Posted by Richard Crowley on 06/12/06 02:45

"Rick Merrill" wrote...
> John wrote:

>> Is it feasible to make a digital wireless mic based on WiFi (802.11)
>> technology?
>> With WiFi, frequency conflict shouldn't be a problem (interferences
>> reduces throughput but audio requires very little bandwidth,
>> especially if digitally compressed), the receiver can handle multiple
>> streams, and the components are cheap. But no such product exist.
>> Wonder why.

I would anticipate a new generation of wireless mic products
based on modern spread-spectrum (pseudo-random channel
hopping, etc.) technology. The tricky part may be in making
it real-time enough for live audio use. Data transmission can
put up with many milliseconds of latency, but it doesn't take
much latency to put live audio "out of sync".

> I just saw that Sony has a Bluetooth wireless mic - anyone try it?

I saw a mention of it on a Sony camcorder TV commercial.
It may be ok for low-end speech pickup (and who knows
what the effective range and reliability are?) Bluetooth
doesn't have enough bandwidth for high-quality audio,
more like telephone-quality.

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