THE WIRELESS FRONTIER

By Barry Willis

Originally published in The Perfect Vision, January 2007

In TPV 71's "Color Commentary," I asked why wireless audio was so late to the tech game. Among home theater retailers, it's the most requested unavailable technology, according to a reader of that column, Ted Feldman, president and founder of San Francisco-based Neosonik. Mr. Feldman contacted me to let me know that at least one wireless company is very much into the tech game – his own. Neosonik, he claimed, has solved wireless audio's many problems of noise, interference, and dropouts, and in the process, has perfected wireless transmission of HDMI-encoded video. That bold claim piqued my interest. So I had to find out.

On a sunny October day, I stood in a travel trailer in the coastal town of Half Moon Bay, CA, watching a high-definition Alicia Keys concert on a 17-inch LCD TV, beamed from inside a steel garage about 150 feet away. It couldn't have looked better if Neosonik Senior Design Engineer Scott Rust had precisely aligned a high-gain antenna in direct line-of-sight with a broadcast tower.

Rust carried the TV from the trailer into the garage to its proper place atop a center-channel speaker. There were no glitches in transit, despite the preponderance of heavy metal in the garage -- including Rust's racecar, but that's another story.

Nor was there any problem with the 5.1-channel audio, delivered cleanly by five self-powered loudspeakers and a subwoofer, each wired only to electrical power. As in the classic story about the dancing elephant, the amazing thing about the demo wasn't that it was done well -- it was -- but that it was done at all, and not by Sony or Pioneer, but by a small American startup.

Think about the possibilities. Think of all that cable that no longer has to be strewn about the listening room, tripping up guests and causing spousal consternation, not to mention the hefty price tag that comes with high-quality cable.

Perhaps, not coincidentally, on Oct. 31, little more than a week after Neosonik's first press demo, a new electronics industry consortium calling itself WirelessHD announced that it was developing specifications for wireless high-definition audio/video transmission for consumer electronics devices. Free advice for WirelessHD: The work's been done. Cancel the R&D and sign licensing deals with Neosonik.