A Peek At A Few Of The Newest Wireless Gizmos

Latest wireless audio gadgets such as iPods, wireless headphones and cell phones support latest wireless protocols. These protocols are supposed to cut the cord and provide perfect high-fidelity audio. I will take a look at whether these products keep their promise to deliver perfect-quality audio. In addition, I will take a look at the underlying technologies.

Several products are available with wireless already built in while others, in particular streaming audio products, often have optional wireless capability. Newest generation iPods and mobile phones already come with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth support.

The Bluetooth protocol is a fairly low-cost option. However, its drawbacks have an influence on high-quality audio applications and are often overlooked.

1) Restricted operating range

The range of Bluetooth devices is generally just 30 ft. This excludes Bluetooth from multi-room applications.

2) Small data rate – audio compression

Bluetooth will use audio compression since it does not reliably offer a high-enough data rate for uncompressed audio. Audio compression will degrade the audio quality to some degree. High-quality audio transmission usually does not tolerate this type of distortion. As a result Bluetooth is normally not used in high-end audio devices.

3) Audio delay

The signal transmitted via Bluetooth will bear a small delay of a minimum of 10 ms. This is mostly because of the audio compression. While being uncritical for MP3 players, this delay may be a dilemma for video and other real-time applications.

4) Lacking multi-headphone support

Bluetooth does not support any quantity of headphones which might be a problem if you have a larger number of people who want to listen to headphones from a single transmitter device.

WiFi is one more commonly used wireless protocol that is also suitable for audio streaming. WiFi does support uncompressed audio but will have problems transmitting to a large number of wireless receivers at the same time. As a result of the high availability, WiFi is convenient for streaming audio from a PC. Yet, WiFi products have relatively high power consumption. Because of this wireless headphones usually do not employ this technology.

Wireless speakers and wireless amplifier products for home theater speakers generally utilize their own proprietary protocol. Entry-level wireless headphones and speakers generally still utilize FM transmission which offers low cost but is susceptible to noise and audio distortion.

More advanced wireless protocols are based on digital formats which eliminate audio degradation and incorporate advanced features like error correction to deal with interference from competing wireless devices.

Newest-generation wireless amplifiers allow streaming to an infinite number of receivers and support uncompressed audio transmission.

Some of these protocols support low-latency audio transmission which assures that the audio of all speakers will be in sync in a multi-channel application. Wireless audio transmitter products generally operate at 2.4 GHz or sometimes in the less crowded 5.8 GHz frequency band including Amphony’s wireless audio products.

These wireless amplifiers also differ in regard to amplifier output power, standby power consumption and audio quality. A high-quality audio amplifier is crucial for optimal sound quality. Digital amplifiers generally offer a power efficiency of at least 80% and standby power consumption of less than 5 Watts which keeps them cool during operation and helps save energy. However, some Class-D amps have rather high audio distortion. Selecting a low-distortion amplifier is crucial. Good-quality wireless amplifiers have audio distortion of less than 0.05%.