by Chris Schaaf on February 24, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Click here to view the full article
Everyone wants to be on the wireless bandwagon these days, and wireless music is probably at the top of the list. For the Apple folks out there, this is old news with iTunes and an Airport Express or AirPlay. For others, a Sonos (or maybe a Mondo) wireless media player is whetting your wireless music whistle. Either way, NuForce has entered the fray with the Air DAC.
The NuForce Air DAC is a two part wireless system that allows you to transmit CD-quality audio from your portable device to your home stereo. The system, at its core, consists of two parts: the Air DAC receiver and either the uTX (USB) or iTX (30-pin Apple dock connector) transmitter. Based on SKAA technology, the system creates its own wireless audio network in the 2.4 GHz band (read: no wifi network required) and incorporates a proprietary method of interference avoidance, ensuring you won’t experience clicks, pops, or dropouts. Claimed latency in the system is low enough to watch video on your device with the audio streaming to the Air DAC receiver.
The Air DAC (and SKAA in general) is designed as a one-room system; both the transmitter and reciever must be within 15-30 meters of each other (10-20 meters with the iTX). Each transmitter can be bound to up to four receivers and vice versa. The receiver has a single front-panel button to cycle through available transmitters. The transmitter automatically locks on to receivers as it comes into range. I’d imagine you could probably get it to work in adjacent rooms in some situations, but the intention is that you’d have a receiver in each room you want to use and the transmitter will hop from receiver to receiver as they come into range.
The receiver is a little more than three inches square and about an inch high, so hiding it among your existing A/V gear should be a pretty simple chore.
The SKAA technology is pretty cool in that they standardize the transmitters and leave the receiving device up to the manufacturers. In this case, it’s a small desktop cube with RCA outputs, but there’s also speakers, headphones, and earbuds in the works. The beauty of the system is that all SKAA devices are designed to interact and work with each other, so you can mix and match your TX and RX devices.
Click here to view the full article