Sunday, March 23, 2014

Just How Do Contemporary Wireless Speakers Overcome Interference?

By Mike Heller


Wireless audio is now popular. A multitude of consumer products including wireless speakers are cutting the cord plus offer greatest freedom of movement. I am going to investigate how most recent wireless systems can address interference from other transmitters and just how well they perform in a real-world scenario.

The buzz of cordless gizmos including wireless speakers is responsible for a quick increase of transmitters which broadcast in the preferred frequency bands of 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 Gigahertz and thus wireless interference has turned into a significant problem.

Conventional FM transmitters typically work at 900 MHz and do not possess any specific method of dealing with interference but switching the transmit channel can be a strategy to deal with interfering transmitters. Advanced sound systems employ digital sound transmission and in most cases work at 2.4 Gigahertz. These kinds of digital transmitters transmit a signal which takes up much more frequency space than 900 MHz transmitters and therefore have a greater possibility of colliding with other transmitters.

One of these methods is called forward error correction or FEC in short. The transmitter will transmit extra information besides the audio data. The receiver uses an algorithm that uses the additional data. In the event the signal is damaged during the transmission resulting from interference, the receiver can easily filter out the incorrect data and recover the original signal. This technique works if the level of interference won't exceed a certain threshold. FEC is unidirectional. The receiver doesn't send back any kind of data to the transmitter. As a result it is frequently employed for systems including radio receivers in which the quantity of receivers is large.

Another technique makes use of bidirectional transmission, i.e. every receiver sends information to the transmitter. This method is only practical if the quantity of receivers is small. In addition, it requires a back channel to the transmitter. The information packets have a checksum from which every receiver can determine whether a packet was received correctly and acknowledge correct receipt to the transmitter. If a packet was damaged, the receiver is going to alert the transmitter and ask for retransmission of the packet. Consequently, the transmitter needs to store a certain amount of packets in a buffer. Likewise, the receiver must maintain a data buffer. This is going to introduce an audio latency, also known as delay, to the transmission which can be an issue for real-time protocols such as audio. Generally, the bigger the buffer is, the larger the robustness of the transmission. A big latency can be a problem for certain applications nonetheless. Particularly if video exists, the audio tracks ought to be in sync with the video. In addition, in multichannel surround sound applications in which several speakers are wireless, the wireless speakers ought to be in sync with the corded speakers. Systems which incorporate this particular mechanism, nevertheless, are limited to transmitting to a few receivers and the receivers use up more energy.

To avoid crowded frequency channels, a few wireless speakers keep an eye on clear channels and may change to a clear channel as soon as the existing channel gets occupied by another transmitter. Considering that the transmitter lists clean channels, there is no delay in looking for a clean channel. It is simply selected from the list. This technique is frequently referred to as adaptive frequency hopping spread spectrum.



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