Friday, March 21, 2014

A Glance At How Contemporary Wireless Speakers Function In Real-World Conditions

By Mike Heller


A constantly growing amount of wireless products like wireless speakers is bringing about growing competition for the valuable frequency space. I am going to take a look at a few systems that are used by current electronic sound products in order to discover how well these solutions can operate in a real-world environment.

Conventional FM transmitters normally operate at 900 MHz and do not possess any certain method of dealing with interference but switching the broadcast channel can be a approach to deal with interfering transmitters. Digital sound transmission is usually employed by more modern sound systems. Digital transmitters commonly function at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz. The signal bandwidth is higher than 900 MHz transmitters and thus competition in these frequency bands is high.

FM type audio transmitters are generally the least robust when it comes to tolerating interference considering that the transmission doesn't have any procedure to deal with competing transmitters. On the other hand, these kinds of transmitters possess a rather constrained bandwidth and switching channels can often eliminate interference. Digital sound transmission is usually used by newer audio gadgets. Digital transmitters normally function at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 Gigahertz. The signal bandwidth is higher than 900 MHz transmitters and thus competition in these frequency bands is high.

Several wireless products for instance Bluetooth devices and also wireless telephones use frequency hopping. Therefore simply changing the channel will not prevent these kinds of frequency hoppers. Sound can be considered a real-time protocol. Consequently it has strict demands pertaining to reliability. Furthermore, low latency is critical in most applications. For this reason more sophisticated strategies are needed to guarantee reliability.

A regularly utilized strategy is forward error correction where the transmitter transmits extra information combined with the audio. From this added data, the receiver may restore the original information even if the signal was corrupted to a certain extent. Transmitters employing FEC on its own normally can transmit to any amount of cordless receivers. This mechanism is commonly used by products where the receiver is not able to resend information to the transmitter or in which the quantity of receivers is fairly big, just like digital stereos, satellite receivers and so forth. In scenarios where there's only a few receivers, frequently yet another method is utilized. The wireless receiver will send data packets to the transmitter in order to confirm proper receipt of data. The data packets include a checksum from which every receiver can easily see whether a packet was received correctly and acknowledge correct receipt to the transmitter. In situations of dropped packets, the receiver is going to inform the transmitter and the dropped packet is resent. As a result both the transmitter as well as receiver have to have a buffer in order to keep packets. Using buffers causes a delay or latency in the transmission. The amount of the delay is proportional to the buffer size. A bigger buffer size improves the reliability of the transmission. A big latency can be a problem for many applications however. Particularly if video exists, the audio tracks should be in sync with the movie. Furthermore, in surround applications in which a number of speakers are cordless, the wireless speakers ought to be in sync with the corded speakers. Wireless systems which use this method, however, can only transmit to a limited quantity of wireless receivers. Generally the receivers have to be paired to the transmitter. Since each receiver also requires transmit functionality, the receivers are more expensive to fabricate and in addition consume more power.

In an effort to better overcome interference, some wireless speakers will monitor the available frequency band as a way to determine which channels are clear at any given moment in time. If any certain channel gets crowded by a competing transmitter, these devices can change transmission to a clean channel without interruption of the audio. Since the transmitter has a list of clear channels, there's no delay in trying to find a clear channel. It is simply picked from the list. This strategy is often referred to as adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.




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