Wireless Speaker Advice

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If you're investing in a sound system for your living room, or even if you're kitting out your whole house, you'll generally need to lay cables to where the individual speakers are.  This means one of two things: (1) You hire a professional to lay the cables in the walls, or (2) you'll have to put up with cables trailing over your floor.  If you're anything like me, you don't want the cables all over the floor. 

A simple alternative to this is investing in wireless speaker (or several).  A wireless speaker is like a traditional loudspeaker; however, there's no need for cables.  There's a base unit, which connects to your sound system, and this simply transmits the signal over radio waves to each individual speakers.  This set-up negates the need for trailing wires, and means that you can place a speaker wherever there's a power outlet. 

In fact, a lot of units will also allow you to power them with batteries, which can be great if you're having a barbecue, for example, and want to move the music outside without moving the whole sound system.  It's also possible to buy weatherproof wireless outdoor speakers for permanently positioning outdoors without the risk of damaging them.  If you do choose a wireless outdoor speaker, ensure you install it correctly or you run the risk of electric shock if you get water inside it.

The wireless speaker system can be connected to any standard audio output. This includes a stereo, mp3 player, TV, DVD player etc. etc... Most systems achieve this with a standard RCA plug. So you can use them for any purpose: Speakers for MP3 players, wall speakers etc.

Most systems use the same transmission frequency band as cordless telephones (900 MHz) and some use the same band as wireless routers (the 2.4 GHz band). Modern speakers rarely experience interference issues, and even if they do occur, most models also have a tuning knob, which will allow you to switch the transmission channel (in a similar way that you can on your wireless router) to minimise any disruption to your audio.

A lot of manufacturers boast that their system can be used in up to a 100m radius. In my experience, I find this to be an exaggeration. However, the majority of units can cover a rather large area, and unless your house is huge, you should be safe to put the speakers anywhere.

Wireless speaker systems are gaining more and more popularity with consumers, especially when it comes to wireless computer speakers and wireless surround sound speakers (if you've got a home theatre with 5.1 surround, the speakers at the back can be a pain to install; wireless stereo speakers remove this problem).  The increase in popularity is simply because they're exceptionally easy to install and don't clog up your floorspace with ugly cables.  They have received a lot of bad press in the past because of problems with interference from other wireless devices.  In recent years, however, the quality has improved dramatically.

However, that being said, you need to be careful about the type of speakers you buy to ensure that they will produce good quality sound.  There are a couple of ways the base station will broadcast the audio to the wireless speakers. 

The first is by broadcasting it over a traditional FM signal (think how you listen to normal analogue radio).  This is obviously not the highest quality audio and so, regardless of how good the speaker is, you'll never get amazing sound if the base station broadcasts in this manner.

The best, and increasingly most common way, is by digital transmission. This leaves (or converts) the audio into a digital stream and broadcasts the stream to the speakers.  This means that the stream received is a perfect representation of the original audio.  Think about your digital cable TV and how that's always a much clearer picture than that of the old analogue broadcasts.  So my advice is to always opt for digital wireless speakers – they usually cost a little more, but it's well worth it in terms of sound quality.

Costs range from about $60 to well over $200. Whilst it's certainly not necessary to spend hundreds of dollars, if you are investing in a set of these speakers, I'd advise you to opt for at least the mid-range. Choose a speaker with a good standard specification, and you shouldn't really go wrong.

In general, if you're anything at all like me, as long as you choose carefully the speakers you need, you'll be really pleased you switched from traditional wired speakers.