Helpful Hints For Selecting The Optimal Wireless Audio Transmitter Product For Whole-home Audio Stre

An increasing number of wireless audio transmitter devices promise the ultimate freedom in streaming music all over the house. We will take a look at the most popular technologies for wireless audio and give some recommendations for selecting the best wireless audio product.

Getting audio from your living room to your bed room can be quite a problem particularly in houses which are not wired for audio. The following technologies are used by products solving this problem: infrared, RF, wireless LAN and powerline.

Infrared is limited to line of sight because the audio signal is sent as lightwaves and therefore products utilizing this technology, such as infrared wireless surround sound products, are limited to a single room.

RF wireless audio products broadcast the audio signal via radio waves. These radio wave signals can easily go through walls. The signal is sent either by using FM transmission or digital transmission. FM transmission is inexpensive but quite prone to static, audio distortion and susceptible to interference.

Digital wireless audio transmitter devices, such as products from Amphony, utilize a digital protocol. The audio is first converted to digital data before being broadcast. This conversion and transmission in the digital domain will ensure that the original audio quality is preserved. On the other hand, this is only the case of the data is sent uncompressed. Some wireless audio transmitters will apply some sort of audio compression. Such products include Bluetooth audio transmitters. Audio compression will degrade the quality of the audio to some degree.

Products utilizing wireless LAN are practical when streaming audio from a PC. Their downside is that they typically have some fairly high latency, i.e. the signal will be delayed by some amount since wireless LAN was not particularly designed for real-time audio streaming. WLAN receivers frequently do not have built-in network access. As a result, such devices frequently require buying separate LAN cards. These cards are then plugged into each receiver.

Powerline devices use the power mains to distribute music and offer large range but run into problems if there are individual mains circuits in the home in terms of crossing between circuits. Another challenge confronting powerline products are strong power surges and spikes. Such surges can cause dropouts in the audio due to errors in the transmission. To safeguard against these errors, powerline products normally build a delay of several seconds into the transmission.

Now we’ll give you some recommendations for shopping for a wireless system: Choose a system that supports multiple wireless receivers if you plan to stream audio to a number of rooms so that you don’t have to buy a separate transmitter for every receiver. Products with some form of error correction will be more immune against radio interference from other wireless transmitters. Choose a digital RF audio transmitter to guarantee that the audio quality is maintained. Make sure the audio delay is less than 10 ms if you have a real-time application such as video.

Choose a transmitter that has all the audio inputs you need, such as speaker inputs, line-level RCA inputs etc. Pick a system where you can add receivers later on which provide all of the necessary outputs, e.g. amplified speaker outputs, RCA outputs etc. Select a transmitter that can adjust the audio volume of the input stage. This will give you the versatility to connect the transmitter to any kind of equipment with different signal levels. Otherwise the audio may get clipped inside the transmitter converter stage or the dynamic range is not fully utilized.

Verify that the amplified wireless receivers contain built-in digital amplifiers with low distortion figures. This will keep the receiver cool due to high amplifier power efficiency and provide optimum sound quality. Pick a system which offers receivers that can drive speakers with the desired Ohm rating. Make sure the receivers have a small form factor and are easily mountable. This will help during the set up. 5.8 GHz wireless devices usually have less problems with interference from other wireless transmitters than devices operating at 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz.