Samd said:
Given that wifi in most (?) homes is becoming standard fare and, that wifi is lossless, why are we not seeing wifi in more applications in mainstream hifi deployment?
1. Active speakers need power but could be wirelessly connected.
2. I have my CXN and Oppo BD next to the arm of my chair for convenience in operation but with 12m connectors - wireless to the amp? etc etc
Is it cos we just love cables and we'd have nowt to argue about?
We have quite a few products which offer a choice of WiFi or wired Ethernet connections. It is pretty much standard on streamers these days, but quite rare on servers. The rationale here is that a server might need to support multiple concurrent streams, which is easy to do with wired Ethernet, but quite challenging with WiFi.
WiFi has some limitations compared to wired Ethernet, most notably that all of the devices on the network are sharing the same bandwidth. Not only is the practical maximum speed of a WiFi network much slower than a typical wired network connection, it is shared between all of the connected devices. Only one device can transmit reliably at a time and there is some overhead incurred in the process of listening for a gap in the transmissions from other devices and waiting your turn. WiFi is not inherently lossless but then neither is wired Ethernet. Its losslessness (if that is a word) comes from protocols layered on top which provide error detection and error correction. The most common of these is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), but equipment manufacturers and software developers are free to apply their own error correction schemes or accept some errors in exchange for reduced bandwidth requirements or lower latency. Most modern network streaming products use some form of error correction, but this comes with an overhead of its own, as requesting and resending packets takes up more bandwidth and increases latency.
Theoretically, you could build WiFi connectivity into active speakers, but there are a few things to consider. A CD quality losslessly compressed FLAC file or stream requires approximately 1.5Mbps, which most modern WiFi networks can handle easily, as long as the signal does not have to travel far. But the network speed drops rapidly as you move further from the router or wireless access point, or as it passes through walls and other obstacles. High definition audio obviously requires much more bandwidth. If you send the data uncompressed then you might need up to twice as much bandwidth. At this point, playing music without dropouts or long delays for buffering large amounts of data becomes quite challenging.
There are all sorts of ways to work around the limitations of a typical single router / wireless access point home network. The best performing option is to have multiple wireless access points with wired "backhaul" connections to the router. The latest generation mesh WiFi products like Orbi and Velop, which use separate radios for wireless backhaul, are probably the next best thing. However, equipment manufacturers know that most people just have a single router and do not have much appetite for spending hundreds or even thousands of pounds beefing up their WiFi network, so most of them recommend using wired Ethernet for greater stability.