Wednesday 12 March 2014

Tricks For Selecting Wireless Speakers

By Mike Heller


An ever expanding number of cordless systems for instance wireless speakers is causing growing competition for the valuable frequency space. I'll have a look at a few technologies which are used by modern day digital sound products in order to determine how well these systems can operate in a real-world environment.

The increasing popularity of wireless consumer gadgets including wireless speakers has begun to cause difficulties with a number of gadgets competing for the restricted frequency space. Wireless networks, cordless telephones , Bluetooth and different devices are eating up the precious frequency space at 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz. Wireless audio systems should assure reliable real-time transmission in an environment which has a great deal of interference.

Quite a few wireless products for instance Bluetooth gadgets and wireless telephones use frequency hopping. Thus merely changing the channel isn't going to steer clear of these kinds of frequency hoppers. Real-time audio has pretty strict demands concerning reliability and low latency. In order to offer these, other means will be required.

One method is known as FEC or forward error correction. This technique enables the receiver to fix a damaged signal. For this reason, supplemental information is sent from the transmitter. The receiver utilizes an algorithm that makes use of the additional data. When the signal is corrupted during the transmission due to interference, the receiver can easily remove the invalid information and restore the original signal. This approach works if the amount of interference does not exceed a certain threshold. Transmitters using FEC may broadcast to a great number of wireless devices and doesn't require any feedback from the receiver.

An additional method utilizes receivers that transmit information packets back to the transmitter. The transmitters incorporates a checksum with every data packet. Each receiver can determine whether a certain packet was acquired properly or disrupted because of interference. Subsequently, every wireless receiver will send an acknowledgement to the transmitter. Considering that dropped packets will have to be resent, the transmitter and receivers have to hold data packets in a buffer. This is going to create an audio latency, often called delay, to the transmission which might be a problem for real-time protocols such as audio. Generally, the greater the buffer is, the larger the robustness of the transmission. However a big buffer will lead to a large latency which can cause issues with speakers not being in sync with the video. One constraint is that systems in which the receiver communicates with the transmitter can usually only transmit to a few wireless receivers. Also, receivers have to add a transmitter and generally use up more current

Often a frequency channel can get occupied by another transmitter. Ideally the transmitter is going to understand this fact and switch to a different channel. To do this, several wireless speakers continually watch which channels are available to enable them to immediately switch to a clear channel. Considering that the transmitter has a list of clear channels, there isn't any delay in trying to find a clean channel. It is simply picked from the list. This technique is often called adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment