There are a couple of puzzling and disturbing gaps in the consumer electronics devices available that I’ve asked about in various venues, but get no real answers. Obvious things that seem do-able enough on a commercial scale, but are being omitted from the marketplace for reason’s I’m not seeing.
One is with regard to simple Bluetooth stereo. Okay, now Bluetooth finally has enough bandwidth to produce decent sound, or at least as decent as most of the other consumer gear for producing sound from digital sources. Fine. I can buy ten thousand competing Bluetooth “speakers” for my car and shower and bedroom and office and supposedly parties, and I can buy innumerable little devices to pipe the sound into a “real” stereo system. That’s all well and good, but we’re missing something.
I’ve got a lot of old stereo gear around, and amplifiers and speakers don’t age nearly as badly as source-related components. If I want to have Bluetooth audio through speakers in, say, my bedroom, I can either buy one of the the ten thousand mostly tinny and cheap Bluetooth speakers and ignore the fact that I already own far better speakers and amplifiers, or I can buy a Bluetooth adapter, all of which seem much more similar than different, typically your choice of a round or square little box with a pig-tail coming out with a mini-stereo plug, and apparently invariably with a built-in rechargeable battery and recharging circuitry that is completely useless in this application.
There’s something missing, though. If I want to use my own speakers and amp for Bluetooth from my notebook or tablet in my bedroom, I either have to get up, out of bed and turn the amp ON every single time, then turn it OFF when I’m through, pretty much defeating the entire purpose of Bluetooth, or I can leave the amp on 24/7. Or, I guess I could rig the amp with a remote power control, I’ve got a few, resulting in the absurdity of sitting with a full computer on my lap having two complete wireless systems built in and yet having to use a third wireless system in its own little box with its own little buttons and batteries just to flip a switch across the room. This is just ridiculous.
I haven’t tackled it yet, but I have little doubt that I can set up something myself to solve that one with a relay box and a Raspberry Pi. The RPi is fully capable of handshaking with the Bluetooth source, receiving the signal and transcoding it from whatever the Bluetooth audio digital encoding standard is to whatever a decent USB DAC requires, where it will be decoded again into analog. Since it’s Linux, there is no doubt some way to insert a little script or program into the chain of events that will flip one of the GPIO pins on, and I can use that to power up my stereo. It will undoubtedly be trickier to figure out when to turn the thing back off again, but it seems very do-able.. raising the obvious question, if I can do it inconveniently myself, why is no one in the vast marketplace of consumer electronics already doing it? It simply makes no sense. There must be at least hundreds of thousands of people out there, probably millions, who have perfectly adequate gear for bedroom stereo already who would like to pipe their Bluetooth sources through it rather than invest in yet another, probably inferior-sounding box, and simply need it to turn itself on and off. A Bluetooth adapter hooked to a power controller is not rocket science, guys. It’s a bewildering omission.
The second one is harder, and older, and more fundamental, and I’m not confident that I’ll be able to combine bits of consumer electronics, little computers, boards, modules, whatever, to solve it.
Since at least the late 1960s a whole lot of people have had some sort of stereo in their bedrooms, especially teenagers at home or in dorm rooms or small apartments, and for at least that long there’s always been the same fundamental problem… you’ve invariably got a room with AC power outlets on every major wall, pieces of furniture to the left of the bed and to the right of the bed that will do for speaker and amplifier placement, you can place the amplifier and one of the speakers conveniently enough to wire together, but there’s no convenient way to run the wire for the second speaker. That’s all they give you to work with, a wire. You can’t run it under the floor or carpet in most circumstances, you can’t run it behind the walls and over the ceiling in rental and dorm rooms, there are traffic patterns or doorways or ladies or parents objecting to the aesthetics of any obvious solution and pretty much every non-obvious solution, and it happens time after time, bedroom after bedroom, decade after decade. It’s a simple, doggedly infuriating and eternal problem. All it seems to need is a simple wire, all you have is a simple wire, and there is never any good way to run the wire from right here to right there that doesn’t immediately turn into a major freakin’ project. Never.
The solution is so very obvious, and has been for so very long- you need to have a control box and right-and-left speakers that each plug into the wall but communicate with each other wirelessly… and yet, somehow, despite having full digital audio capability everywhere, multiple wireless systems and protocols available at our fingertips, and real computers available at gumball-machine prices, this seems to be something we can’t do short of some exotic, hugely expensive proprietary rig that includes its own amplifiers and speakers, like it or not.
Why is this so hard?
Admittedly, it is, with current protocols and hardware.
We don’t need the control functions of amplifier and source selection and transcoding in a little box anymore, we all have smart phones and tablets and notebook computers up the wazoo. What we need is two at least fairly-affordable little boxes, each incorporating AC power conversion, a decent mono amp, a mono DAC of some sort, each capable of communicating or at least synchronizing with each other.
For some reason, we’re not even close.
I’m not even talking, here, about synchronizing left and right audio channels wirelessly with the source, as we need to for combined audio and video, we seem to be light-years away from that yet.
If engineered from scratch, the key problem seems to be that the right and left channels have to be synchronized within a very few milliseconds for it to be listenable. For just playing stereo without video latency is in itself not much of a problem, the technology is already dirt cheap to transmit the entire audio file, if necessary, to each receiver in a second or two, so we’re not buffering a few seconds, we’re taking those seconds to buffer the entire file.
I “get” the problems of using an asynchronous protocol (IP) to try to drive ANY synchronous actions, but we’ve had a cheap, consumer-level synchronous protocol (Bluetooth) available for some time, even if the bandwidth has been lacking. There should be some way to use IP for fast mass-transfers of data and Bluetooth to synchronize playback.
It’s time. The need has been there forever, the basic building blocks are in place.
– Robert the Wombat