Speaker manufacturers are constantly questing after the holy grail of home audio: A wireless audio protocol that sounds as good as a wired system. Consumers don't like running cables all over their living rooms to hook up their surround sound speaker systems, so manufacturers are desperate to find a way to deliver audio to speakers wirelessly without losing one iota of sound quality.
Radiient Technologies may have found the answer. A spokesman here at CES in Las Vegas explained that the company's Roomcaster chipset uses an ultra-wideband (3.1-10 GHz) signal to avoid interference from WiFi, microwaves, Bluetooth devices, and so on, transmitting 192 KHz multi-channel audio with no dropouts.
Most wireless audio systems use a dedicated transmitter and receivers, but Radiient's chipset allows each speaker to act as a repeater. A speaker that's receiving a less-than-optimal signal alerts the system, which realigns the audio path between the speakers until the signal becomes perfect once again (it's essentially a mesh network). Unlike 802.11
implementations, the spokesman said, Radiient's wireless protocol has a latency of only 2-3 ms – too brief to cause lipsynch problems while watching video.
I couldn't listen to the system in action because the prototype had apparently overheated the demo room. But Roomcaster is no mere vaporware. After disappearing to confer with a party unseen, the spokesman said that D&M Holdings (Denon and Marantz) has already signed on [see update below] to include Radiient's Roomcaster chips in products scheduled to appear on the market in the next 8-10 months.
If the system works as planned, Radiient's going to make a mint on this stuff. Holy grails don't come cheap.
(Update: Correction made above after the company later contradicted what the spokesperson, whose name I wish I had written down, told me on the show floor. According to Carol Traeger, the second company spokesman, "We regret that the person who conveyed that information to you was misinformed and speaking out of turn." Apparently, Radiient is in talks with Denon and Marantz, but a deal has not been finalized.)
