Any recommendations for Wireless or Virtual Surround Sound Home Theater Speakers?
 

Does anyone have any recommendations, advise, opinions about:
1. any wireless home theater speakers systems
2. any virtual surround sound home theater speakers systems, such as soundmatters MAINstage or Yamaha YSP-1

How do they sound and are they worth it?

I've always though wireless speakers were junk....but I've never used them

I started a thread on this 2 weeks ago; I got very few replies then.

Toad, so have you found any products online that have gotten good consumer reviews?

There have been numerous threads on this topic.

The general consensus is that wireless speakers sound like cordless phones. Also wireless speakers mean no speaker cable, not power cables. Unless you want to use multiple 'D' cell batteries.

That is the question "are they worth it?". Worth it compared to what? There are now a ton of options available to hide wire and get much better sound,

-flat wire that can go on a wall and be painted with the wall, or slipped under the carpet
-thru walls and ceilings
-"race way" track systems
-routing out base molding to accept the wire

etc, etc. IMHO, it is worth the time, effort and expense to go with one of these rather then wireless or virtual.

This thread should be a sticky!!! Every couple of weeks, someone asks the same questions!

Cordless/Wireless speakers = inferior sound, when compared to conventional, wired speakers.

Sonic

While I think you should skip the wireless, was at Home Depot today and they had a bunch in their clearence section they were $50.00 which was 1/2 price. They were 900 hz. Of course it is YMMV at your local HD.

Yeah! I'd like to know if anyone has had any experience with this Yamaha YSP-1 speaker array that's supposed to replace your 5 speakers in your 5.1 setup too:

http://www.yamaha.com/yec/YSP1/image...ff_anim_01.gif

It seems like the BOSE direct-reflecting system. :o

I thought I would revive this thread because I am looking for the same thing.

My TV room is not conducive to running wires at all. Two story walls, tile floors, minimal moulding. Actually it's got pretty crummy acoustics too but that is out of scope for this thread.

I just need 3 wireless channels so I can run the back 3 speakers in my 6.1 system. I've got power in the back so I'm not worried about being "totally" wireless.

The closest I have seen is this: http://store.hometheater2u.com/wireless.html

There's an article about them here: http://www.audioholics.com/ces/CESam...digitalamp.php but I can't find any objective reviews. This is probably due to the fact they haven't been officially released yet.

Since it is a digital system I can see where it would be better than the analog systems of the past (eg: Recoton, etc). If a wireless computer network can be lossless, why can't a wireless speaker system be lossless too?

I did send an email to the hometheater2u site and got a pretty quick and informative response. It's kind of long and sounds mostly like a commercial.

Bottom line MSRPs:
$199 = wireless receiver & transmitter
$699 = wireless digital amplifier & transmitter

They say prices on their web site will allegedly be lower.

But, one rx/tx pair is just for 2 channels and I personally need 3. I don't want to buy another pair just to run 1 more channel.

If anybody hears about any up and coming digital wireless setups, please post.

The problem with wireless is the transmitter. (AFAIK) Considering you can pick up a radio for $5 that will have crystal clear reception of stations in your area, you'd think you could do this for 15' across your room. But, you just can't get enough power in a consumer-priced RF transmitter. So the signal is weak, regardless of which frequency band it is in. You probably also wouldn't want a powerful transmitter in your house due to interference and maybe even health.

So far. I'm sure someday they'll get it figured out, but I still haven't heard a cordless phone that was consistent enough to make me think they could do a larger bandwidth audio channel for a decent sounding HT setup. The phones' audio takes far less bandwidth (I presume) since the signal is such crap to begin with.

I believe the latest Home Theater magazine had a review of the Yamaha speaker. It got a pretty good review after much tweaking was done with it.

Spiky,
You are talking about analog FM radio right? Yeah, all of the personal FM transmitters I have ever heard tend to suck mightily and it has to do with their legal output. But, like you said, you don't necessarily want a big transmitter in your house and your neighbor probably doesn't want you to have one either.

Digital cordless phones, by definition, pass a "perfect" signal from the handset to the base unit. But, if the handset only captures 3/4 of your voice range through a mediocre microphone in non-studio conditions, you get Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.

DIGITAL wireless audio should be a lot easier then since it is just passing pre-recorded audio.

I would like to see something based on 802.11 computer networking gear. The basic hardware components are cheap. I can play a CD on a networked remote drive in real time. All I'm doing is passing that CD audio file from one box to another. Why can't I have two standalone boxes with 802.11 and enough processor power to pump through the network bandwidth? DAC chips are cheap so they should be able to easily pass digitized CD quality audio.

I am frustrated because I can't get surround sound in my new house and somebody hasn't found a cheap turnkey way to do this yet.

I doubt it is perfect. It can be incomplete. Example: Here in Mpls, the ABC affiliate's digital transmitter is low on the tower and their frequency is higher, channel 50. So many people can't get consistent signal for HDTV. And that's with a "real" transmitter that is every bit as good as the other 2 stations on the same tower. But those stations are higher up and few have problems receiving their signal. I finally got my antenna aimed just right to have virtually no problems with this ABC station.

Digital is only perfect if you get it, and the power in a little transmitter has to abide by rules just like the analog ones. And music requires much more bandwidth than a phone conversation. Constant signal at many frequencies. Not to mention interference since the 2.4GHz range is very well-used.

I mean, I agree that it is better and should be. But it clearly isn't "there" yet. (I was talking about both analog and digital transmitters)