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[James Paul]

Step right up folks, gather around, for today is the day of money in your pocket, for a 10 device Lifetime license of $990.00, providing YOU, a savings of nine, count `em, NINE, Greenbacks, GW`s, Kash Muney, over the $99 one device Lifetime. But act now, while supplies last.

[Andrew Broughton]

Getting latency below 10ms on an 802.11ac 5ghz WIFI connection is pretty tough.  And that's in a perfect world.  Add network traffic, and that number can skyrocket to 40-50ms pretty quickly.

Anything more than 5ms is garbage for IEM systems.

Now, when WIFI 6 becomes more available, you may be able to barely put something together that would be considered acceptable.  But, there's still no QoS that would guarantee delivery and as such leaves this in the garage band category at best for the foreseeable future.

Best part is that the latency won't be constant. It'll likely fluctuate all over the place. I can't imagine how bad that would sound.

[Russell Ault]

[...] I find typographic design and typeface design fascinating.  Ever heard the terms letting and kerning?

(not mine) People who don't pay attention to kerning just want to watch the world bum.

 

-Russ

[Scott Holtzman]

(not mine) People who don't pay attention to kerning just want to watch the world bum.

 

-Russ

All crows are black birds, but not all black birds are crows.

[Tim Gurske]

I think it's fine. As far as I can tell it's doing the processing on the laptop, which is hard wired. The phone is just controlling it remotely, so a little bit of latency doesn't matter. So, even if the wifi goes out or the battery on the phone dies, the laptop should still be doing its job.

I think the biggest issue with it would be trying to mix on a phone, and the monthly subscription which is complete BS in my opinion.

I'm still not sure who would buy it though...

[Chris Grimshaw]

I think it's fine. As far as I can tell it's doing the processing on the laptop, which is hard wired. The phone is just controlling it remotely, so a little bit of latency doesn't matter. So, even if the wifi goes out or the battery on the phone dies, the laptop should still be doing its job.

The laptop is doing the mixing, yeah, but then that stereo feed is streamed to each device over WiFi. Plug your IEMs into your phone (probably using a lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter), and you're good to go get a feed of constantly-varying latency.

Chris

[brian maddox]

I think the thing everyone forgets is that WiFi is an absolutely miraculous invention. It allows Hundreds of devices to pass data THROUGH the AIR using a relatively narrow amount of RF bandwidth without ANY central control system. What?!?

How does it accomplish this miraculous feat? By using that timeless engineering tool known as CHEATING. And in this case, the Cheating takes the form of making things APPEAR to be in real-time, when they absolutely are NOT. The data flow often moves very slowly during a difficult moment or two of spectrum change or high error rate, and then compensates for that lull by moving very QUICKLY at the first wide open opportunity. It's like that impatient driver that passes you furiously weaving through traffic and disappearing into the distance, only to again be visible several minutes later when it becomes trapped behind a slow moving truck.

This works perfectly fine for data that does not have to pass in a linear "real-time" fashion. Refreshing a web page or controlling a mixer need not be real time functions so long as they are kinda close. If I turn a mixer control and one time it happens in 3 ms and the next time it happens in 50 ms, I'm not likely to even notice the difference. WiFi technology leverages that simple fact to accomplish a pretty amazing feat of technology. Passing data through shared space under a dizzying number of different circumstances.

Unfortunately, LIVE audio is a REAL-TIME endeavor and as such is COMPLETELY at odds with the design criteria that makes WiFi work in the first place. The ONLY way to use WiFi to pass audio is to intentionally introduce latency to give a "Wiggle Window" in which to play the aforementioned slow/fast/slow/fast/slow dance needed to pass the data through the treacherous shared airwaves. For many areas of live sound, this Wiggle Window can be introduced without serious consequence, but IEMs is the one area where this is demonstrably not true. And it never will be. Will there be individuals who will be able to tolerate it? Sure. But there will be far more who cannot, even if that only manifests itself as a difficulty to find volunteers to play music on your church worship team. They may not know why, but they'll know that it definitely is NOT much fun to play music at your church. It just "feels off". And the better a musician/singer they are, the greater the chance that they will feel that way.

tl;dr - WiFi will not EVER work for IEMs unless the entire standard is fundamentally changed or altered to carve out a real time data transfer solution. Full Stop.

[Andrew Broughton]

PREACH!

[Brian Jojade]

tl;dr - WiFi will not EVER work for IEMs unless the entire standard is fundamentally changed or altered to carve out a real time data transfer solution. Full Stop.

Each WIFI standard has improved upon the latency and jitter issues.

WIFI 6 gets MUCH closer to making the connection good enough that it could work for this type of thing, although not 100% guaranteed to be hiccup free.

As the technology advances, we will at some point cross the hurdle that you can pass audio wirelessly reliably enough for it to be used for these type of things.  We're not there yet, but the writing on the wall is there that it's coming.

[brian maddox]

Each WIFI standard has improved upon the latency and jitter issues.

WIFI 6 gets MUCH closer to making the connection good enough that it could work for this type of thing, although not 100% guaranteed to be hiccup free.

As the technology advances, we will at some point cross the hurdle that you can pass audio wirelessly reliably enough for it to be used for these type of things.  We're not there yet, but the writing on the wall is there that it's coming.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see this happening. Primarily because there is not going to be a large enough demand to drive the standards requirements to reach the goal. Any latency greater than 2 milliseconds or so is problematic for IEMs. Two Milliseconds. Lectrosonics has struggled to get their digital IEM system accepted at 1.4 ms of latency because of these concerns, even though the system solves MANY of the inherent issues with professional analog IEM systems.

If we needed to reach these ultra-low latency levels in order to watch TikTok on our phones, I might see us getting there. But we don't. What consumers want/need is bandwidth and reliability. Low latency is a distant third. and Extreme Low Latency Audio is really not even on the design table.

[ProSoundWeb Community]