Monday 17 February 2014

How To Select The Most Reliable Wireless Speakers

By Mike Heller


A constantly increasing amount of wireless gadgets which include wireless speakers is bringing about growing competition for the valuable frequency space. Let me check out a number of technologies that are used by the latest electronic audio gadgets in order to determine how well these products may work in a real-world situation.

The popularity of wireless products like wireless speakers is responsible for a rapid increase of transmitters that broadcast in the most popular frequency bands of 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 Gigahertz and thus cordless interference has become a serious concern.

Traditional FM transmitters normally work at 900 MHz and don't have any specific way of coping with interference yet changing the broadcast channel is a strategy to cope with interfering transmitters. Modern audio systems use digital audio transmission and frequently operate at 2.4 GHz. These kinds of digital transmitters send out a signal that takes up much more frequency space than 900 MHz transmitters and therefore have a greater possibility of colliding with other transmitters. Frequency hopping products, on the other hand, are going to continue to create problems because they will disrupt even transmitters working with transmit channels. Real-time audio has pretty rigid demands regarding reliability and low latency. In order to offer those, different mechanisms are required.

One of these approaches is referred to as forward error correction or FEC for short. The transmitter will broadcast additional information besides the audio data. By using a few advanced calculations, the receiver is able to restore the data that might partially be damaged by interfering transmitters. Consequently, these products may broadcast 100% error-free even if there's interference. FEC is unidirectional. The receiver does not send back any kind of information to the transmitter. Thus it is often used by products like radio receivers in which the quantity of receivers is big.

One of these methods is known as forward error correction or FEC for short. The transmitter is going to transmit extra information besides the audio data. The receiver uses a formula that makes use of the extra information. When the signal is damaged during the transmission due to interference, the receiver may filter out the erroneous information and restore the original signal. This method will work if the amount of interference does not rise above a certain limit. Transmitters using FEC by itself usually may broadcast to any number of cordless receivers. This mechanism is usually employed for systems in which the receiver is not able to resend data to the transmitter or where the quantity of receivers is fairly large, such as digital stereos, satellite receivers etc. An additional method makes use of receivers that transmit data packets to the transmitter. The transmitters has a checksum with every information packet. Each receiver may detect whether a particular packet was received properly or disrupted due to interference. Next, every cordless receiver will be sending an acknowledgement to the transmitter. If a packet was damaged, the receiver is going to notify the transmitter and ask for retransmission of the packet. As such, the transmitter must store a great amount of packets in a buffer. Similarly, the receiver will have to have a data buffer. This is going to create an audio latency, also known as delay, to the transmission which might be a challenge for real-time protocols including audio. Generally, the greater the buffer is, the greater the robustness of the transmission. A large latency can generate problems for several applications however. Especially if video exists, the audio tracks should be synchronized with the video. Furthermore, in surround applications in which several speakers are cordless, the wireless loudspeakers should be in sync with the corded loudspeakers. Cordless products that use this technique, however, can only broadcast to a small quantity of cordless receivers. Commonly the receivers have to be paired to the transmitter. Because each receiver also requires transmit functionality, the receivers are more pricey to manufacture and also use up more power.

In order to better overcome interference, several wireless speakers will monitor the accessible frequency band in order to decide which channels are clear at any given time. If any particular channel gets crowded by a competing transmitter, these products may change transmission to a clean channel without interruption of the audio. Because the transmitter lists clean channels, there's no delay in trying to find a clear channel. It is simply chosen from the list. This approach is frequently termed adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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