Wireless Home Theater

Home Theater meets the wireless age

Everythings wireless these days and Home Theater is no exception. Households are powered with wi-fi devices using Bluetooth. Weve been talking on our 5.8 Ghz wireless phones for years now; why shouldnt we see wireless entertainment centers? Well get to why not later, but for now lets look at whats out there and what wireless can do for you.

Todays entertainment technologies are starting to incorporate more and more information technologies with new media today. Wireless media devices today include DAB (digital audio broadcast) players, Onkyos Net Tune, Cambridge Audios music server and other hard drive loaded devices, and especially the granddaddy of them all Microsofts Windows Media Player and its Extender children.
Any of these devices can communicate wirelessly whether with a terrestrial music source as in a DAB radio set, or with other devices that might communicate with your router. Wireless networking your Home Theater hardware is in and many manufacturers do their part to make that easier. Onkyos receivers that are net-tune ready can receive internet radio and have a RJ45 port on back, and you can modernize this old networking technology with wireless adaptors to give you true wireless source.

The other aspect of wireless Home Theater is whats probably most popular but also represents a compromise: wireless speakers. Wireless speakers can represent a problem for audio quality because instead of the audio signal being piped directly into your speaker in the purest form possible, its being converted to radio waves. If thats not bad enough, the audio that was just received wirelessly must now be amplified inside the speaker itself. This means the speaker must either run on batteries or needs to be plugged in to provide volume. Speakers you have to plug in are not wireless and speakers running on batteries are called a ghetto blaster, not a hi-fi Home Theater system.

Wireless speakers alone might be sufficient for some users or they might be ideal for a wireless hybrid speaker system where you use conventional speakers for the front, then for the rear speakers use wireless. Wireless rear speakers are the most permissible choice (if you had to use wireless speakers) because the rear channels arent going to be used as heavily. However, wireless speakers are not hi-fi quality.

Wireless Home Theater systems are well advertised because of their great popularity. Basically a wireless Home Theater system is just a Home Theater in a Box (HTIB) system that uses wireless speakers. If youre thinking of getting into HTIB anyway, wireless speakers arent likely to bring down the quality significantly. But if youre fussy about sound quality and looking for the best quality you can get, you need low impedance high gauge speaker wire running to speakers and a system that consists of separate components. Even if one of your components is a receiver that can do power amp, pre-am and surround processing duties, it will offer you gains over a HTIB.

If youre looking for a wireless HTIB system there are several offerings from Sony. Dont expect full range speakers from this product line, these are small speakers that will only fill very small rooms with sound, but wont measure up to the kind of impact you need for true Home Theater. Sony makes reliable gear and youll get a lot of bang for your buck. Philips also makes a decent quality HTIB wireless system in its MX line that features wireless speakers.