Our Thoughts on Sony's S-AIR Technology
Sony's new
S-AIR technology is a very curious move given the amount of wireless streaming technologies out there.
S-AIR is a proprietary technology from Sony that is suppose to make setting up and sharing your music among your S-AIR compatible music devices a snap. While we can see the draw of this convenience, the simple fact that you are locked into yet another proprietary format makes us think this is a bad idea. The wireless streaming market is getting very crowded these days and coming out with a closed system doesn't seem like a great idea in our mind. In our opinion if you want to make your device the simplest to use and also sell a lot of units make the setup work with standard wireless protocols. With the amount of time and money Sony probably spent on developing the technology they could have come out with something that played nicely with the rest of the wireless systems that you have in your house currently. I guess this is the way these big companies operate. Come out with a new technology, push it hard and hope that everyone supports it. Unfortunately we don't see this one panning out. There really is no major added benefit of S-AIR. Most devices these days are very simple to setup so having a new Sony system that doesn't work with anything else doesn't make a ton so sense.
If after all our rants you are still interested you can check out their press release that is filled with all the specs over at
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Posted by David Ficocello at April 21, 2008 6:00 AM
I think you misunderstand the technology. Some of what the S-AIR can do falls into the category of real-time, Digital Wireless Audio.
This is different than streaming, where you can assume to have a large buffer in the receiving device. It works well for transferring media files between, say, a media server, to a playback device that essentially has a computer with a file system in it (hard disk, FLASH, or RAM based.).
What the common steaming technology cannot do well at all is low-latency, real-time 'streaming' to speakers or headphones. In this area, low-latency (typically under 20mS) must be preserved. This requires a different technology that, while commonly uses the same 2.4GHz ISM band as WiFi, is able to guarantee the low-latency QoS (Quality of Service) required to make speakers wireless - something that **NO** standard home wireless technology (including 802.11 WiFi) can deliver.
There are probably a dozen or so suppliers of this new technology, including Avnera, STS, Kleer Audio and others. Sony might have used a chipset from one of these vendors.
The problem is that ALL of these companies fielded proprietary technology - so their radios don't talk to each other. The big guys are watching, though; I believe that eventually, just as it happened with the early implementations of wireless Ethernet, one solution will emerge, possibly Ethernet AVB, but probably not for a couple of years.
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