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I love the idea of high fidelity, active, wireless speakers, and a transceiver source-control hub... ️

solderdude

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But then you would need to run wires to it now and then which probably aren't out of view and have to plug and unplug it every time.
Probably also while listening to them, as that is when the batteries drain and what I hate about portable audio.

I do think wireless speakers are nonsense (as there will always be wires) and there is yet another 'link' needed with more limitations than speaker wire.
In both the wireless and wired situation where you don't want to see wires they would have to run in the walls or ducting.

Active speakers ... yes please (hoping the electronics will last and is serviceable) .
 

stunta

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But then you would need to run wires to it now and then which probably aren't out of view and have to plug and unplug it every time.
Probably also while listening to them, as that is when the batteries drain and what I hate about portable audio.

I do think wireless speakers are nonsense (as there will always be wires) and there is yet another 'link' needed with more limitations than speaker wire.
In both the wireless and wired situation where you don't want to see wires they would have to run in the walls or ducting.

Active speakers ... yes please (hoping the electronics will last and is serviceable) .

They could have removable battery packs. My lawn products including the mower and snowblower are battery operated and they last more than long enough for my needs. If the speakers and amps are efficient, this may be a viable alternative. Battery tech keeps getting better.

As for wireless, there is a trade-off between reliability and convenience/aesthetics. It should get more reliable over time.
 

Thomas savage

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They could have removable battery packs. My lawn products including the mower and snowblower are battery operated and they last more than long enough for my needs. If the speakers and amps are efficient, this may be a viable alternative. Battery tech keeps getting better.

As for wireless, there is a trade-off between reliability and convenience/aesthetics. It should get more reliable over time.
The new 9ah batteries and even the 5ah ones I use in my mixer at work are amazing really. Battery technology is giving us a real world benefit in our daily life’s.
 
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BillG

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[QUOTE="Thomas savage, post: 105014, but don’t like shoe boxes for speakers but I’m on board with active speakers streaming simply from your phone.

It’s hifi no question.[/QUOTE]

It's available in both bookshelf and tower configurations... :cool:
 

Kal Rubinson

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I love the idea, too, but I will wait until it matures into products that I want to listen to.
 

restorer-john

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They could have removable battery packs. My lawn products including the mower and snowblower are battery operated and they last more than long enough for my needs..

Your needs and someone else's needs are where the divide is. Battery operated lawn products are hilarious IMO. We have a acreage, I spend sometimes 5 hours attacking 6ft high grass and bushes with my brushcutter. Another 2 hours on edging and 2 hours at least with a commercial 4 stroke self propelled (we are on a steep hill) 5HP 24" wide cut mower. Then there's the chainsawing of saplings and clean up with the blowers.

Most people around here have large Ride-on lawn tractors- I can't because our block is so steep (dangerous).

Simple maths tells you no Li-Ion battery pack or even an entire shed-full will ever do that we need.

The lawn mower runs hard constantly (3KW for 2hours)
The brushcutter is pushed hard (1.2KW for 5 hours)
Edge trimmer runs medium for a few hours (1KW for 2 hours)
Chainsaw is another hour (1.5KW for 1 hour), blowing etc etc.

Add all that up and look at the AH /Watt Hour capacity of the packs. Simply put, the energy isn't available.
 

stunta

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This is a strawman argument. One could just as easily argue that they have a workload 100 times larger than yours so your equipment is a joke.
 
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BillG

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As for wireless, there is a trade-off between reliability and convenience/aesthetics. It should get more reliable over time.

The speakers are paired to the hub via an ad-hoc Wifi network, which has been a stable, reliable, and very mature method for many years now. Your assertions about reliability are unfounded... :facepalm:
 
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restorer-john

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This is a strawman argument. One could just as easily argue that they have a workload 100 times larger than yours so your equipment is a joke.

No it isn't. The energy simply isn't there in the Li-Ion battery packs. It's not rocket science. A silly little 18v or (pair) 36v 4AH pack is enough energy for drilling a few holes or whacking up some fence palings with a cordless drill, but for decent lawn equipment, it's a joke and you know it.

A few of my neighbours pissed around with battery powered things- they all went to the landfill or sold at yard sales. I'll admit some handheld battery trimmers might be useful for little old ladies tidying up their flower gardens, but mowing, edging, blowing, chainsawing and brushcutting need real power.
 
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restorer-john

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To me, this is the the future... :cool:

To you it may be the future. To me, it is a retrograde step and does nothing to advance ultimate fidelity. It is an attempt by a pigeonholed (but excellent) company to be 'relevant' with the minimalist crowd who yearn to live in spartan, converted warehouse apartments, with little or no idea other than what they read in the latest hipster magazine while getting their latest haircut.

I mean seriously, look at this clown... This is their marketing image. What a joke.

clown.JPG


P. S. The only other thing I'd like for the system is, to have an optional rechargeable battery pack for each speaker, to make them fully wireless as right now they need to be plugged into an outlet for power.

Speakers that size (the floor-standers and the stand mounted bookshelf ones) are likely to be placed optimally (one would hope) and not moved around much, (except for that awesome rooftop party with Harry Hipster and the Kale Brothers on NYE 2019) so what does it matter if there is a power cord to a high energy supply (AC mains)? Your battery idea is sweet, but not remotely practical or powerful enough for even a modest system.

Apparently it 'boasts' a 250W output for the earth-shatteringly long period of 5 seconds for "massive movie explosions". Give me a break, 5 seconds! Wow, I'm amazed. Any decent power amplifier can do that all day and all night, with peak outputs many times that.

The speakers are paired to the hub via an ad-hoc Wifi network, which has been a stable, reliable, and very mature method for many years now. Your assertions about reliability are unfounded. :facepalm:

I guess if you think streaming over a BT or WiFi aptX lossy connection is good enough for you to be classified "it's HiFi no question", then I guess we are poles apart. (have you ever looked at dropped data in audio over WiFi- it's scary)

DALI is a speaker company that produce some really nice gear (I have some) and I'm glad they are jumping on the lucrative Class D powered bluetooth, hipster, all-in-one solutions to problems that didn't exist, but to declare this crap the 'future' of HiFi is a bridge too far.
 

Thomas savage

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To you it may be the future. To me, it is a retrograde step and does nothing to advance ultimate fidelity. It is an attempt by a pigeonholed (but excellent) company to be 'relevant' with the minimalist crowd who yearn to live in spartan, converted warehouse apartments, with little or no idea other than what they read in the latest hipster magazine while getting their latest haircut.

I mean seriously, look at this clown... This is their marketing image. What a joke.

View attachment 16034



Speakers that size (the floor-standers and the stand mounted bookshelf ones) are likely to be placed optimally (one would hope) and not moved around much, (except for that awesome rooftop party with Harry Hipster and the Kale Brothers on NYE 2019) so what does it matter if there is a power cord to a high energy supply (AC mains)? Your battery idea is sweet, but not remotely practical or powerful enough for even a modest system.

Apparently it 'boasts' a 250W output for the earth-shatteringly long period of 5 seconds for "massive movie explosions". Give me a break, 5 seconds! Wow, I'm amazed. Any decent power amplifier can do that all day and all night, with peak outputs many times that.



I guess if you think streaming over a BT or WiFi aptX lossy connection is good enough for you to be classified "it's HiFi no question", then I guess we are poles apart. (have you ever looked at dropped data in audio over WiFi- it's scary)

DALI is a speaker company that produce some really nice gear (I have some) and I'm glad they are jumping on the lucrative Class D powered bluetooth, hipster, all-in-one solutions to problems that didn't exist, but to declare this crap the 'future' of HiFi is a bridge too far.
A proper fact based thread on the suitability of WiFi for streaming audio at home would make a great thread, personally I’m unaware of any issues.

As a platform Wifi reliably transfers data for billions of people , why is Audio any diffrent if the implementation is adequate and if it’s not why not?
 
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BillG

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A proper fact based thread on the suitability of WiFi for streaming audio at home would make a great thread, personally I’m unaware of any issues.

As a platform Wifi reliably transfers data for billions of people , why is Audio any diffrent if the implementation is adequate and if it’s not why not?

It's such a reliable method that it's been used in professional live audio broadcasting products for many years now.

A simple "audio over wifi" Web search will reveal many companies and products that utilize the technology... :cool:
 

Thomas savage

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As for hipsters , though the sight of them inspires instant rage inside me and promotes desires of extreme violence I do stay in Williamsburg when in NYC because I like their beer, food, art , music ,, they can also often provide decent conversation too. Likewise when recently Iv had cause to visit LA I have enjoyed their hang out spots and all of the above with the addition of spicy German influenced hipster sausage ..

Iv met some really beautiful souls that were hipsters, damn life’s so inconvenient and confusing.
 

solderdude

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Dynaudio (along with Dali, two of my favorite brands) also has a wireless offering using their own 'link' (24/192).
The floorstander has a max power consumption of 165W but suspect it draws about 20W under 'normal' conditions ?
A 300Wh battery (e-bike) will let you listen to it for 2 hours when drawing max power and probably around 10 hours in normal listening mode.
A good habit in that case (to prevent interrupting the listening session) would then be to change or charge the battery after a few hours of listening.
All of this to get rid of a pair of speaker wires ?
When you would be moving the speakers all around the house and use them in your garden etc. the wireless battery operated speaker makes sense. Stationary in the house it just adds a lot of hassle and has no advantages... well perhaps some of the residents can fight over who gets to connect their phone to the speakers.

Swapping out batteries just to listen to your speakers and potentially having to change them in one of your speakers during listening doesn't seem like something I would like.
The mains connection is viable as most active monitors also have a mains connection + line level connection.
wireless with a mains connection doesn't 'solve' many problems.
You 'solve' having to run 2 wires from a power amp by having 2 run 2 power cords with 2 mains plugs.
There is also the need to have either 2 wall sockets close to the speakers or use extension cords.

Heard the Dynaudio XEO 10 a couple of times and one of the vendors told me some users have problems with dropouts occasionally when I specifically asked about this.
This was about a year ago or so.
He also said that in most cases it worked flawless.
The guy I was tagging along with while trying to decide what he wanted ended up with active Dynaudio monitors instead.
 
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BillG

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Dynaudio (along with Dali, two of my favorite brands) also has a wireless offering using their own 'link' (24/192).
The floorstander has a max power consumption of 165W but suspect it draws about 20W under 'normal' conditions ?
A 300Wh battery (e-bike) will let you listen to it for 2 hours when drawing max power and probably around 10 hours in normal listening mode.
A good habit in that case (to prevent interrupting the listening session) would then be to change or charge the battery after a few hours of listening.
All of this to get rid of a pair of speaker wires ?
When you would be moving the speakers all around the house and use them in your garden etc. the wireless battery operated speaker makes sense. Stationary in the house it just adds a lot of hassle and has no advantages... well perhaps some of the residents can fight over who gets to connect their phone to the speakers.

Swapping out batteries just to listen to your speakers and potentially having to change them in one


The keyword in my wish for a battery pack was "optional", just in case you missed it, or perhaps you just desire to argue... ;)

Power storage technology is advancing at a good pace, and we'll see graphene based batteries, with much higher capacities, in a few years - as a matter of fact, I've read that Samsung expects to bring the technology to market very soon.

It won't be long before we have wireless power transmission as well, although that technology is still very specific currently. We actually do this now, using microwaves and lasers, for some commercial and military applications, but I don't think that's been scaled down for home usage just yet - it will come, though. I'm aware of wireless mobile device charging now, but that's still applied near-field, and I'm referring to longer range.

In a future, I can see a home with several wired mains scattered about for legacy appliances. But, everything going forward from this point will be wireless - it's inevitably, desirable, and good...:cool:
 
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restorer-john

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It won't be long before we have wireless power transmission as well, although that technology is still very specific currently.

Yes, so 'specific' it really can't do much more than 200mW 3-4ft from the focused array and only when it is perfectly orientated. Basically, a tiny little phone battery would take 10hours to charge in that ideal situation. Move it a tiny bit off perfect alignment at 3ft and the power drops x10 times.

Focused array for significant domestic power will never happen at 2.4HGz (microwaves remember) as the ERP will exceed all the FCC limits for safe exposure (1Watt). Loosely coupled resonant chargers (inductive) are proven, safe and understood.
 
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restorer-john

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As a platform Wifi reliably transfers data for billions of people , why is Audio any diffrent if the implementation is adequate and if it’s not why not?

I love WiFi, I've been using it since 2000/1 IIRC, back when it was 802.1b @10Mbs, PCMCIA card bus into ancient laptops, right through to what we have now at some obscene connection rate to my router. Dropped packets are a fact of life with WiFi. Many tens of thousands are dropped all the time, but with data, it's not an issue on the whole- the packets get resent and everything waits until the missing packet arrives.

I watch all my movies across WiFi via my router and NAS and love the convenience, but the HTPC is doing plenty of real time buffering and re-constructing after packet losses.

With higher and higher real time rates of streaming data (think DSD 256), dropped packets can and do cause audible glitches. With CD/MD/DAT/DVD/SACD we had very robust and effective error correction and concealment algorithms (CIRC etc), something we simply don't have with files being streamed across WiFi. Modern standalone D/As have no error correction whatsoever as they take the data stream at face value, warts and all.

You don't get those losses over Cat5/6 hardwired.

I killed my WiFi on my main PCs and went back to hardwired LAN to my router because of the interference from 2.4GHz around all my nearby test gear. I got sick of spurious peaks on FFTs that had nothing to do with what I was testing.
 
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