Distributing your music wirelessly throughout your house is a tempting option for people who do not have speaker wiring installed throughout the home. There are several models of wireless music systems on the market. However, how well do they perform in a real-world scenario with lots of wireless interference? I will take a look at some popular products and investigate how well they perform to help you decide which system to purchase.
When looking for a wireless media product, there are several considerations such as how many wireless devices are supported, is the audio streamed compressed or uncompressed, what is the quality of the audio converters and how far can I transmit the audio. One very important consideration though is how reliable is the transmission itself.
Realiability is crucial since the frequency bands which are used by unlicensed transmitters are becoming increasingly crowded by other transmitters, cordless phones, wireless networks, Bluetooth etc. All of these gadgets compete for the same frequency space. As such chances are the the transmission is affected by a competing device.
Modern wireless music systems usually employ digital transmission. Digital transmission is able to tolerate interference to some extent by using error correction and retransmits. As such such digital systems tend to perform fairly ell even in environments crowded by other radiators.