Wireless Home Theatre - up to scratch?
There's a new buzz beginning to circulate in consumer home theatre: wireless home theatre. Put your speakers anywhere you want, without those nasty cables! Like all new technologies, it isn't just quite "there" yet. Read on to see if it's worth jumping into now, or waiting for the technology to improve...
The concept behind wireless home theatre is great: get rid of those nasty cables and enjoy easy audio placement anywhere in your house. While the concept is great, the execution (for today at least) is far from optimal.
For starters, audio cables, love them or hate them, are still the best way to get a good audio signal from A to B. While they often lead to a spaghetti like mess and an unsightly visual appearance, cables are a tried and tested technology. They're also extremely cheap and reliable: forget what that pompus audiophile you know may try to tell you, a simple audio cable provides 99.9% of the audio accuracy as those highly expensive "pro" monster audio cables and the like. Don't overlook the connectors though: it is there where quality does count, as the connectors are where you can lose signal quality and add noise.
However, back to wireless. The sad fact is that this area is still in its infancy and for most consumers the pros of "audio" anywhere are massively outweighed by the cons. Most wireless home theatre systems still operate on a frequency of around 900MHZ. For the non technically inclined, this is a weak signal, prone to interferance and greatley limited by distance. 900MHZ may seem impressive, until you consider that most wireless digital home phones operate at at least 2.4GHZ (2400MHZ). A 900MHZ wirless home theatre system is going to give you poor audio no matter how you look at it and the signal will be under constant interfereance from just about any other electrical signal in the house... noise free this connection will not be.
The good news is that, at last, home consumer systems are now coming out at much stronger frequencies like the previously mentioned 2.4GHZ standard. A stronger signal means better quality and improved reliability. While true audiophiles will still stay far away from these new improved wireless audio systems, they are almost there for your everyday consumer who wants to place their speakers where they want, without the unecessary inconvience audio cables. As usual, time will only bring about further improvements and within a few years, you can expect much better products at a much reduced price. Now if only we could work out how to deliver power wirelessly, then we would truly be able to have a cable free environment...
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