Wireless speakers always come with lots of stuff.
It seems like every time I'm in a store that sells speakers I hear someone asking about wireless speakers.
It's a great idea, but then reality sets in: wireless speakers always have wires.
And get this: most wireless speakers have more wires than standard "wired" speakers. Think about it--a regular speaker has a wire that delivers both power and signal to the speaker. Since wireless speakers aren't "powered" by your receiver or amplifier, they have to be plugged into an AC power outlet (that, or come with built-in power amps that must be plugged into a power outlet). Another wire connects the amp to each speaker.
Affordable wireless speakers are never terribly good speakers. It seems like all of the engineering effort is directed at the wireless part, and sound quality is an afterthought.
Sure, transmitting signals to the speaker is relatively easy, but wireless receiver electronics are likely to degrade the sound compared to conventional wire. So wireless costs more and sounds worse! Nice!
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"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899.
This infamous quote has been bandied about forever, but let's try to apply it to our times. Sure, the old commissioner was off by a bunch of decades, but what's left to be invented in audio and video now?
Yes, there will be higher than high-definition video, HDMI 1.4, and speakers that sound like real life, but those are refinements of already existing technologies.
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
Perhaps we've hit an impasse and we're not going to see any really new products for a few decades. What will a 2012 Blu-ray player do that a 2008 player cannot? Oh right, there may not be any Blu-ray players by 2012, there may a new format by then. But what will it do that a 2008 Blu-ray player cannot?
How about an iPod small enough to be injected into your bloodstream? You would just think about a song or movie, and it would play back in your head.
Who knows, maybe by 2012 there will be wireless speakers that don't have any wires. But it might take until 2022 before someone figures out how to make totally wireless speakers that actually sound good.
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Wireless speakers usually come with a lot of wires.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Fact is, all of the wireless speakers I've reviewed for CNET still use speaker wires to do what speaker wires always do, deliver audio signals from power amplifiers to the speakers. And since wireless speakers have built-in power amplifiers, they need to be plugged into an AC wall outlet. So where a standard speaker has one wire, the wireless speaker has at least two! The "wireless" part refers to the system's ability to wirelessly transmit audio signals from the front of the room to the surround speakers.
The two wireless transmission systems, infrared and radio frequency, are fraught with problems. They all too frequently add noise, hiss, and pops--and when they're not adding those nasties--they just quit entirely and the sound cuts out. Infrared systems beam light from a transmitter, usually placed somewhere near the A/V receiver or home theater in a box DVD player, to the wireless speakers (so there must be a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the speakers). Depending on the room's physical layout, that may or may not be easy to implement. Radio frequency systems get around that hassle, but can have noise and radio frequency interference problems of their own.
Oh, and for the most part wireless speakers are pretty lame sounding speakers. They're typically woofers only, one-way systems--eliminating the tweeter gets around some of the noise problems associated with wireless speakers--and always at the cost of eliminating treble detail. Hi-fi they're not.
KEF's Universal Kit.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Now, that's I've totally trashed the wireless fantasy, there's one wireless system that I can get behind, KEF's Universal Wireless Kit. The "universal" tag refers to the kit's ability to be used with almost any speakers: big ones, small ones, you name it. I used the kit with my high-end Dynaudio Contour 1.1 speakers, and came away impressed with the wireless KEF's sonics. That said, even the KEF system comes with a big mess 'o' wires. Reality bites.
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