WishList – WiFi Speaker Arrays

With rumors of the Apple Hi-Fi’s demise looking not-so-exaggerated, I thought it would be a nice moment to share a vision of convergence and audio-porn with our dear readers.

Here is the fantasy: the Audio receiver must die.

Like many Airport Express owners, I use the device as a wireless hub in my home and as a way to stream audio through my stereo. AppleTV owners can do the same with video streams to their TVs. Cool, but the vision isn’t completely realized.

What about 5.1 audio? With a few hacks, it looks possible but that’s not the simple, elegant Apple way. And if I want to stream audio to various rooms in the house, I can buy multiple Airport Express units and multiple receivers, but the expense is unreasonable, and I can’t stream to more than one unit at once.

I’ve seen audio engineers hardwire speakers in multiple rooms throughout a house, all powered by a central receiver—but this is a solution for people with more money than sense. Those receivers are not cheap, and you have to port long cables through your drywall, which is completely ridiculous when WiFi could do all the work.

Here’s the pitch: A small (Bose-sized) self-powered speaker with a WiFi card, and a subwoofer with the same. This way, you can install any number of speakers wherever you have an outlet. Apple should develop an iTunes interface to configure the speakers into arrays, and within those arrays, offer the option of designating 5.1 positions (front-center, front-right, front-left, back-right, back-left, subwoofer, etc.) or right-left stereo and so on. Finally, the user should have the option of streaming audio to one, some, or all of the speaker arrays in the network. This way you can blare your tunes in the living room, the bedroom, the home office and the pool all at once or selectively. Add AppleTV, and you can send all of your A/V components to the electronics recycling plant—all you need is your Mac and a TV. I’m not sure how well Apple TV interfaces with cable and satellite boxes, but under the current paradigm, it would also be great if they could play nice together so the speaker arrays could receive digital sound from them.

Avega has a system that is close to this vision, but it requires a set-top box, which would be a redundant piece of equipment, and is no better than a receiver that connects to your computer—or one of those godawful mediacenter PCs. The customizability into multiple arrays and configurations also appears to be lacking.

To those who would protest that a WiFi card per speaker would be an unreasonable expense, I would counter that many homeowners would jump at the chance to purchase this product. In the 20th century, if you had built-in audio it got sold with the house. With WiFi, you can take your units with you and reconfigure them in any environment. WiFi Speaker Arrays would not only eliminate the need to buy a costly audio receiver—other standard components like DVD players would also become obsolete because all the media you play would either operate out of your SuperDrive or your HD. Consider also that increasing the demand for WiFi Cards would create an economy of scale that would bring the price down as manufacturing is ramped up.

An added benefit would be that each speaker could extend the range and signal strength of your wireless network. WiFi speaker arrays could also become the foundation of the networked home we keep hearing so much about, with internet-capable ranges, refrigerators and washing machines, for whatever that’s worth.

So far, Apple leads the convergence race with Airport Express and AppleTV. They could capture an enormous share of the home electronics market with WiFi speakers and the right interface to support them. With this vision for an entire home audio and video wireless solution, Sony’s plans for a Bravia that can download movies would be DOA.