomes congested by a competing transmitter, these devices can switch transmission to a clean channel without interruption of the audio. Since the transmitter lists clean channels, there is no delay in looking for a clear channel. It's simply chosen from the list. This technique is usually named adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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