Speakers can make a beautiful sound, but they can also make an ugly mess, littering floors and walls with wires.

Running speaker cables around your room for a couple of stereo speakers was bad enough, but now in this age of surround sound, with packages that come with six, seven or even eight speakers, it’s difficult to set up your audio system without making the floor look like a bird’s nest of wires.

Manufacturers are aware of the problem and now a number of them have turned to wireless speaker technology to reduce the amount of cabling.

In fact, everything from home cinema kits to PC speakers and hi-fi systems are now using wireless technology. We’re going to take a look at wireless speakers and how they can help declutter your room of some of those nasty speaker cables.

Where are the wires?
Wireless technology sounds simple. You replace wires with transmitters and receivers and suddenly you can throw those old speaker cables in the bin.

Unfortunately, the reality is not as straightforward. The main problem is how you get power to the speakers when there are no cables available. This is why a truly wireless home cinema set-up is still an unattainable goal at the moment.

Instead, there are systems that use fewer wires than traditional surround sound set-ups, which are on offer from most manufacturers. Seeing as most surround sound systems involve a mass of cabling that is often tricky to set up, anything that reduces this complexity is still a welcome proposition.

In home cinema terms, wireless usually translates as a system that uses wireless technology to transmit sound to the rear speakers. The speakers will need to be plugged into a mains socket, but the wireless receiver still eliminates the need to run cables all the way to the back of a room.

Method in the madness
There are two common ways to transmit audio to the rear speakers in a home theatre system. The first uses radio waves and generally has a range of up to 300 metres.

In the past, radio wave systems have used analogue transmission, but this was prone to hiss and interference. Modern systems transmit sound in digital form and use error correction and frequency hopping to avoid interferences and improve overall sound quality.

The second method uses infrared to transmit the audio. The audio is first encoded in digital form and then beamed out via the infrared transmitter.

However, infrared is a line-of-sight technology, which means the receiver must be in line with the transmitter without obstruction for the connection to remain active.