Wednesday, March 12, 2014

An In-Depth Look At Modern Wireless Speaker Technologies

By Mike Heller


Let me examine exactly how modern sound transmission systems that are utilised in today's wireless speakers work in real-world environments having a great deal of interference from other cordless products.

The most common frequency bands that are employed by cordless gizmos include the 900 MHz, 2.4 Gigahertz and 5.8 GHz frequency band. Usually the 900 MHz as well as 2.4 GHz frequency bands have started to become clogged by the ever increasing amount of products including wireless speakers, wireless phones and so on.

Just changing channels, on the other hand, is no reliable solution for steering clear of specific transmitters which use frequency hopping. Frequency hoppers like Bluetooth products or numerous cordless phones will hop throughout the entire frequency spectrum. Thus transmission over channels will likely be disrupted for short bursts of time. Audio can be considered a real-time protocol. Consequently it has strict needs pertaining to dependability. In addition, small latency is crucial in lots of applications. For that reason more sophisticated means are necessary to ensure reliability.

One of these approaches is referred to as forward error correction or FEC in short. The transmitter is going to broadcast additional data besides the sound data. From this supplemental data, the receiver can easily restore the original data even if the signal was corrupted to a certain degree. Transmitters employing FEC alone generally may transmit to any number of wireless receivers. This mechanism is typically used for systems in which the receiver can not resend data to the transmitter or where the number of receivers is rather big, like digital radios, satellite receivers etc.

One of these methods is called forward error correction or FEC for short. The transmitter is going to transmit additional information besides the sound data. By using a few innovative calculations, the receiver is able to repair the data that may partially be corrupted by interfering transmitters. Because of this, these products can transmit 100% error-free even if there exists interference. Transmitters utilizing FEC may transmit to a multitude of cordless devices and does not need any kind of feedback from the receiver. One more technique uses bidirectional transmission, i.e. each receiver sends information back to the transmitter. This method is only practical if the quantity of receivers is small. In addition, it requires a back channel to the transmitter. The information that is broadcast includes a checksum. Using this checksum the receiver may see whether any certain packet was received properly and acknowledge. In cases of dropped packets, the receiver is going to alert the transmitter and the dropped packet is resent. Because of this both the transmitter as well as receiver have to have a buffer to store packets. This is going to create an audio latency, also referred to as delay, to the transmission which may be a problem for real-time protocols including audio. Typically, the greater the buffer is, the greater the robustness of the transmission. Nonetheless a big buffer can lead to a large latency which can bring about issues with speakers not being in sync with the video. One limitation is that systems in which the receiver communicates with the transmitter can usually only broadcast to a few wireless receivers. In addition, receivers have to incorporate a transmitter and generally use up additional current

Often a frequency channel can get occupied by a different transmitter. Ideally the transmitter is going to realize this fact and change to a different channel. To do this, some wireless speakers continually check which channels are available so that they can instantly change to a clear channel. The clear channel is selected from a list of channels that was identified to be clear. One technique which employs this transmission protocol is known as adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum or AFHSS




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