Saturday, November 23, 2013

A Look At The Cordless Overall Performance Of Outdoor Rock Speakers

By Linda Cullmann


To help you decide on a pair of cordless speakers, I will explain the term "signal-to-noise ratio" that is usually used in order to express the performance of cordless speakers.

When searching for a couple of cordless speakers, you firstly are going to check the cost, power amid other essential criteria. Yet, after this initial selection, you are going to still have a number of products to choose from. Now you will focus more on some of the technical specs, including signal-to-noise ratio in addition to harmonic distortion. The signal-to-noise ratio is a fairly essential parameter and shows how much noise or hiss the wireless loudspeaker produces.

Evaluating the noise level of different sets of wireless speakers may be accomplished fairly simply. Simply get together a few models which you want to evaluate and short circuit the transmitter audio inputs. Afterward put the wireless speaker gain to maximum and check the amount of noise by listening to the speaker. You are going to hear some amount of hissing and/or hum coming from the loudspeaker. This hiss is generated by the wireless speaker itself. Ensure that the volume of each couple of wireless loudspeakers is set to the same level. Otherwise you will not be able to objectively compare the amount of hiss between several models. The general rule is: the lower the level of hiss that you hear the higher the noise performance.

When taking a look at the wireless loudspeaker spec sheet, you want to look for a set of wireless speaker with a high signal-to-noise ratio figure which indicates that the cordless loudspeakers output a small level of static. Noise is produced due to a number of reasons. One factor is that today's cordless speakers all utilize components such as transistors as well as resistors. Those components will generate some amount of hiss. Since the built-in power amp overall noise performance is mostly determined by the performance of components situated at the amp input, manufacturers will attempt to choose low-noise elements while designing the amplifier input stage of their cordless speakers.

Hiss is also created by the wireless transmission. Different kinds of transmitters are available which operate at different frequencies. The least expensive type of transmitters uses FM transmission and usually broadcasts at 900 MHz. The level of noise is also dependent upon the level of wireless interference from other transmitters. Modern models will normally employ digital music broadcast at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz. The signal-to-noise ratio of digital transmitters is independent from the distance of the wireless loudspeakers. It is determined by how the music signal is sampled. Furthermore, the quality of components inside the transmitter will affect the signal-to-noise ratio.

Most of today's cordless speakers use power amps which are digital, also referred to as "class-d amps". Class-D amps make use of a switching stage that oscillates at a frequency in the range of 300 kHz to 1 MHz. This switching noise may result in a certain amount of loudspeaker distortion yet is frequently not included in the signal-to-noise ratio which only considers noise in the range of 20 Hz and 20 kHz.

The signal-to-noise ratio is measured by feeding a 1 kHz test tone 60 dB underneath the full scale and measuring the noise floor of the signal generated by the built-in amplifier. The volume of the wireless loudspeaker is set such that the full output wattage of the built-in amplifier can be realized. Next, the noise floor between 20 Hz and 20 kHz is calculated and the ratio to the full-scale signal computed. The noise signal at different frequencies is eliminated by a bandpass filter during this measurement.

Another convention to express the signal-to-noise ratio utilizes more subjective terms. These terms are "dBA" or "A weighted". You are going to discover these terms in a lot of cordless loudspeaker parameter sheets. This technique tries to examine in how far the cordless loudspeaker noise is perceived by human hearing which is most responsive to signals at frequencies at 1 kHz. The A-weighted signal-to-noise ratio is typically higher than the unweighted ratio and is published in the majority of cordless speaker specification sheets.




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