Mar
1
Wireless Rear Speakers
Filed Under Surround Sound
I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit old fashioned about certain things and wireless speakers are one of them, but before I get too deep into this I want to explain what this is. I’m talking about wireless rear speakers for use in home theater settings where it’s just not possible or cost prohibitive to run wiring for the rear channels, not wireless speakers systems in general. Ok about the being old fashioned part, up until very recently wireless speakers were a bit of a pariah in the industry. They had poor frequency response, were subject to pops, crackles, outright signal loss and a myriad of other problems that just made them more hassle than they were worth. Thats slowly changing however but I do stress slowly.
Products like the “Rocketfish – Universal Wireless Rear Speaker Kit” make wireless rear speakers possible but in all honesty the sound quality is quite poor, mostly due to the built-in amplifier used. Would you notice with a small pair of low-quality bookshelf speakers? Probably not but pair them with something a little larger and capable of resolving some detail and you’ll quickly hear the difference. That’s not to say all wireless speaker systems are to be avoided, in the last few years the transmission rate has been pushed up as high as 1.5mbs at 2.4GHz which is a big improvement over early models.
Companies like Avnera, Samsung and Amimon are all working toward even better implementations of wireless audio (and video in Amimon’s case) and I’m sure that we’ll see significant advancements in the field in the not to distant future. The biggest hurdle however isn’t the transmission rate or protocol but the bundling of inferior internal amplifiers such as those found in the current crop of wireless speaker products.
What we need are devices that just send the low level audio and then amplify that signal locally (preferably right at the speaker) by an amplifier on-par with the one powering our front channels, rather than trying to cram the whole kitten kaboodle into one box. Simply put, this flexibility would afford us much better sound by means of future upgrades and/or not being tied to these inferior little amplifiers. For now however I remain unimpressed with the current crop of wireless speaker devices.
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