Texas-based professional sound system firm WaveAngle has squeezed CD-quality sound into an AAA-powered 2.4GHz wireless guitar link.
"Wireless guitar audio is nothing new, but it has yet to take off in a big way in the mid-range market," said WaveAngle president Sean Michaud. "Low end analogue solutions based on UHF and VHF radio have existed since the late 1970s, but there has not until now been a mid-range digital audio solution priced at an affordable level that does not noticeably sacrifice audio quality, or immunity to dropouts and fuzz-outs, for wireless convenience."
Michaud admits other mid-range wireless guitar products do exist, but claims these invariably employ some form of compression which degrades sound quality compared to a wired link.
The firm has used Nordic Semiconductor's nRF24Z1 2.4GHz transceiver which can stream uncompressed stereo audio at up to 4Mbit/s with native 16bit, 48kHz resolution.
"We were able to develop a product that delivers completely uncompressed audio with enough bandwidth headroom to allow us to engineer out latency to an imperceptible level to the human ear," clamed Michaud.
The Nordic chip is designed to cope with other 2.4GHz interferers such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. "It does this via a proprietary frequency agility protocol that automatically looks for an adjacent clear channel to swap to before interference becomes so severe that too many packets are being lost for audio quality to remain unaffected," said Nordic.
The result is the $299 Radian Gold Series wireless guitar system that has a range of 30m and operates for 20 hours from one AAA cell.
Up to 10 can be used at once in the same room.
The nRF24Z1 also features input support of up to 24bit, 96kHz, and comes in a 6x6mm package.
