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REL Wireless – Setup Tips and Best Practices
Hi, John Hunter with REL here, and we’re going to address the really thorny issue of wireless in your home. Understand you may have 30, 40, or 50 devices these days that are hooked up. Wirelessly, right off the bat, you come in from the street and you’ve got some kind of a wireless modem that is then sent through a WIFI system then wirelessly ships it all over the place.
Understand that that is a huge radio station. At its at its most basic level everything that’s wireless at some point devolves into being nothing more than a very, very fancy FM radio. So understand that when you have a big WIFI transmitting unit and it’s any workload, most this, or even the, the, the, the ones that are so-called repeaters, most of them mean stays or what’s called a mesh network.
Most of them, if it’s receiving, let’s say you put one in your upstairs and that’s supposed to be feeding the six or seven rooms upstairs so your kids can be working on it. That is both a receiver and a transmitter. Hence, it’s putting out noise pollution. The main one, if it’s anywhere near our transmitter is a huge source of noise pollution.
First of all, understand that you, and any physically large bulky object are impediments to good clean WIFI or wireless transmission. Not because you’re some huge, massive human being, but because we’re 97 plus percent water. Water is a really effective shield for RF. Not good. So, what do we want to do if we’re going to be in a room that’s a publicly used room. Maybe it’s just your family most of the time, but you know, eight, 10 times a year, maybe you have parties or guests over for a dinner party. Get it up. Assume that you’re working with line of sight. You’re not, it’s a very broad broadcast beam, but get it up and over the height of most people. It will help ensure that when you do have that occasional dinner party, you’re still able to get that beam past most people’s bodies and have it get out to your REL.
There’s a working minimum. You want to keep a minimum of three feet between any high-quality transmitter. Now you may be saying, well, hang on. I don’t have this problem with any other stuff. Why am I suddenly having a problem with your system? You know, my WIFI works. I got eight devices in the same room and the answer is really simple.
Wi-Fi and all the rest of that clutter has the luxury of making handshakes, electronic handshakes constantly and re verifying. Saying, hey, how are you doing? Who are you? Oh, I see your, this, uh, transmitter made by Netgear. Got it. Nice to meet you. I’m over here doing this thing and they’re doing this and that’s great.
And the only problem with that is in music we’re doing this right now. So, all of that handshaking and re-verifying and resubmitting, the connection that works great for wifi. You just missed two bars of music. I’m sorry. It’s all over. That’s the problem. So how do we do what we do? And we’re not the only ones beginning to build these wireless systems, but any good musically based wireless system is going to be able to handle everything in real time.
With zero compression, digital loves to be compressed and if it’s just data, it’s a wonderful tool. You take huge bunches of information and you crush it down into this tiny, neat little ball. You can toss it wirelessly wherever you want and when it gets there, you just expand it, open up this thing and there’s your file lovely, but we can’t do it with real time music.
We’re hardwired with almost no latency between an amplifier and a loudspeaker on this channel. We’re hard wired to that. REL. No problem. We’re wired to this left channel speaker and oh boy, we’re wireless to the left channel sub because whatever reason. Maybe it’s a tile floor and we didn’t want to have a cable dressed across it. Whatever, we have to be able to be as fast as that copper wire.