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Airship II Product Overview
The New Wireless Standard
The text below is a transcription of the video
Hey, John Hunter here. Listen, we have a new version of the Airship, the air ship too coming. Little bit about this, this retains all of the previous units functionality, so we have high level input with the speakon here. We’ve got. a stereo pair of low level inputs. We’ve got an XLR input for 0.1. We’ve got RCA inputs for 0.1 as well.
So what’s the difference, same power supply. So we were developing some really, really super fast models, and we went to check, we always do this functionality using our wireless. Now we’re really proud of our wireless. I will just say this. Most people who’ve looked into wireless, really sort of forensically find out that most of the wireless that goes with subwoofers is anything but edge of the art.
There’s a lot to it, and our chief engineer, Justin really has incredible experience going all the way back to power, laser work. The guy knows everything to do with microwave wireless. He’s really a godsend when it comes to this stuff. So we’re doing functionality listening, and we can hear, I can hear a difference.
It’s a problem. It hadn’t previously been a problem. Suddenly it sounds slow, a little soft. What is going on? So we dug in and looked at everything. There was nothing that was different. We hadn’t somehow made our product worse over the years what’s going on? So we looked at, and the only spec that jumped out us at all was the noise function.
On the main processor. So what we do, just a brief explanation of what we do with air ship is pretty incredible. We essentially import the entire front end, the section that steps high level down to low level from our units. That’s actually reproduced here. So when you hook up high level here, we drop it in.
We do some very cool things where we get rid of all the out of phase components. Normally when you’ve got left and right signals, for example, a lot of it is in phase, but there are some aspects to it that are out of phase. Well you can’t send in phase and out of phase reliably wirelessly. So we strip out all the out of phase information.
This is a much more sophisticated piece than people realize we did all of that. Hadn’t changed anything, and yet what was happening was the actual noise that was in the core processor was affecting it. So we went out and studied and figured out we had a 96 DB signal noise ratio on the original that’s pretty damn quiet and it seemed fatuous, but we went all right, look,
the best one we can find is about 120 DB Texas instruments builds. When we listen to three different manufacturers and the Ti one was clearly the most natural sounding, the fastest, the most open, the most dynamic. So we put the 120 DB unit in and we were just completely unprepared for the fact that you could actually hear that it clearly is not just noise for what was happening here dynamically.
It couldn’t have just been the fact that it was quieter in the background and all down to the fact that we were actually working just on high speed. We were always working on stuff in the background, high speed driver development, and we could finally hear the limits of the previous chip. So the Airship II, it retains all the functionalities of the
previous one. You can still do high level and 0.1. All of those things still happen within the Airship II, we’ve just upgraded the core performance of it. So a brief note, what is the Airship II designed to partner with naturally? At its price it’s probably not gonna be a perfect solution for things like T/xs, for example, and we make other solutions for that.
This is really about edge of the art wireless. So this is designed to pair with our reference models. It’s designed to work with Serie S the 510, the 812, the Carbon Special, the 212/SX. Those are its natural partners, late in development of the 1510, we were just checking basic functionality with wireless
and of course we put an HT Air in there, worked great, but the performance of the 1510 is so fast, so sudden and so resolved. It really resolves to quiet better than any of the previous models we’d ever heard. And it made us wonder what would happen if we partnered it with an Airship II, we did, and not a great surprise.
It’s a match made in heaven and it has the ability to transform the 1510, from being a piece that is really just expressly a 0.1 LFE monster into a full blown re theater reference piece.