Wireless surround sound will be the next big thing, cinema quality of sound engulfing you in your own home without all of the cables.

Sounds to good to be true doesn’t it? But it’s on the way and there are already a lot of electronics manufacturers jumping on the band wagon. If you’re as to what surround sound is I would suggest reading this article on 5.1 surround sound before you carry on with this one. It will give you some good background information.

It is the rear speakers of the wireless surround sound systems that are wireless in the majority of speaker packages that are currently available. This is not a bad thing though as more often than not it is running cables to the rear speakers that cause the most difficulty. In most cases it is the longest run of cable and will require it to pass by a door way which is always problematic. Until the recent introduction of wireless suround sound the options of getting cables to your rear speakers are not great you have:

• Run the cable loosely along the floor and hold in place with cable tacks.
• Run the cable along the join of the walls and ceiling and house it in trunking (this can work out very expensive
• If you have roof space (a loft or attic) above the room that your home theatre is in then you can pass the cable in to the roof space and back out in the ceiling above where your speakers will be. Although this method has the least cable on show you still have to have length of cable running vertically up the wall.

None of them are great, so there’s definitely the need for a wireless system. As a started to say it is mostly the rear speakers that are wireless, but they are not entirely wireless in most cases there is a receiver in the middle of the two speakers that is connected to each of them via wires. Because speakers need an amplified signal they also need power, so they receive their power through wires as well.

There are speakers that are not connected together, each of these speakers will have an inbuilt receiver but will still need power. So again there are still wires going to this speakers because they still need individual power supplies - so there is still a cable running down the wall to a power point.

What about powering them by battery?

Well people have tried but the reality has two outcomes:

1. The battery used doesn’t have enough power to make the speaker any good in a home cinema system or
2. The battery does give fantastic performance but needs replacing half way through a film.

Needless to say - currently the technology is not in place to make battery powered speakers.

A lot of wireless surround sound system us a very high radio typically about 2.4Ghz or the lower 900MHz band, some use infrared and others use Bluetooth, although not many use Bluetooth in a surround sound application.

You are not restricted to buying your speakers in a ‘home cinema’ kit form though. There are options to convert your rear speakers in to ‘wireless’ but again they are only wireless in the aspect that they are independent of the front speakers but not of each other. This is not the cheapest of options, but if you already have good quality rear speakers that you don’t want to change then this is the ideal option.

True high performance wireless systems are still a dream,  but are on the way, the technology is in place. Currently wireless means ‘less wires’ which is still helpful, ‘wireless’ also usually means that you loose the wires that would normally be going around the perimeter of your room to your rear speakers. That said, in most cases this offers a considerable advantage and is worth looking at.