WiSA Looks to Online Storefronts, Cheaper Modules to Broaden Brand Reach

The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association (WiSA) is hoping to ride what Summit Wireless CEO Brett Moyer sees as an affirmation of the TV as the “central gateway” into the home’s entertainment room, the executive told us in an interview. The COVID-19 pandemic helped prop up the TV as the central screen in the home after several years of losing younger viewers' eye share to tablets and smartphones, Moyer said. Now the smart TV's growing sophistication as an interactive device in the streaming age is making it, again, “the center of the house,” he said.

“Very-thin TVs have very poor audio,” Moyer said, which gave rise to a booming sound bar category. WiSA wants to take some of that share with what it sees as a better quality surround-sound experience, and it’s looking at the next generation of IP-based technology and a lower cost speaker module to bring the technology to a broader user base.

WiSA seeded the market with ODM brand Platin in the spring with a complete 5.1 high-res audio $999 system that has gotten positive reviews. On whether he’s concerned that a lower cost, lower performance audio module could dilute the WiSA brand, Moyer said the next-generation product will be “not the best in the industry like the current generation is, but more than good enough.”

Doing the math, he said $6 savings per speaker in a six-speaker system, plus markup, can allow a speaker company to deliver “all the benefits of multiple speakers to the consumer for a $100-$200 lower street price” than what's currently available. Higher end speaker brands Bang & Olufsen and Samsung’s Harman will continue to offer higher performance systems they sell now, he said, but the $6-per-speaker savings could “clearly change” what higher volume speaker makers can do with WiSA, calling the next-gen product “an extension of WiSA, not a cannibalization.” Eventually, the goal is to get WiSA down to a “set of code that you can load into the TV so that it’s 50 cents or something,” he said.

On the technology side, lower-priced modules would still have “tight” synchronization, he said, and latency might stretch from 5 milliseconds to, possibly, 20 milliseconds, which Moyer said would be imperceptible to most consumers: “The vast majority of the market will not see a difference or hear a difference,” he said, “but they’ll get a lower price point and an easier ability to experience spatial sound.” He said, “You can meet Dolby standards with a lot lower performance than what we do currently.” WiSA announced support of Dolby Atmos height speakers last year.

Moyer envisions WiSA Ready systems at different price points from various brands, crediting LG’s adoption of the technology in 2018 (see 1907250048) with “driving all the design wins that you started seeing in 2020 and 2021.” Multiple TV brands will be capable of working in WiSA systems in different ways, some WiSA Ready, some WiSA-certified. LG and Hisense TVs route the audio through the USB port for a lower cost solution “and easier adoption,” he said.

Toshiba's Regza TV family was the first to be certified WiSA SoundSend-compatible; more are coming, he said. That means WiSA has certified that the brand’s TVs “have all the proper implementation of [Consumer Electronics Control] to work with SoundSend.”

CEC has been a stumbling block for WiSA, said Moyer, saying it has also been an issue for sound bars when it comes to controlling volume. Problems with CEC implementation on the TV is the second-most frequent problem WiSA support sees behind the need to tell the TV to use the external audio output, he said. “There are problems with how TV brands have implemented CEC,” he said: “It's not consistent, it's not clean, it's not universal, and it's been going on for years.”

WiSA is selling the SoundSend transmitter under the Platin brand to try to eliminate CEC problems. The $179 disc works with TVs supporting Audio Return Channel or Enhanced Audio Return Channel on an HDMI output. SoundSend receives the audio, decodes it and transmits it wirelessly to WiSA-certified speakers.

TV makers not certifying their sets to be WiSA Ready can have their TV’s operating system certified with SoundSend, Moyer said. On Android TVs, consumers will be able to download the SoundSend app to the TV “and run everything from the TV,” Moyer said. “It means we’ve tested it,” he said. “There could be problems with how CEC’s implemented on that TV” with a sound bar, he said, “but we’ll stand behind that TV’s operating system working with SoundSend flawlessly. SoundSend validates that SoundSend and all the CEC commands of the TV work well,” he said.

Next-gen WiSA modules could reach the market next year, appearing in speakers in the second half. Compatible TVs could follow in 2023, Moyer said. The timeline is behind what the organization had hoped for, but Moyer said Wi-Fi development issues, not component shortages, are the cause of the delay. “The next generation is designed to take what we know and move it to standard Wi-Fi chips so you drop your costs,” he said. “There are certain features that we are looking for in Wi-Fi chips that are just starting to show up,” he said. He declined to expand.

WiSA parent company Summit Technologies is banking on SoundSend and lower priced systems to be the drivers that finally bring WiSA, which we started following in 2012 (see 1211060075), into the mainstream spotlight. Klipsch announced the first WiSA-enabled wireless home theater speaker system in 2015, only to have product pulled from Best Buy shelves in 2016 due to a screeching sound that came from the speakers due to a missed software update from the speakers’ digital signal processing manufacturer, Moyer said. The Best Buy website shows a WiSA-Ready center-channel speaker and subwoofer but not a complete WiSA system. Klipsch didn't comment on the company's plans for WiSA product.

Summit brought the Platin line to Best Buy in April to “support the category,” Moyer said. The product was shown as “no longer available in new condition” at Best Buy Monday; it had eight reviews with a 4.4 average out of five. A search for WiSA on the Best Buy website brought up the Klipsch WiSA center speaker and subwoofer, a $279 Axiim WiSA and transmitter and nonwireless speaker systems from Definitive Technology and Yamaha that aren't WiSA-Ready. The search also showed an LG soundbar/subwoofer system that's not part of the WiSA ecosystem.

Now WiSA is targeting seven virtual store-within-a-store outlets where online customers can see how WiSA speaker systems, SoundSend products and compatible TVs work together. The virtual storefronts -- at Amazon, Electronics Express, Walts TV, Beach Camera, BuyDig and soon, B&H Photo and Focus Camera -- will have marketing, advertising, channel sales support and advanced notice of new WiSA-certified and WiSA-Ready products, the company said this month.

As for Best Buy, “we relieved ourselves of any obligation to not make money at Best Buy,” said Moyer. Platin was placed there only “to support a category build," he said. "If Klipsch isn’t in Best Buy, or Enclave or somebody else, then there’s no point for Platin to be there and to lose money.” WiSA would “love to go back into Best Buy,” but only if the retailer carried a “bunch of products that are certified with four or five brands,” said Moyer. Best Buy didn't comment.