21st March, 2008
Setting Things Straight: Wireless Speakers
Brent Butterworth
We weren’t terribly surprised to read attacks on various consumer electronics technologies in Wired magazine’s January 2008 “Why Things Suck” issue. But we were disappoiinted to see that Wired’s writers seem to know no more about the technical aspects of audio and video than our Labrador retriever knows about playing the oboe.
Case in point: writer Paul Boutin’s merciless assault on wireless speakers. Granted, there have been plenty of lousy products in this category, but Boutin’s wrong to suggest there’s something inherently bad about wireless sound.
First, let’s clear the air, so to speak, and pun intended: Wireless audio can be done well. We experienced effective wireless way back in the early 1990s, in the form of a transmitter/receiver system from JBL that sent sound to surround speakers without wires. Even in New York City-one of the world’s most interference-intensive environments-the system’s relatively primitive analog transmitter (which, if memory serves, operated in the radio-frequency slums around 50 MHz) exhibited no audible interference whatsoever. Another system we remember-a cheapie with wretched plastic speakers-delivered sound with negligible interference to the back patio of an A/V enthusiast friend of ours for years.
Yes, we heard some wireless speakers that marred our music with crackles and noise, but even back then, there enough examples of good wireless audio systems that anyone who tagged the category as “sucking” simply wasn’t familiar with all of the available products.
Newer digital wireless audio technologies offer the potential for even better sound. Some use packetized data that’s robust enough to survive even extreme interference without producing a single audible glitch. (The Internet also uses packetized data to prevent transmission errors.)
Practically every sentence of Boutin’s article contains a technical error. He slags wireless for “bad sound and interference-loads of interference,” then points to “multiple conversions” as the culprit. He states that digital signals from DVDs and CDs have to be converted to analog to prevent “hi-res bootlegging.” Yet there are countless examples of wireless digital audio transmission in the home. Microsoft’s Media Center Extender technology relies on wireless transmission of audio signals. So does the Sondigo Scirocco multichannel audio extender, which receives Dolby Digital signals from a computer wirelessly. And CD digital audio has no copy protection, so worrying about “bootlegging” of audio from a CD through a wireless audio system is like leaving your front door unlocked but worrying that someone might break in your home through a window. (And which of these formats would be considered “hi-res,” anyway?)
He then complains that a wireless speaker system requires “at least three conversions-from digital to analog and back again,” a process that presumably destroys sound quality. Yet almost every CD and DVD you listen to goes through these conversions. A typical recording process might convert analog microphone signals to digital, then convert the audio back to analog for processing, then back to digital for mixing or mastering, then back to analog for playback in your home. It might even go through another D/A-A/D pass, yet you wouldn’t know the difference. Sure, D/A and A/D processes can degrade sound-years ago, they usually did-but poor D/A or A/D conversion is rare now. The process is practically transparent, as Boutin would learn if he ever sat through a blind test of these technologies.
Any reception problems in a wireless speaker are due to sloppy RF engineering, period. D/A and A/D conversion has nothing to do with it. There’s no way that even the worst D/A or A/D converter-even the worst ones from two decades ago-can cause interference in wireless speakers.
A few minutes spent reading reviews of wireless speakers on Amazon.com tells you that some perform well and some don’t. Saying all wireless speakers suck is as dumb as saying all of Wired’s writers suck.
Posted at 3:04 pm | Comment (0)
