Improving Wireless Audio

Part 2 Evolution and Exciting Perspectives, Even though key technologies remain in development, wireless audio evolution beyond Bluetooth offers some very promising perspectives to the industry. Let's look at the efforts and the most promising platforms and technologies for wireless audio.

- J. Martins

Wireless audio technologies remain a work-in-progress after several decades. As mentioned in the first part of this article, the lack of interoperability between proposed solutions, most using proprietary technology while sharing the available unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum of the original Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) radio bands, have resulted in consumer confusion and lack of awareness of the full possibilities of wireless audio.

Consumers are able to understand some sort of replacement of wired connections they use today, but wireless audio in the digital age is a much more complex environment, with streaming services over the Internet as sources, signal distribution in the home using Local Area Network (LAN) standards, not to mention the lack of interoperability in multiroom synchronization.

With the overwhelming consumer awareness of Bluetooth, consumers understand the convenience of wireless, but it also created more confusion and distrust. Bluetooth is still considered too complicated and unreliable by most consumers, and only recently the key challenges for basic true wireless reproduction of stereo signals were sorted.

In this article, we are exploring alternative technologies to Bluetooth that pave the way for building future wireless audio standards. We also discuss different use cases that will never be covered by Bluetooth. And those remain largely tied to Wi-Fi standards, and radio frequency transmission in the same unlicensed bands using proprietary digital encoding and protocols.