Wireless Surround Sound’s Future
Still on the cutting edge is the living legend, Bose.
Bose offers wireless systems that include its patented, revolutionary sonic technology. Bose’s Lifestyle 28 Series II offers a wireless feast of incredible sounds and utter “geek porn” coolness. Its ADAPTiQ audio calibration system allows greater freedom of speaker placement but without the various “spacial adjustments” that typically result from changes in the location of a system’s speakers. This user-friendly technology analyzes the way a given room’s dimensions, layout, structural materials, etc. affect sound, then automatically adjusts the sonic output.
The BoseLink connects compatible Bose products to a Lifestyle system for listening in as many as 14 rooms, including outdoors. It provides independent volume control in each room, as well as access to two different audio streams from the same Lifestyle system.
The BoseLink AL8 “home-wide” wireless audio link, which needs to be bought separately, makes this into a wireless system. Bose’s Direct/Reflecting cube speaker arrays blend reflected and direct sound to recreate a great extent of a live concert’s naturally occurring spacial separations via a natural balancing of reflected and direct sound that is similar to that of a live performance. Stereo sound emerges and surrounds a listener from nearly anywhere in a given room.
Bose’s patented Acoustimass module works in concert with small “cube” speakers to deliver a full range of sound. Acoustimass delivers the clarity of pure low-frequency reproduction even at the lowest frequencies and the loudest levels. A great magic trick is to place the module behind a curtain or chair. With that component out of sight, all of the amazing sound appears to come directly from the cube speakers.
The whole point of Bose’s Lifestyle series is to have a system designed so that every element-the media center, the speakers, and the patented Acoustimass module-works in harmony, enhancing both performance and user-friendliness. Any audiophile needs to consider a system such as what this great company offers.
Yet, Bose is being eclipsed by the young company called Sonos.
Sonos has offices in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass. The company was founded by a group of people with successful backgrounds in researching and developing media technologies who happen to all be music loves that wished to find a better way to bring music to their ears within their homes.
The Sonos system allows you to have up to 32 independent music players within one house, all controlled by one wireless, sleek-looking, and extremely user-friendly remote control. The same track can be played simultaneously in all Zones, or each Zone can be simultaneously playing different tracks, or any combination in between (such as, hypothetically, three Zones playing one track while seven other Zones play a second track). Each Zone can either stream music from your music library, any of the ZonePlayer line inputs, or the Internet (via free online radio stations supported by Sonos or user-added MP3-streaming broadcasts). You can send any two-channel source into a ZonePlayer and then stream that source to any or all of your other zones. One user advises hooking up the CD or DVD player’s analogue outputs to the nearest ZonePlayer, which allows you to quickly send a brand new disc, or perhaps one you haven’t yet encoded, to another room with the push of a button.
The remote-accessed Music Library allows one to choose music to play by: artist; album; composer; genre; track (all accessible tracks are listed in alphabetical order); imported play lists; or browsing folders (a convenient folder view of all of one’s stored music per shared resource).
There are digital media receivers such as the Roku Soundbridge, which is a network music player that lets one play one’s PC or Mac digital music files anywhere in the house and thereby connects one’s stereo or powered speakers to one’s computer’s digital music library. WMA, AAC*, MP3, AIFF and WAV music formats are supported. It is network ready with wired Ethernet and a CompactFlash Wi-Fi adapter. However, Sonos goes beyond such devices. The Sonos ZonePlayers connect up to the central system and they work wirelessly over the W- Fi band. Very few people have the structured Ethernet wiring which allows one to put the units where one wants them to go and not just where one’s networking is available. The Sonos R & D team created a mesh networking technology, so that one is not tethered to any particular access point. Indeed, it contains its own secure Wi-Fi wireless network, which actually co-exists with one’s existing wired or wireless network and works with both Windows PCs and Apple’s MacIntosh. Because of this technological advancement, Sonos is extremely quick and easy to set up, install, and use.
The future of whole house music management is here now.
