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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Just How Have Latest Wireless Speakers Gotten Better Lately?

By Gunter Fellbaum


I'll take a look at how modern-day sound transmission technologies which are used in the latest wireless speakers operate in real-world situations with a large amount of interference from other wireless systems.

The rising rise in popularity of cordless consumer gadgets just like wireless speakers has started to result in difficulties with various gadgets competing for the restricted frequency space. Wireless networks, cordless telephones , Bluetooth and other products are eating up the valuable frequency space at 900 MHz and 2.4 Gigahertz. Cordless audio systems have got to guarantee robust real-time transmission within an environment having a large amount of interference.

FM type sound transmitters are generally the least robust with regards to tolerating interference considering that the transmission doesn't have any mechanism to cope with competing transmitters. Nonetheless, these types of transmitters have a relatively limited bandwidth and changing channels can often steer clear of interference. Digital audio transmission is normally utilized by more modern sound gadgets. Digital transmitters commonly work 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.

A few wireless systems for instance Bluetooth devices along with cordless telephones use frequency hopping. As a result just changing the channel is not going to prevent these types of frequency hoppers. Consequently contemporary audio transmitters incorporate specific mechanisms to deal with interfering transmitters to assure continuous interruption-free audio transmission.

A frequently employed method is forward error correction where the transmitter sends extra information along with the audio. Making use of some advanced algorithms, the receiver is able to restore the data that may in part be damaged by interfering transmitters. Because of this, these products may broadcast 100% error-free even when there exists interference. FEC is unidirectional. The receiver does not send back any information to the transmitter. Thus it is frequently used by equipment like radio receivers in which the quantity of receivers is big.

One more approach uses receivers which transmit data packets back to the transmitter. The information packets incorporate a checksum from which every receiver can determine if a packet was received correctly and acknowledge proper receipt to the transmitter. In situations 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. Employing buffers brings about a delay or latency in the transmission. The amount of the delay is proportional to the buffer size. A larger buffer size increases the reliability of the transmission. However a large buffer can lead to a large latency which could cause challenges with speakers not being in sync with the movie. One limitation is that products in which the receiver communicates with the transmitter usually can only transmit to a small number of cordless receivers. Furthermore, receivers need to incorporate a transmitter and usually use up more current

In order to avoid crowded frequency channels, a few wireless speakers watch clear channels and can change to a clear channel once the existing channel becomes occupied by a different transmitter. This method is also referred to as adaptive frequency hopping.




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