Audio Industry Lacks Standards for Connectivity

[Sasha_G]

Ergonomics Expert and ex-Apple Computer researcher Donald Norman had this to say about home theater:

Anyone who thinks that the computer industry has made things difficult for customers, wait till you look at home theater. There is a major opportunity here to enlarge the market considerably by setting, agreeing upon, and implementing industry-wide standards for interconnection, aimed at making the result easier to install and use, far more comprehensible, and therefore more attractive to the average family.

Read the Article:
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ProblemsOfHomeTheater.html

The sad thing is, each company in the audio industry seems to be using their own standard when it comes to wireless:
http://www.twice.com/article/CA375365.html

This seems like a time for companies to get together and stop reinventing the wheel. If things are easier to hook together, more people than ever will get into home theater and audio.

[Lwang]

For a second, I thought you meant wired connectivity. I thought that was standardrized already, hot connection to hot connection, ground to ground.

[Sasha_G]

I was mainly talking about wireless, but there are some issues with wired connections. While the wired octopus in many audio systems works, there are some problems when trying to find a single wire to replace all those multiple wires.

Things get really sticky when the quality of the source material gets so good that copy-protection is an issue.

The audio industry has done the whole analog pass through for the new multichannel CD formats. Now they are exploring digital formats that have copy protection built in. However, there still is no standard that uses a single wire, and that tends to make things more confusing and more expensive as equipment must be built to cater to all the connection needs.

[Sorny]

i.Link (IEEE 1394) is a single wire connection that has DVD-A and SACD support, as well as DD/DTS/PCM/MPEG. Can be found on Pioneer Elite equipment at the 5 and higher model numbers (example VSX-55TXi, where the i is for i.Link). Denon has a non-standard implementation of IEEE 1394 for audio.

Sorny

[Retread]

For a second, I thought you meant wired connectivity. I thought that was standardrized already, hot connection to hot connection, ground to ground.

Just look at the jacks on the back of the Ventriloquist center-rear speaker. They look like bananas, but standard bananas will not fit. The holes in the connectors are too small. One has to find the single product that will fit, or go through the extreme pain of trying to thread wires through two pairs of recessed bananas to tie them together.

Professional audio gear uses balanced I/O. Home gear uses unbalanced. To put a professional parametric analyzer in the path to the subwoofer requires balanced/unbalanced conversions on both sides of the Eq. To connect a professional calibrated microphone to the receiver for tests requires phantom powering, which typically means a balanced device with more balanced/unbalanced conversions.

The back of my receiver is "plug-ugly," what with all the mix of analog, digital, LFE, pre-amp, etc., connectors. Then you add in a TV, a DVD/VHS player, a motorized screen, and a front projector used for computer monitor/TV display/DVD-VHS movies, and you have a real mess of wires hanging from the ceiling beams -- which is what I have in my viewing/listening room. Fortunately I also have a very tolerant wife, who likes the sound of Buddy Holly, Chris Isaak, and George Strait over the system.