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Wireless Vs. Cable, What’s Right For You
The Reasons and Advantages for Each
The below text is a transcription of the video.
So the question today is when do I opt for one of REL’s awesome wireless systems. These are zero compression. They’re very fast, very dynamic, natural sounding and when should I stay with hard wired. The simple version is intrinsically hardwired is better until you get to fairly long lengths. Now, the 10 meters that we supply, which is roughly 33 feet, for those of us who are not in the metric system, they work extremely well.
There’s not a lot of delay to them about two milliseconds, something like that total. So then the question becomes, when do I go to wireless? Is it a speed thing and the answer is sometimes, but a lot of this is based on practicality. Give you an. You have a home theater, let’s say for just a moment that you’ve got a stereo pair of RELs and you have a center channel and a rear channel.
This is a big 3d based system through REL 3d. So what would I do in a system like that? Well, generally speaking, the main subs, the left right mains are gonna be hard wired. I think that most people who are going to go to the extent to do left and stereo subs in a big theater like that, that can go back and forth between music and, home theater are gonna make the effort to get those connected up hardwired.
Maybe they’ll use baseline blue to get the utmost, depends on what level you’re doing it at, but let’s go to the center channel. How does that connect up? Well, the best way to do it in most cases is to simply take the existing. We give you this free, cut it down to length once you’ve figured out exactly where you’re gonna put it.
So here’s the drill. Let’s say the center channel is here and the subwoofer is just below. It could be by the way, four or five feet left or right of center if the room is big enough. What you want to do is actually take this hardwired connection. Come off the back of the speaker, right? You want to take the two hots twist
these hot colors are hot, right? The red and yellow are hot. Black is your ground. Twist these two together and connect these up to the hot connection. The plus on the back of your loud speaker, connect this one up to the black connector on the back of your loud speaker. And in most cases it’s maybe a meter and a half, two meters at most typically, maybe it’s three meters
if you’ve moved it left or right by say five or six feet, but it’s right there. It’s intrinsic. You don’t have to do a lot of routing wiring, any special work and labor to get this to work. Now, same system in the opposite right hand corner, you have, let’s say, uh, a T/9x in the back rear corner and that’s, what’s connected up full range, right?
You’ve got really good surrounds. You’ve really thought about this. You know how to lay it out out of theater, things are set to large or full, and you’ve got that nine X back there with a 0.1 that’s gonna need to be connected as well. And you start going well, this is getting to be a bit of a pain.
You know, the equipment cabinet that houses all the electronics driving this is, is right over here behind some drapes and things in a closet behind the, the wall that my screen is mounted to. That’s gonna be really expensive and painful to have somebody run cable. Say 40 feet to go all the way up behind it.
You’re gonna have baseboards you’ve gotta remove. So, this can become a very expensive exercise or, or you could have hooked up something like this. If it’s a, if it’s a big S or reference based system, you could have connected up this Airship II to just have the antenna on the back of this thing, sticking up and give it a shot straight back to the rear corner.
If it’s a really crowded theater, if you’re gonna really have 15 or 20 people in it, Mount the antenna, or mount the Airship transmitter up high in the dark and have it beam line of sight back over to the REL in the opposite corner where this will receive it, pick up the signal, excuse me, decode it and feed it directly into the sub.
So some of these things are just real problem solvers.