Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Tips For Choosing Wireless Speakers

By Mike Heller


I'll take a look at exactly how modern day sound transmission technologies that are utilized in today's wireless speakers work in real-world situations having a large amount of interference from other cordless products. The popularity of wireless devices including wireless speakers is responsible for a quick increase of transmitters that broadcast in the preferred frequency bands of 900 MHz, 2.4 Gigahertz and 5.8 Gigahertz and thus cordless interference has turned into a significant problem.

The most popular frequency bands that are employed by cordless devices include the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz frequency band. Usually the 900 MHz and 2.4 Gigahertz frequency bands have started to become crowded by the increasing number of products just like wireless speakers, wireless telephones and so on.

FM type audio transmitters usually are the least robust in terms of tolerating interference because the transmission doesn't have any method to cope with competing transmitters. Having said that, these kinds of transmitters use a relatively limited bandwidth and changing channels may steer clear of interference. The 2.4 GHz and 5.8 Gigahertz frequency bands are used by digital transmitters and also have become quite crowded these days given that digital signals take up much more bandwidth as compared to analogue transmitters. Frequency hopping gadgets, on the other hand, will continue to lead to further problems as they are going to affect even transmitters working with transmit channels. Real-time audio has pretty strict demands pertaining to reliability and minimal latency. To be able to offer those, different mechanisms are required.

One of these techniques is known as forward error correction or FEC in short. The transmitter is going to broadcast additional information besides the audio data. The receiver uses a formula that makes use of the extra data. When the signal is damaged during the transmission because of interference, the receiver can easily filter out the erroneous data and restore the original signal. This technique will work if the amount of interference doesn't go beyond a specific threshold. Transmitters making use of FEC may transmit to a great number of wireless receivers and does not require any feedback from the receiver.

One approach is named FEC or forward error correction. This approach allows the receiver to repair a corrupted signal. For this reason, extra data is sent from the transmitter. Using a number of advanced algorithms, the receiver may then fix the data which may partly be damaged by interfering transmitters. Because of this, these systems may broadcast 100% error-free even when there is interference. Transmitters employing FEC can broadcast to a large number of cordless devices and does not need any kind of feedback from the receiver. Another strategy employs bidirectional transmission, i.e. each receiver transmits information back 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 data that is broadcast has a checksum. Because of this checksum the receiver can detect whether any specific packet was received properly and acknowledge. In cases of dropped packets, the receiver is going to inform the transmitter and the lost packet is resent. Consequently both the transmitter as well as receiver need a buffer to keep packets. This is going to create an audio latency, also called delay, to the transmission which can be an issue for real-time protocols including audio. Normally, the greater the buffer is, the larger the robustness of the transmission. Nonetheless a large buffer can lead to a large latency that may lead to difficulties with loudspeakers not being in sync with the movie. One constraint is that systems where the receiver communicates with the transmitter can usually merely broadcast to a few cordless receivers. In addition, receivers need to incorporate a transmitter and usually consume more current

In order to avoid congested frequency channels, some wireless speakers watch clear channels and may change to a clean channel as soon as the current channel becomes occupied by another transmitter. The clean channel is picked from a list of channels which has been determined to be clear. A modern technology which utilizes this particular transmission protocol is referred to as adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum or AFHSS




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