CES 2007: NEOSONIK'S AIRPOWER A\V COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING

By Mike McGann

Originally published in TekTruth.com, January 2007

If Ted Feldman has his way, every single piece of audio and video gear in your home will become obsolete. So you might be able to understand his excitement about Neosonik’s coming out party at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

If you’re a veteran watcher of announcements at CES, you might scoff at such an idea, recalling everything from the company that claimed to have “alien” display technology to Moxi, which made a big home video networking splash and then fizzled. But don’t be so quick to write off Neosonik.

Why? In short, the company plans to roll out a new wireless connection technology that will connect all of your gear, speakers, preamps, DVD players and displays into one, unified two-way network. It’s not WiFi, Feldman is quick to point out, but a new proprietary technology, a 60MB/second pipeline that can easily carry a full HD video stream and a 7.1 channels of audio with headroom to spare (your garden variety HD signal with a 5.1 digital audio track uses up 19.39MB/sec.). All of the data is transmitted in digital form and decoded at the source, either the display or the speaker.

“We think it reshuffles the entire industry,” said Feldman, Neosonik’s president.

Ironically, the research that created this new technology, which will debut in audio gear sold under the Neosonik brand and then be licensed under the AirPower A/V name, started not with creating a wireless system, but rather keeping the audio and video signal digital as long as possible to create maximum performance. The company was initially looking to create maximum audio performance, the primary goal of Feldman and Neosonik’s chairman, James Twerdahl, the former president of such audio powerhouses as JBL, Marantz and Jensen.

Feldman said the system originally worked with Cat-5, or Ethernet cable, as part of a wired network. Ultimately, the engineers realized they could almost as easily create a wireless network, which works something like an 802.11a network, but with different protocols and encryption, so systems don’t bleed into one another.

The company has already offered a handful of demos in the San Francisco Bay Area to uniformly good reviews — using the basic framework that all AirPowerA/V-based systems will use.

The speakers will all have on-board digital amplifiers and digital signal processors. They will connect two-way to the main audio controller, which operates much like a digital traffic cop and would replace the pre-amplifier in a traditional home theater setup. This two-way data stream allows a very close synchronization — a maximum of 250 nanoseconds between channels, or roughly the difference of having your speakers being a couple of inches off center, which is virtually undetectable by the human ear. Other wireless systems shown to date have had multiple synch issues and errors more in the range of a millisecond or more, creating an obvious out of phase sound, which is why none have taken off in the marketplace.

The video will be handled in a similar manner — and current HDTVs with HDMI inputs will be able to attach a module that takes the digital signal, processes it as h.264 video and outputs it to the display.

While the idea of having all components — especially speakers and video projectors — connected wirelessly (and yes, all will need independent power sources), the biggest changes driven by this set up seems likely in terms of speaker design. With no single, multichannel amp driving speakers, or long cables, the possibility for much more advanced speaker design exists. With on-board processing, speakers could adapt in a dynamic fashion to the signal, constantly adjusting the crossover points to optimize sound. And since each speaker will be designed for just one amp, within the speaker, the driver and cone designs — along with the crossover — can be created for optimal performance, instead of needing to cope with multiple amplifier designs and power outputs.

And while Feldman says performance was the original driving factor behind the technology, he knows that the wireless aspects — no cables and easy set up and install — will drive the product in the marketplace. That’s why the company will start out selling its own audio systems, starting at about $6,000, this summer, even though the long-term goal of the company is to license the technology.

“We know we have to be in the marketplace,” he said. “We’ve got to put the product out on the market and then, we think, everyone will want to license it.”

Feldman says Neosonik is jumping out first because he knows one other thing: there needs to be one standard. Consumers won’t support 20 different wireless protocols, and he points to the slow sales of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

“We want this to become a de facto standard,” he said. “Consumers want one format and they want it to work.”

If this design works — and by all indications, it does — AirPowerA/V could become an explosive success in 2008, and the talk of next year’s CES. Clearly, this looks like a technology to keep a close eye on, since audio/video gear is the last remaining tech segment not to embrace wireless technology.