CEDIA 2013

Bang & Olufsen returned to CEDIA after a several year absence to announce a high-performance wireless speaker platform that supports up to eight channels of uncompressed 24-bit audio at sample rates up to 96 kHz. The platform is based on the WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio Association) open standard and incorporates proprietary processing.

The WiSA standard operates in the relatively uncongested 5.2-5.8 GHz range to avoid interference from other signals and provide enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed music at native sampling rates. WiSA-certified speakers are also designed to overcome latency and interference problems as well as work with other WiSA-certified speakers, a handful of which are expected to be introduced in January at CES 2014.

The company staged an impressive demo at its press conference and even walked one of the speakers around the room to show off the robustness of the signal. In order to become WiSA-certified, speakers must pass a series of rigorous tests.

B&O also announced that it will introduce the first WiSA-certified speaker at the end of October and plans to build the wireless technology into upcoming televisions. A stand-alone wireless transmitter with eight inputs is also slated for introduction.

More on B&O here.