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Aperion Readies Wireless Home Theater

Portland,
Ore. – Direct-to-consumer marketer

Aperion Audio

plans
year-end shipments of a wireless home-theater system incorporating Summit
Wireless technology to delivers 24-bit uncompressed audio to active speakers.

Aperion
will demonstrate its product at the CEDIA Expo in Atlanta, having shown a

preproduction
prototype

at last year’s show.

The
system is the $2,499 Intimus 4T Summit Wireless 5.1 home-theater speaker
system, which consists of five active speakers and a powered subwoofer, all
with Summit wireless transceiver built in. The speakers talk to an included
wireless audio hub, which replaces a traditional A/V receiver and incorporates
surround-sound decoders and HDMI, coax, optical and analog connections to TVs
and other audio sources. The system is expandable to 7.1.

The

underlying technology

,
developed by fables semiconductor company

Summit Semiconductor

of Hillsboro, Ore., is promoted as delivering 7.1-channel sound quality that’s
“virtually indistinguishable” from wired quality. Summit promotes the
technology as overcoming the sound quality, interference, latency and cost
challenges associated with other wireless technologies designed for
multichannel home theaters. Its speaker-level, speaker-delay and phase controls
are said to be so flexible that they can be used to focus the audio sweet spot
into the corner of a room where a sectional couch might be placed.

The
system features

SpeakerFinder

technology to automatically discover
speakers in the room and assign channels to them.

MyZone

sweet-spot calibration takes
seconds
to produce a time-aligned sound field for the listener by
automatically adjusting delay and volume to a
selected listening
position.

Summit achieves its sound-quality goals
by, among other things, transmitting uncompressed 48kHz/24-bit PCM over the
air, using forward error correction to overcome latency problems, and using the
congestion-free 5.1Gz to 5.8GHz U-NII band. That spectrum, which features 23
non-overlapping channels, has been approved by the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) for worldwide unlicensed use near the IEEE
802.11a/n wireless-network band.

Other technologies that avoid
interference include spread-spectrum OFDM (orthogonol frequency-division
multiplexing) modulation, four-antenna diversity tuning in the speakers,
dynamic frequency selection to hop to a channel without interference, and up to
10ms of audio interpolation to fill in lost packets.

Aperion Audio markets in-room and
custom-installed speakers as well as active soundbars under its own brand. Summit
Semiconductor, the fabless wireless-chip maker, was spun off earlier this year
from Focus Enhancements. Its technology can be integrated into home theater
speakers, sound bars, audio/video receivers, TVs, Blu-ray players,  MP3 players, set-top boxes, and gaming systems,
the company said.

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