Wireless Audio Transport: Summit Semiconductor Doesn't Sell The Concept Short

My meetings with vendors usually follow a predictable trajectory. A company spokesperson (often not capable of answering my technical questions) walks me through a mind-numbing foil-by-foil, bullet-by-bullet, word-by-word recitation of a PowerPoint foilset, on a product of whose existence I was already aware and whose inevitability as a roadmap next-step was already obvious. The company refuses my request for pricing and associated quantity information, even though I make it clear that per longstanding EDN policy, in doing so they’re precluding print coverage in the magazine’s Pulse section. And, completely oblivious to what has just transpired in the discussion, along with revealing his or her fundamental ignorance of EDN’s editorial approach, the company’s PR representative wraps up by piping up with something along the lines of “so, when can we expect to see your coverage appear in print and online…and can we review and approve it in advance…and can we have the cover?”

Sigh. Fortunately, however, I’m occasionally surprised (specifically: positively so) by what transpires in a briefing session. Such was the case last week with my time spent with Summit Semiconductor during a short business trip to the Portland, OR area. Granted, I wasn’t able to wrangle pricing out of the company. And the PR rep predictably concluded the session with the question “so when will your writeup based on this meeting be published?” (don’t these folks realize that their pushiness is counterproductive to their desired end result?). But the technology (and products based on it) that the company demo’d and discussed with me were unexpected. And even better, they were of not only professional but also personal interest…and were synergistic with several recently published writeups, to boot.

Part of the reason for the surprise, I confess, was due to less-than-perfect preparation on my part. The person I was traveling with had assembled the day’s itinerary, and when I flew up to Portland the evening prior, all I could remember about this particular time slot was the ‘Summit’ portion of the company moniker. So, in my hotel room before falling asleep, I perused the power management ICs and other devices offered for sale by the similarly-named (but as it turns out, unrelated) Summit Microelectronics. Imagine my confusion, therefore, when I walked into the company lobby and, to my right, noticed a display case full of awards and customer demo systems showcasing video encoder chips bearing the Focus Enhancements name.

Focus Enhancements, a company I’d long (but not recently) followed, was a confusing amalgamate of three seemingly disparate product lines; the aforementioned video encoders, an under-development UWB wireless video technology, plus (believe it or not) a series of FireWire-based external HDDs for use with digital camcorders. As it turns out, a few months ago the latter product line was acquired by VITEC Multimedia, with the semiconductor aspects of the business relocated from Campbell, CA to Hillsboro, OR and renamed Summit Semiconductor. VP of Marketing Tony Parker was refreshingly candid about the company’s longstanding interoperability and other challenges as it struggled to develop a robust UWB-based wireless video approach akin to the Alereon-based product I reviewed two weeks ago.

As a result, Focus Enhancements-now-Summit Semiconductor decided to disengage from this particular application and redirect its multimedia and wireless expertise elsewhere. Specifically, the company’s now developing wireless audio transmission technology, which I conceptually mentioned most recently two weeks back. To date, I’ve tested equipment from (to the best of my recollection) three different suppliers; Amphony, Avnera, and SST (whose MelodyWing technology has seemingly been shuttered in conjunction with the company’s acquisition by Microchip). And in my conversation with Parker and his peers, he also mentioned STS (aka Wireless Audio IP) as a competitor, a company now owned (along with another wireless audio pioneer, Kleer) by SMSC.

At first glance you might think, given Summit Semiconductor’s technology heritage, that the company was using UWB as its wireless audio transport mechanism…but you’d be wrong. Neither is it employing the 2.4 GHz ISM band leveraged by some of its competitors. Instead, citing burgeoning 2.4 GHz ISM spectrum corruption, Summit Semiconductor is instead residing in the U-NII (Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure) band, spanning 5.15 to 5.825 GHz. Strictly speaking, from a potential spectrum corruption standpoint, U-NII only slightly overlaps the relevant ISM band (which ranges from 5.725 to 5.825 GHz in this region). However, 802.11a and the 5 GHz variant of 802.11n span the entire U-NII frequency footprint (extending even lower in some other countries), so Summit Semiconductor’s spectrum decision seems to only delay the inevitability of wireless beacon contention. Also, the company’s gear is required to periodically spectrum-sniff for same-frequency broadcasting radar equipment and, if detected, automatically relocate itself elsewhere in the band to avoid the potential for interference with judged-higher-importance radar signals.

If Summit Wireless were only an audio transport scheme, it’d still be of interest to me as-is. However, the company’s technology also touches on another aspect of my two-weeks-back writeup, that of automatic per-speaker delay and volume calibration. The Pioneer system in my studio relies on a microphone placed in the listener ’sweet spot’ to accomplish this objective. Summit Semiconductor’s gear instead leverages ultrasonic transducers embedded within each speaker, within the audio source, and within a remote control placed in the ’sweet spot’. Product Marketing Engineer Bill Anderson demonstrated to me, by means of a tethered laptop’s display along with my ears, how the company’s equipment both quickly calibrates on system power-up and rapidly responds to remote control and speaker re-locations and subsequent user re-calibration requests.

As regular readers already know, I’m a big fan of auto-calibrating surround sound systems such as Pioneer’s proprietary algorithm or the broadly licensed Audyssey approach. And the ability to send sound to various transducers in a cable-free fashion is an added bonus, both for consumers and for the custom installation companies they sometimes leverage. Cement foundations, for example, preclude drilling holes and running wires underneath floorboards. With that said, several aspects of the company’s products and plans still give me pause:

• Summit Semiconductor is focusing its initial promotion efforts on high-end gear, for example with booth presences at CEDIA and the audiophile wing of the Consumer Electronics Show. While such a move is somewhat understandable, as a means of cultivating a high profit margin initial business in the absence of high initial product volumes, audiophiles are as a rule skeptical of anything digital, far from a potentially interference-plagued wireless link…not to mention anything that purports to do a better job of system calibration than does their ‘golden ears’.
• Partially (I suspect) as a nod to potential audiophile customers, Summit Semiconductor promotes the 24-bit, 96 kHz per-channel capabilities of its approach. However, I’ve long believed that wireless broadcast is most relevant for comparatively remote (versus close-to-sound-source front and center channel speakers) surround and subwoofer speakers, neither of which requires such a robust link. Subwoofer-directed sound is inherently frequency-limited, and surrounds mostly handle reverb-delayed ‘echo’ and ‘explosion’-type audio information, neither of which is particularly quality-demanding. A lower-cost competitor to Summit Wireless might, therefore, be equally relevant.
• Summit Semiconductor’s Parker admitted to me in the meeting that part of the business-plan appeal was the fact that each speaker in the system would contain the company’s silicon. This is in contrast to an alternative approach such as that employed by the Avnera-based Rocketfish system that I continue to use to this day, which combines the satellite speakers’ amplifiers and wireless receiver in a distinct unit, tethered to passive speakers over conventional wire. Summit Semiconductor’s strategy, which admittedly is synergistic with its per-speaker ultrasonic calibration scheme, increases the per-speaker cost. It also requires self-powered speakers, whose AC reliance not only constrains their location options to being close to power outlets but (as is also the case with ‘wireless’ video, and as mentioned in my recent cover story on the subject) also somewhat diminishes the ‘wireless’ appeal by virtue of the still-necessary power cord.
• Finally, Summit Semiconductor aspires to work with its customers to brand its wireless audio technology in the form of a prominent product-located logo and other promotional materials, thereby enabling consumers to purchase transmitters, remote controls and transducers from different manufacturers in an interoperable fashion. While it’s a laudable goal, I can’t frankly imagine any leading speaker manufacturer signing up for such a scheme, given that the contending aspiration for each speaker supplier is to compel the consumer to acquire an entire single-brand suite. More generally, why would Sony (for example) agree to do anything that’d decrease the probability of a consumer purchasing an all-Sony equipment set, speakers included?