Ipad to wireless speakers directly ?

[Snooker]

Can you stream music from say an IPAD directly to wireless speakers consisting of a built in dac and amp, suppose it has to currently go through a box to separte the two channels for the speakers ?

 

[davedotco]

There are some design issues that make this qute diffucult though.

The big issue is that digital audio is always transmitted as a single datastream containing both left and right channels, this is true whether wired or wireless. In most situations the dual channel datastream is detected, organised (buffered, reclocked), than split into left and right channels for D to A conversion, often all within the same chip.

The important thing here is that much of the processing is done while the datastream is still dual channel, so any slight delay caused by buffering or reclocking is the same for both channels. Now, let's say you had a dac in both left and right speaker, it is easy to have the left speaker handle the left signal and of course the right signal does the same. The speakers will be in different positions and if they are totally independent there is no way that the buffering or reclocking will have identical time delays, so you end up with the two channels out of sync, this is not good.

As far as I know there are three ways to solve this issue...

The first is the 'master/slave' configuration, ie all the processing and amplification is done in the master with an analogue signal sent to the slave speaker at 'speaker' level. Most powered speakers work this way.

Secondly you can put a dac in each speaker and share data wia a link to keep everything in sync, the smaller Adam Artist and the Yamaha NX-N500 do just that.

Thirdly you can use expensive dac/processors that are fast and accurate enough to keep everything in sync, some pro monitors work this way though some still use a central contoller to achieve this.

This applies to any 'digital active' speaker whether wired, Airplay or Bluetooth.

There are examples of all available, Bluetooth is the most common but Airplay is available if you look around,

 

[Al ears]

If you just need small desktop so I suggest you look at the Frankenspiel FS-X these use method two mentioned above and automatically create a stereo pair on power up.