Monday, 10 March 2014

Strategies For Buying Wireless Speakers

By Mike Heller


An ever increasing quantity of wireless systems for example wireless speakers is bringing about growing competition for the valuable frequency space. I'm going to investigate a few systems which are employed by today's electronic sound gadgets in order to determine how well these systems can operate in a real-world environment.

FM type sound transmitters are typically the least robust in terms of tolerating interference because the transmission doesn't have any method to deal with competing transmitters. However, these types of transmitters have a fairly constrained bandwidth and switching channels may often eliminate interference. Today's audio gadgets utilize digital sound transmission and frequently work at 2.4 GHz. These types of digital transmitters broadcast a signal which takes up a lot more frequency space than 900 MHz transmitters and therefore have a greater possibility of colliding with other transmitters.

Only switching channels, however, is no reliable remedy for staying away from certain transmitters that use frequency hopping. Frequency hoppers such as Bluetooth gadgets or numerous wireless phones are going to hop throughout the entire frequency spectrum. As a result transmission on channels is going to be disrupted for brief bursts of time. Real-time audio has fairly strict demands concerning reliability and low latency. To be able to provide those, different mechanisms are required.

Quite a few cordless products for example Bluetooth devices as well as cordless telephones incorporate frequency hopping. Thus merely changing the channel won't steer clear of these kinds of frequency hoppers. Sound can be considered a real-time protocol. Consequently it has stringent demands regarding dependability. Also, small latency is vital in numerous applications. Therefore more advanced techniques are necessary to assure reliability.

One of these approaches is known as forward error correction or FEC in short. The transmitter will transmit additional information in addition to the sound data. Using this supplemental information, the receiver can easily recover the original information whether or not the signal was corrupted to a certain degree. Transmitters employing FEC alone typically may broadcast to any number of wireless receivers. This mechanism is typically used by systems in which the receiver is not able to resend information to the transmitter or where the number of receivers is fairly large, just like digital radios, satellite receivers and so forth. One more technique utilizes receivers that transmit information packets to the transmitter. The transmitters contains a checksum with every data packet. Every receiver may see whether a particular packet was acquired correctly or disrupted because of interference. Next, every wireless receiver will be sending an acknowledgement to the transmitter. Given that dropped packets must be resent, the transmitter and receivers must hold data packets in a buffer. This buffer causes an audio delay that will depend on the buffer size with a larger buffer increasing the robustness of the transmission. A large latency can be a problem for many applications nonetheless. Particularly when video is present, the sound must be in sync with the movie. Also, in multichannel surround sound applications where a number of loudspeakers are cordless, the wireless speakers should be in sync with the corded loudspeakers. One limitation is that systems in which the receiver communicates with the transmitter usually can merely transmit to a few cordless receivers. In addition, receivers have to incorporate a transmitter and generally consume additional current

As a way to better overcome interference, some wireless speakers is going to monitor the accessible frequency band so as to decide which channels are clear at any given time. If any particular channel becomes congested by a competing transmitter, these products may change transmission to a clean channel without interruption of the audio. Considering that the transmitter has a list of clear channels, there isn't any delay in looking for a clear channel. It's simply picked from the list. This strategy is frequently termed adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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