Home audio without the wires

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For its part, Neosonik has come up with chips that employ a proprietary protocol for synchronized streaming of multiple audio/video signals. It runs over the same frequencies as 802.11(a) wireless technology, but it isn't Wi-Fi, so it's insulated from that traffic.

"You can't get it from anyone else but us," Feldman said. The company also doesn't convert the digital signal into an analog signal until it hits the speakers. In most systems, the digital-to-analog conversion occurs at the CD player.

In many wireless systems, the data sent to the different speakers may arrive several milliseconds apart. As a result, you get a lot of "drift" with the sound: it sounds like someone is moving the speakers around the room. In video, that translates to pixilation.

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By contrast, the data is synchronized in the nanosecond range in the Neosonik system. A guitar track (or water droplet sound) that the artist intended to "sound" like it's on the far left of the listener sounds that way.

Video files are also synchronized tightly, so viewers don't get jitter. Those files include video based on the 1080i standard, which provides a display of 1,080 lines with interlaced scan, although at the moment it can't handle 1080p, which has the same display resolution but uses the smoother progressive scan.

"We can output 1080i across the wireless link. Later, we will be able to do 1080p, but there is virtually no content out there right now in 1080p," Feldman said. "By the time there is enough 1080p content, we will have 1080p wireless to support it."

High expectations
There is plenty of pent-up demand for wireless audio and video. Sometimes, that demand has translated into premature product releases--and purchases. Last year, I bought a pair of wireless Acoustic Research speakers touted highly in a review in The New York Times. A week later, my wife and I tossed them out: although only about 20 feet from the receiver, the static was unbearable. In the Neosonik testing station--a folding chair in the back of a marine warehouse--the music and TV playback are as good as any wired home-theater system.

"It (the Neosonik speaker system) is very good in terms of the way it sounds," said Antonio Long, who runs Audio Vision, a high-end audio store in San Francisco, which has agreed to start selling Neosonik's system. "Wireless speakers are something we get a request for about once a day, but we don't sell them now. There is nothing we'd put our mark on now."

Neosonik is banking on that demand, Although few have ever heard of the company, it's no start-up. In 1994, Feldman, who had worked in several audio companies, was eating at a Chinese restaurant in El Granada, a small coastal town near Half Moon Bay. He had just returned from CES, where he had noticed something unusual: all of the high-end audio manufacturers were showcasing their speakers by playing CDs.

Even though CD players had been on the market for years, most high-end audio manufacturers had previously stuck to showcasing their stuff by playing good ol' vinyl.

"It was pretty clear that everything was going digital," Feldman said.

Still, that creates a problem. Digital signals don't sound like music to humans. The data stream has to be converted back into its analog form. Analog signals, however, degrade. The problem can be fixed with amplifiers. But, as anyone who ever visited a stereo store can attest, amplifiers climb rapidly in price as quality improves.

"Why don't we keep it digital all the way to the edge, the loudspeakers?" Feldman wondered. "The final moment is when the cone in the speaker pulses."

His first idea was to get rid of the digital-to-audio converter chip. Instead, the amplifier acts as the converter. It issues pulses of power that then pulse the speaker cone. Thus, the signal doesn?t fade. "The amp is basically the D-to-A converter," Feldman said. Compression is less of a problem.

Later, he grafted wireless onto the concept. Last year, Neosonik began to show off a version of the system for stereo to major manufacturers. This year, the company started to demonstrate how video and audio can travel over the system.

Although the system works, Neosonik, among others, faces perhaps an even bigger hurdle of market acceptance. For every Google or Dell that has become a household name, there are millions of also-rans. The hardware business can be even harder than making it on the Web, due to manufacturing costs and retailing issues.

Neosonik plans to do a hybrid strategy. It will release home theater systems--which includes the receiver-like box and speakers--under its own name next year. The systems, which will sell for between $6,000 and $10,000, will be sold at high-end audio stores, while cheaper versions costing $3,000, along with separate components, will begin to pop up in stores like Magnolia a little later. Prototypes will be shown at CES, and the company plans to start taking orders in the middle of 2007.

At the same time, the company will embark on a licensing strategy. In a way, the retail strategy exists to impress the major manufacturers and potential licensees.

"These guys really don't want to talk to you until you have a name," Feldman said.

In the meantime, Feldman, Rust and the rest of the employees will be tinkering away at the warehouse.