Audioengine W1 Wireless Audio Adapter

Reviews: Multimedia

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Max Slowik
Beth
Audioengine
May. 2, 2008

Specifications

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In Use

I tested these with my awesome Audioengine A5s, my worn-yet-quality Sennheiser circumaural headphones, my home theater PC (with a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H using Realtek's ALC889A, 106dB SNR), a Toshiba Gigabeat, and an Apple iPod 5G. And, naturally, the DAP built into the W1s. Installation was, suffice it to say, infinitely easier than drilling through the floor and running a cable through the crawl space. Instead of plugging in two ends of one wire, you plug in four separate wires. Brain surgery. It's not even necessary to connect an audio cable to the sender if you're connecting it to a PC. Windows detects it as a "Generic USB Audio Device" and it works as your main audio out. This makes a separate sound card tricky to use if you're interested in applying it outside of stereo audio; let's say you wanted it for the rear channel of an HTPC. You couldn't use the PC for USB power, since the sound card replaces the standard audio out.

This problem can be circumvented by using the power supply instead of the PC, but then you'll need an extra power supply (only one is included) for the receiver. Again, Audioengine's A5 speakers have a USB power jack, so you'll find that combination works flawlessly.

Testing

After setting all my line-out levels and double-checking my equalizers and everything else, I lined up the same songs and audio test recordings on both my computer, connected directly to the speakers, and the long list of other players, using the W1s via the A5's secondary input. This way I could directly compare the wired audio to the wireless. And my findings were... substantial.

I couldn't tell the difference.

Every device connected to the wireless transmitter--every audio track--sounded identical to the audio being wired to the speakers. I even set up a blind test to be sure, my head not three feet from the A5s with the dials spun from one to ten, and I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't tell the difference.

In a quest to find any flaw over wired audio, I set up two sets of speakers (one wired and one wireless, connected to the same computer) to see if the delay was noticeable. And I couldn't identify the lag (at sea level, 20ms/ a fiftieth of a second, you'd deal with the same amount of latency being 22 feet away from the speaker). If you're supremely keen of hearing, it wouldn't be unbelievable that you could hear that delay, but it would be unrealistic. And, of course, if you're only going for stereo, then the delay is irrelevant.

If there's enough interference, then I'm sure anyone could, at long last, notice it affecting the music. But inside my house, in the city, with about a billion things that should interfere with the signal, they still worked fine. Either the speakers found a clean channel (one of 40 automatically selected, FCC-distributed channels) or they switched around any noise transparently; interference just wasn't an issue.

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Page 1: Introduction and First Looks
Page 2: In Use & Testing
Page 3: Conclusion

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by aireiq on May 6, 2008 - 10:23 am

The PR pronunciation of CompUSA is spot on, in case anyone was wondering.

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