WiSA Looking for Broad Market Expansion Starting in 2014

LAS VEGAS -- Bang & Olufsen’s commitment to the WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio) standard and its product launch last fall could well be the long-awaited catalyst WiSA proponents have been waiting for to propel the wireless audio technology into the broader CE marketplace. The organization has more than doubled the number of member companies since last CES, Dylan Vance, chief technologist of WiSA, told Consumer Electronics Daily at CES. Last year at CES, there were 10 WiSA members and coming into CES it had 23. “I believe that when we leave CES we'll have 27,” Vance said.

It hasn’t been a quick road to market for WiSA, which was developed at the outset for wireless home theater applications. “Originally the perception was that it wasn’t good enough,” said Vance, regarding the WiSA approach for delivering wireless audio from a source component to a powered speaker. Would-be adopters also hesitated to pursue the technology before a standard was in place, Vance said. With operability proven and a certification program in place, now things are starting to gel, he said.

"All along the quality was there,” Vance said, “but there are a lot of followers in the audio industry. They come by every year to see what’s new,” he said. “As soon as Bang & Olufsen put out a product for real on the shelves that’s the reason membership has doubled,” he said. “Now it’s, ‘if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.'"

Bang & Olufsen’s seal of approval has opened the door to the high-end of the audio market. The most recent WiSA Association add is Danville Signal Processing, a supplier of DSP chips, crossovers and wireless modules, which joined WiSA this week, Vance said. Danville’s business model is to provide a wireless solution for “very high-end, low-volume” customers, the type exhibiting in the high-end audio suites on the top floor of the Venetian Hotel. “They don’t know anything about wireless, or the first thing about implementing it in their products,” Vance said, but many want to enter the space. There are very specific considerations that need to be addressed when developing products with wireless, he said. Danville will act as expert in “integrating the very high-end boutique speakers into the wireless ecosystem,” he said.

With wireless multi-room audio front and center at this year’s CES, expanding the standard to cover that application is the focus of WiSA’s technical advisory committee meeting at CES, Vance said. The group will discuss multi-room requirements and use cases “and make sure we find the interoperability and common ground in the ecosystem between the transmitter side, the manufacturers and brands and the speaker/receiver side,” he said. Multi-room has unique challenges for WiSA, since up until now the standard has been focused on one room, Vance said. Transmitting over distance and through walls are issues that will need to be addressed in the standard, he said.

Lincoln Wilde, director of marketing for WiSA chip maker Summit Semiconductor, demonstrated for us a “proof of concept” 5.1-channel system in the Summit suite, playing a movie stored on an Apple Mini PC acting as the audio source and with music for audio streaming. Summit used an existing transmitter module tweaked with a USB connector that conducted power, audio and control. As a finished product, the transmitter module’s functionality could be built into an AV receiver (AVR) or anywhere where audio is being decoded, Parker said. Through an app, he was able to send stereo music to a set of speakers across the room, simulating another room in a house. That’s a function AVRs have been doing for years, divvying up sources between rooms. WiSA wants to bring that functionality to the wireless world.

The WiSA protocol is flexible, noted Tony Parker, vice president-marketing for Summit. When a home theater isn’t being used for movies, the channels allotted to it could be used for multi-room audio, he said. “Technically there’s no barrier for us to do that,” he said, with adjustments at the application layer enabling that to happen.

Summit is developing extended-distance modules for transmitters and receivers, Parker said. Current models go 30 meters line of sight and the new modules will extend to 100 meters line of sight, Parker said. That will serve two applications: whole-house audio and professional applications, he said. Summit’s new transmitter module will enable the RF signal to transmit further through walls. The module will “turn up the RF power to the maximum levels allowed by the FCC” and other regulatory bodies worldwide, Wilde said.

Summit will be sampling those WiSA modules in May and is working with “early adopter” companies on whole-house strategies, he said. The company is discussing use models manufacturers would like Summit to support in its chip designs, and modules will go into production in the August-September timeframe, he said. “Whether our customers will be ready is hard to say,” but they will have access to modules in May to begin developing their products, Parker said. He added that one customer is developing software around Summit’s current modules in an effort to get to market quickly.

Parker said Summit isn’t trying to compete with Sonos, which can go up to 32 rooms with its multi-room audio system. The WiSA standard is limited to 24 speakers. At the same time, Parker noted that Sonos has a “very complex matrix network that has to be managed with a lot of software and a lot of hardware to buffer audio so that it all plays at the same time.” He touted the low latency of WiSA at 5 milliseconds at 48 kHz, something that “Sonos can’t touch” because of latency and inter-channel delay, he said.

Wi-Fi-based systems carry more cost, which translates to a higher retail price point -- in Sonos’s case a starting point of $300 and above per speaker, Parker said. Summit is positioning WiSA as capable of starting at “less than half the cost of what Sonos would charge you for,” he said. The WiSA solution uses no bridges or routers and one transmitter versus multiple transmitters, he said. And while Sonos requires that a consumer stay within the Sonos line to expand, a WiSA multi-room customer could choose from any certified brand. Options are limited now, but the WiSA Association is looking at broad expansion following Bang & Olufsen’s adoption. Although Bang & Olufsen launched WiSA at the high end, the WiSA Association wants to position the technology to “the average Joe,” Parker said.

In addition to Bang & Olufsen’s nine WiSA-certified products, including three TVs, “many, many companies are behind their doors right now trying to narrow in on what the feature set is going to be for their customer base,” Parker said. Australian company Accusound is set to ship product early this year and Chinese ODMs are readying product that will be branded by other companies, he said.

Parker expects numerous WiSA-enabled products to launch in Q2 and Q3 after a yearlong process to tweak the specification for interoperability. “Working with the WiSA team was an enormous amount of effort, but it’s going to be rewarding,” he said. He predicted six companies will have WiSA-certified products on the market by fall. Some, but not all, will be CEDIA-oriented products. Most of the half-dozen companies will offer multiple products, he said. Summit is also talking to a cable provider about implanting WiSA technology into a set-top box, he said, declining to name the company.

WiSA is also developing an HDMI adapter that eliminates the need for an AV receiver, a concept that’s been at the heart of WiSA since the early days. Wilde showed us a prototype of an HDMI adapter -- similar to one that ODM Hansong is currently developing -- that it’s providing to member companies so that they can develop such a product in their own image, Parker said. The adapter has the basic functionality required to set up, control and manage a WiSA surround-sound system, replacing the need for an AVR when used in WiSA-certified powered speakers. The adapter “has all of the capabilities of an AVR but we've stripped down the inputs and removed the amplifiers,” he said.

The adapter, which could be incorporated into a form factor the size of a Chromecast stick, would use the TV’s HDMI switching capability and the Audio Return Channel (ARC) for audio content. Power to the unit eventually will be via USB due to lower power requirements, Wilde said. In the demo using a Sharp TV, a PS3 was connected to HDMI 2 of the TV, and a Panasonic portable Blu-ray player was connected to HDMI 3. The adapter had an HDMI output to the TV to handle switching between HDMI sources. The adapter attaches to a TV, AVR or game console to support up to 5.1 or 7.1 audio channels, Parker said, with the audio bitstream from the TV decoded by a Summit DSP. Communication was handled over Bluetooth. One usage model would be for a TV maker to bundle the HDMI adapter as a TV accessory so consumers can use the CEC capability of HDMI “to control the whole experience,” Wilde said.

The HDMI adapter is sampling now and Summit is showing it as an accessory bundle opportunity for speaker brands and TV makers, Parker said. “Ironically, some of the folks we're talking to are AVR manufacturers,” he said. “You have to be willing to cannibalize yourself to go after a new market,” he said. “WiSA is starting to grow,” he said. Membership has doubled in the last six months and WiSA expects it to double again in the next six months. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said, regarding AVR makers offering a WiSA option.