Manufacturers of audio products at this year’s Consumer Electronics show were all about surround sound, as two-channel audio in the home has increasingly become the domain of audiophiles. However, most people would prefer that their living rooms not be strewn with all of the wires necessitated by a 5.1- or 7.1-channel surround system.
One option for companies desperate to convince consumers to upgrade their audio is, quite simply, to fake it. This method involves installing a single wall-mounted speaker bar underneath the television that attempts to trick the ear into thinking that sound is coming from all directions.
Samsung showed off a version of this concept called the Virtual Surround Sound Bar (video), which sends bass frequencies to a wireless subwoofer via Bluetooth.
A spokesperson for Polk Audio, which unveiled its own SurroundBar, said that while each manufacturer has their own special sauce for virtual surround, most work by analyzing the surround signal and adding a slight amount of delay to certain channels before they hit the speakers. Some of these models are designed to bounce sound off of walls. But since living rooms vary in size and shape, Polk tried to design its virtual surround sound bar to work whether there are walls around or not.
I heard both systems, and while they’re infinitely preferable to the sound that emanates from television speakers, neither came close to convincing me that the sound was coming from my left or right, let alone behind me.
The other potential solution is wireless. Bluetooth isn’t up to the task of zapping lossless audio to multiple speakers, according to Samsung’s Vice President of Audio and Video. However, Bluetooth devices, WiFi routers, and microwaves are perfectly capable of interfering with other potential wireless solutions, which is why no high-quality wireless surround sound standard has emerged… yet.
I spotted one company (Radiient), which claims to have solved the problem by sending audio over an ultra-wideband frequency range. By bouncing the UWB signal from speaker to speaker rather than from the receiver to each speaker, the company’s Roomcaster chipset can apparently send 192 KHz audio to a full set of surround sound speakers without suffering interference from other devices. A spokesman for the company said Denon and Marantz (both belonging to D&M Holdings) will be the first brands to roll out Roomcaster-enabled speakers in about 8-10 months.
With Buckminster Fuller’s vision of wireless power still unfulfilled, these "wireless" speakers must be plugged in to a power source. But most living rooms have a fair number of power outlets in them, and connecting the speakers to those is vastly preferable to stringing cables to each of them from a home theater system in the front of the room.
(image from richer sounds ireland)
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