Thursday, December 5, 2013

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Which Versions Of Wireless Speakers Produce The Minimum Amount Of Static?

By Linda Cullmann


Are you looking to buy a new a pair of wireless speakers for your home? You might be dazzled by the number of options you have. To make an informed selection, it is best to familiarize yourself with frequent specs. One of these terms is named "signal-to-noise ratio" and is not often understood. I am going to help explain the meaning of this term.

Once you have selected a number of cordless speakers, it is time to explore some of the specs in more detail in order to help you narrow down your search to one model. The signal-to-noise ratio is a fairly essential specification and describes how much noise or hiss the cordless loudspeaker creates.

You can perform a simple comparison of the wireless speaker noise by short circuiting the transmitter input, setting the loudspeaker gain to maximum and listening to the speaker. The static that you hear is produced by the wireless speaker itself. Then compare several sets of wireless loudspeakers according to the next rule: the smaller the level of hiss, the higher the noise performance of the wireless speaker. On the other hand, bear in mind that you have to put all sets of cordless loudspeakers to amplify by the same level in order to evaluate different models.

When looking at the cordless loudspeaker specification sheet, you want to look for a couple of cordless loudspeaker with a large signal-to-noise ratio number which indicates that the wireless loudspeakers output a low level of hiss. One of the reasons why cordless speakers make noise is the fact that they use elements such as transistors as well as resistors which by nature create noise. Mostly the elements which are located at the input stage of the built-in power amplifier will contribute most to the overall noise. Therefore suppliers typically are going to pick low-noise components when developing the cordless speaker amplifier input stage.

Hiss is also created by the wireless broadcast. Different types of transmitters are available which operate at different frequencies. The cheapest sort of transmitters utilizes FM transmission and generally broadcasts at 900 MHz. The amount of static is also dependent upon the level of cordless interference from other transmitters. Modern products are going to normally make use of digital audio transmission at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz. This kind of music broadcast provides higher signal-to-noise ratio than analog style transmitters. The level of static depends on the resolution of the analog-to-digital converters along with the quality of other components.

Most of recent cordless speakers use power amplifiers which are digital, also called "class-d amps". Class-D amps employ a switching stage that oscillates at a frequency between 300 kHz to 1 MHz. Because of this, the output signal of wireless speaker switching amps have a fairly large amount of switching noise. This noise component, however, is usually impossible to hear given that it is well above 20 kHz. On the other hand, it can still contribute to loudspeaker distortion. Signal-to-noise ratio is typically only shown within the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Therefore, a lowpass filter is used while measuring wireless loudspeaker amplifiers in order to eliminate the switching noise.

Manufacturers measure the signal-to-noise ratio by setting the built-in amp such that the full output swing may be achieved and by feeding a test tone to the transmitter which is generally 60 dB below the full scale of the speaker amp. After that, only the noise between 20 Hz and 20 kHz is considered. The noise at other frequencies is removed through a filter. Next the amount of the noise energy in relation to the full-scale output power is computed and expressed in decibel.

A different convention to express the signal-to-noise ratio employs more subjective terms. These terms are "dBA" or "A weighted". You are going to spot these terms in a lot of wireless speaker spec sheets. This technique was developed with the knowledge that human hearing perceives noise at different frequencies differently. Human hearing is most perceptive to signals around 1 kHz. On the other hand, signals under 50 Hz and above 13 kHz are barely noticed. The A-weighted signal-to-noise ratio is usually larger than the unweighted ratio and is published in a lot of wireless speaker spec sheets.




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