Hi-fi now has a lot of boxes to tick, but could it ultimately be costing consumers?

[What Hi-Fi?]

The release of the excellent KEF LSX II LT has us wondering whether we really need all of these features after all.

Hi-fi now has a lot of boxes to tick, but could it ultimately be costing consumers? : Read more

 

[ultraminiature]

Take any amplifier and passive speakers or analogue active speakers and you can hook them up to just about anything. Going surround sound for movies is just adding speakers, upgrade the amp to an AV Receiver or getting a HDMI debedder to output to 8 channels line level for active speakers.

Most smart speakers can't upscale to surround. A number have poor latency even in stereo by any input wired or wireless. Models further up the price range drop USB and add a cheap phono stage. If I want records then I want moving coil and so still need to buy a moving coil phono stage - I am not looking at a budget system. I loose out on the USB interface as many of the sub £1000 powered speakers make good computer speakers. If they have HDMI inputs that still works when I can use one of the three monitor outputs just for audio.

The streaming DSP, active speakers with room compensation also has the potential issue that all connected devices have to go to the primary speaker; particularly powered speakers. A neater solution is a wireless hub that can take all the inputs and be hidden away along with most of the wires connecting to the speakers over wi-fi (Chrome cast, Airplay 2) or via Ethernet from the router. The DSP and other smarts that allow a bigger sound from a smaller box usually increases the latency giving lip synch delays.

Perhaps lossless Bluetooth, low latency and wi-fi 7 using the 6GHz band will provide a solution and some software to determine the speaker placement in an 8-12 channel system. They could implement WiSA now, but that needs a separate WiSA transmitter.

 

[Dr-G]

Great piece Harry!
TVs are another case in point. Does anyone buy a good quality TV and then listen to it through the TV speakers? Or use the TV to access nextflix? They'll have a sound bar, or surround, and a streaming box of some sort. I currently have four devices in the lounge that could stream Netflix, but only ever use the AppleTV. I'd really like to buy a high quality 'TV' that's just a monitor but it's not possible. The higher the picture quality, the more other stuff gets thrown in...