Focus Enhancements Seeks to Make HTiB Systems Wireless

Written on Dec 10, 2008 by Brian and filed under News

Wireless speakers are showing up in several home theater systems. But thus far it’s generally just the two rear satellites in 5.1 or 7.1 systems that are set up to be wireless. At CES this coming January, Focus Enhancements will be showing of a new wireless multichannel audio technology that they claim will produce nearly identical sound to wired systems.

This is all accomplished via a new chip, pictured above, called Summit. According to Focus, “it’s now possible and practical to achieve wireless transmission of uncompressed high resolution multi-channel audio in the home, without any of the interference, lip-sync, or setup problems that plagued previous wireless efforts.”

Home theater in a box systems are a prefect target for this technology for several reasons, the biggest one being ease of setup. HTiB systems are supposed to be easy to configure and the prospect of setting up wireless speakers without the need for running speaker wire is fantastic. Thankfully, Focus claims their system is easy to set up and configure as well, meaning HTiB buyers could be getting even closer to the plug and play setup we’d like to see.

Summit includes an sophisticated ultrasonic mapping algorithm that lets the system essentially sense where the speakers are for proper calibration. Users won’t have to worry about audio balancing, level setting or have to deal with a mess of configuration screens. 

The best part is the Summit technology isn’t terribly expensive, so it’s reasonable that we could see it included in even entry-level HTiB systems. Of course we’re only at announcement stage, Focus still needs to convince manufacturers to use their technology. However, if the product lives up to the press release, we fully expect to see a several systems released with Summit technology embedded.