Summit Wireless Technology Delivers Uncompromised Wireless HD Audio

What is Summit Wireless?

Summit Wireless™ is an audio integrated circuit solution that will be embedded in speakers, audio/video receivers, digital televisions, gaming devices, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes, enabling them to broadcast high-definition surround sound wirelessly and simply.

Ease of Set-Up
Today’s wired systems are laborious and complicated to setup and optimize. They require stringing speaker wire, connecting speakers to the correct audio channel, with the correct polarities (negative/positive) and speaker placement within a room.  Even after the initial set up you have the additional challenge of getting your home theater to sound good which can take hours to properly calibrate and is often beyond the consumers comfort level.  This complexity is one major reason why systems are rarely set up properly resulting in inferior sound quality.

For proper set up, knowing the speaker locations is key. Summit Wireless accomplishes this by using ultrasonic technology to locate each speaker’s position within a room. This solution not only is fast, accurate, reliable and cost effective, but is also inaudible by the listener. Summit’s patented SpeakerFinder™ technology, identifies the number of speakers in the system, their location to within one inch, assigns the correct audio channel and establishes a default sweet spot in the center of the room. Amazingly this is all done on system power up in less than a few seconds.  Summits’ MyZone™ technology extends the ultrasonic location technology of SpeakerFinder by embedding an ultrasonic transducer in the remote. With a simple press of a button, the users’ location is found, and the audio sweet spot is moved to that location by adjusting each speaker’s volume and delay instantly to the listener’s current position

To break it down more succinctly, the Summit Wireless system employs what they refer to as a "fast set-up methodology" that works as bulleted below:

• Automatic discovery of speakers
• Automatic channel assignment
• Mapping of speaker location within 1 inch
• Automatic sweet spot configuration
• Automatic scalability from 2.0 to 7.1 speakers
• Instant volume and time alignment adjustment from your listening position
  
  

High Fidelity
For the best audio reproduction, delivering the audio, exactly as it was mastered to the speakers is the primary objective. The attraction to wireless connectivity is that you can avoid audio losses due the resistance and inductance inherent to the speaker wire by transmitting your digitally recorded content over the air. However, traditional wireless audio systems based on WiFi and Bluetooth technologies suffer from limited bandwidth and interference from other wireless sources that operate in the same frequency band. Often audio compression techniques are used to allow a large amount of HD audio content to be transmitted over a limited bandwidth wireless connection, but in doing so audio fidelity is sacrificed at the speaker. Interference on the other hand causes interruptions to the audio signal triggering retransmissions of the lost audio data adding unwanted latency that can introduce lip-synch issues between audio and video sources.  Finally passive speakers with analog crossovers limit the speaker designer's ability to fully compensate for the amplifier and speaker combinations. Often, user listening preferences and speaker placement options are unaddressed by today’s analog speaker designs.  

The Summit Wireless solution uses a pure digital path from the source to the speaker that is uncompressed and up to 24-bit, 96 KHz. Using a proprietary audio-specific network, latency is kept to a minimum at 2.2ms to eliminate lip-sync issues. The digital filters in the Summit solution enable the speaker designer to fully compensate for amplifier and speaker characteristics including time alignment from offset drivers and can be programmed with different filter sets for different listening styles and speaker environments. 

Robust Wireless Network
Today’s wireless audio networks operate in the congested ISM bands found at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. Congestion occurs in these bands due to WiFi, Bluetooth, microwave ovens, cordless phones, and other equipment, and operate with few rules to avoid interference. Typically, the loudest or strongest radio will gain access to the frequency by overpowering all other devices running in the same band. A limited number of channels (3 in 2.4 GHz, 5 in 5.8 GHz) coupled with increasing demand severely limits channel availability. Current wireless audio technologies attempt to solve these issues by using large amounts of buffering that create significant latency, or they heavily compress the audio signal to reduce bandwidth needs. Regardless of technique, the end result is poor audio with audible clicks, pops, and dropouts.

Summit delivers uncompressed HD quality audio which is scalable up to a 7.1 home theater configuration. HD audio at 48k/96k sample rates and 24-bit sample size requires a large amount of dedicated bandwidth. To accommodate the increased bandwidth Summit leverages the recently opened worldwide spectrum in the 5 GHz band, referred to as U-NII (Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure). The U-NII band offers 24 non-overlapping channels with strict access rules ideally suited for audio and video applications. For reliable reception, sophisticated error recovery and interpolation techniques are employed to ensure that all of the data from the source is received at the speaker. Using these techniques in this spectrum, Summit Wireless is able to achieve interference free audio with virtually no latency.

Summit Wireless compared to Competition

Initial Impressions
Last year I attended numerous audio demos at CEDIA.  Aperion Audio suggested I sit in on a demo of their new wireless speakers featuring Summit Wireless technology.  I wasn’t expecting much from this wireless demo since all of the past wireless audio solutions I’ve heard have been less than satisfactory (mildly stated).  Most of the staff from Focus that greeted me where degreed engineers, so that gave me a good feeling that this solution could be different.  I sat down to take a listen.  They put on the Dave Matthews Live at Radio City Music Hall Blu-ray disc which instantly won them points.  I was enveloped in the great Aperion sound we often write about in our reviews but this time it was different.  This time I was enjoying great sound without the shackles of the cabling.  I was quite taken back from this sonic marvel I was hearing so I glanced behind the speakers to look for hidden cables.  Instead I found nothing other than the power cords plugged into the B&O ICE amplifiers that were running each of the Aperion speakers.  WOW, a wireless solution that doesn’t suck was the first thing that came to my mind.  The second of course was when would Aperion Audio or their competitors integrate this marvelous technology into an outdoor speaker system for my backyard patio?

The Summit Wireless team informed me that they could integrate this solution into virtually any loudspeaker design and eliminate the need of a passive crossover, thus creating a truly active bi-amplified speaker solution with perfect driver phase and time alignment.  Very cool!

They handed me the remote during the demo so I hit the calibration button and within a few seconds the sweet spot converged at my seat.  It just doesn’t get any easier than that!

As I enjoyed the pristine, unadulterated fidelity, I couldn’t help to ponder the endless possibilities this technology offers including its integration into Preamp/Processors, and inclusion with room correction systems such as Audyssey.  I’d even love to see a wall-wart box to retro legacy devices like powered subs which would really open placement flexibility options for end users and installers wishing to integrate multiple subwoofers in a theater room but lack the line level or speaker level connections to do it. 

The Summit standalone box which is bundled with the speaker package includes TOSlink and coaxial digital inputs and 5.1 analog inputs.  Future models will include HDMI connectivity and decoding. 

Summary
Summit wireless technology has the potential to deliver where other wireless audio solutions have failed. It can be installed in less than 30 minutes and generates interference-free, low latency, uncompressed HD quality audio that today’s A/V systems are capable of decoding. It acoustically, maps the speaker’s location and automatically determines how many speakers are present and assigns the correct audio channel on system power up. Audio is presented in a coherent sound field that is time aligned to the exact listener’s position.  Summit seems ideally suited for the retrofit and retail markets opening the door for new business models while taking home theater experience to a new level.  

To learn more about Summit Wireless, please visit www.summitwireless.com.