Summit Semiconductor Behind Wireless Home Theater System Launching at CEDIA

Aperion Audio will unveil at CEDIA Expo this week a $2,499 home theater system built around Summit Semiconductor wireless audio technology that gives speaker makers a “turnkey solution” to wireless home theater. Summit’s technology is built into a wireless audio hub with an audio decoder that supports what the company calls the latest Dolby and DTS audio formats. Coaxial, optical and analog inputs are designed for connection to sources including TVs, Blu-ray and game players and digital music players. Aperion, a consumer-direct loudspeaker company, is taking pre-orders for the 5.1-channel active speaker system, which is due to deliver this year.

Summit is holding demos of its wireless technology using Hansong Technologies’ digital wireless audio hub. Hansong is on the prowl for speaker partners at the show, according to general manager Helge Kristensen, who said speaker companies have been asking Hansong for a digital wireless audio hub that can be bundled with speakers at a price affordable to the masses. The company said the hub can support up to seven speakers and a subwoofer and includes support for DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD lossless surround-sound formats. The hub is said to include three HDMI 1.4 inputs and one output.

Wireless speakers have been relegated to the midrange of the market because of performance problems related to interference. Microwave ovens, baby monitors, garage door openers, cordless phones and Bluetooth devices are some of the products that can interfere with audio signals. Tony Parker, vice president of marketing for Summit Semiconductor, said his company’s wireless transmission solution “started from scratch” and uses the UNII band rather than the ISM band. The company is using standard components like 802.11a radios but is not operating in ISM band where Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microwave ovens and other access points compete, he said. ISM operates over three channels at 2.4 GHz and five channels at 5.8 GHz, compared with Summit’s technology in the UNII band between 5 GHz and 5.8 GHz, he said, “but with a much different rule set.” Other wireless audio systems operate in the ISM band, where “the loudest radio wins,” he said. “ISM was designed for data networking, not for the transport of audio,” he said, “and because it’s using TC/PIP protocols, if there are collisions, you have to back off and re-transmit.” Solutions to those collisions include buffering, which is costly to implement, he said, and come at the expense of latency and resulting lip-sync issues.

UNII has more channels available for transmission -- 24 versus eight for the ISM band -- and in the master-slave configuration, speakers can respond only to the master communicating with it. In the master-slave architecture, the speakers, slaves, can respond only to a master talking to it. That eliminates the issue of interference from other devices since speakers can’t transmit or receive and jam the airwaves when not in use, he said. Parker cited a Cisco survey that said 90 percent of the traffic in Wi-Fi space result from beaconing, when Wi-Fi devices are sending out radio signals looking for devices to communicate with. Products like microwave ovens and baby monitors send out signals only when transmitting, he said, but they increase the power of the radio and take over the airwaves when doing so.

In addition to performance, Summit is touting quick-and-easy system setup based on the company’s Speaker Finder feature. Ultrasonic transducers built in to the speakers automatically map the location of each one in a room, Parker said. At power on, the master module requests each speaker to sequentially “chirp” its ultrasonic transducer in a round-robin fashion so that it knows the precise location of each. Parker said individual speakers have built-in delay to time-align the audio so every seating location is a sweet spot with a coherent soundfield and correct imaging. “We've built in a lot of intelligence to make it simple to use,” he said.

CEDIA, the showcase for systems that are custom-installed by professional integrators, doesn’t seem the most suitable forum for a technology with do-it-yourself bragging rights. Custom-installation customers object to a lot more than wires running across the floor: They want speakers hidden altogether in walls or ceilings. “It’s cool technology,” said Ford Montgomery, owner of Chelsea Audio Video, in Beaverton, Ore., but price, brand and margin are among the considerations before he'd offer a wireless system. “A customer would have to really want the wireless aspect of it, because he doesn’t have a choice about brand, since it’s a one-brand system,” he said. The product would have to carry more than a 20-percent margin to make it attractive, he said, and the selection of size, finish, and exclusivity would also need to be taken into account, he said. The women and designers driving many of the high-end electronics purchases these days typically demand in-wall speakers, eliminating a need for wireless ones. “You don’t have to run a low-voltage wire to an in-wall to carry the signal, but you still have to get high-power there,” Montgomery said. “There’s still messiness."

Parker said Summit brought in a dozen custom installers in the past year to gauge their interest. “They all said they could see wireless coming, but the issues have been quality of sound and fidelity that couldn’t meet their requirements,” he said. The company is targeting the gap between $5,000 and $15,000 home theater systems in the retrofit space. He said the systems offer dealers a way to spend less time on labor, including running wires, and less money on expensive equipment.