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Industry Legend Sam Runco Joins the WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio) Advisory Board
Raise your hand if you genuinely love wires and cables.
No, that doesn’t apply if you simply have a preference (or even a passion) for one brand of cables and interconnects over another. If that applies to you, you can put your hand down.
Hands down also if you’re merely showing your acknowledgement of the fact that—for now anyway—wires give you you a better, more reliable, less-interference-prone connection between components. The three of you with your hands still in the air? You three are weirdoes.
You’re probably the one ones who won’t be interested to hear that industry legend Sam Runco has joined the Advisory Board for the WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio) Association. As the founder of one of the industry’s most prestigious brands in front projection (we don’t really need to tell you which company, do we?), a founding member of CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association), a recipient of the latter’s Lifetime Achievement Award and an inductee in the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, Sam Runco brings a lot of industry expertise with him in joining the Board.
Other members of the WiSA Advisory Board include Aperion Audio (who is getting a lot of attention lately for its new Intimus 4T Summit Wireless Home Theater Speaker System), DEI Holdings, Inc. (parent company of Polk and Definitive Technology), GGEC (makers of highly renowned speaker drivers for the consumer, pro, and car audio markets), Hansong Electronics, Klipsch Group, Meiloon Industrial Co., Pioneer Corporation, SHARP Corporation, Silicon Image, and Summit Semiconductor.
And all are working to develop and promote a high performance wireless audio standard for not only speakers, but TVs, source components, and other consumer electronics devices, as well. If the WiSA Association is successful in its goals, before too long consumers (and integrators) will be able to mix and match any WiSA-compliant devices from any number of different vendors, safe in the knowledge that they’ll all place nicely together.
About his new role with the WiSA, Mr. Runco had this to say: “WiSA-compliant speakers are the first to provide consumers with a superior quality, interference-free, wireless surround sound experience while offering interoperability with other WiSA-compliant CE components. I am looking forward to help guide the implementation, interoperability, and evolution of this exciting wireless home audio technology.”
Implementation and interoperability are certainly important factors for the WiSA, given its lack of broad market penetration thus far, but it’s the last goal—evolution—that is perhaps the most intriguing, especially since there’s no real indication yet as to how displays and source components are going to factor into the WiSA equation down the road. For now, it seems that any Blu-ray player or HDTV, for example, can and must be connected to a WiSA speaker system’s transmitter via HDMI. And WiSA is an audio standard, not a video standard. So what would make a WiSA-compliant Blu-ray player or TV different from a non-WiSA-compliant one? And how could the technology be used differently in the future?
Good questions, and hopefully ones that the WiSA Association can hint at answers to during its demonstrations at this year’s CEDIA Expo. Look for them in Sound Room 6 if you’re attending the show.
Related: A/V, audio, cables, consumer electronics, GGEC, high performance, industry, Pioneer Corporation, Sam Runco, surround sound, Tech, technology, wireless audio, WiSA Advisory Board saokggec, SPEAKER RECEIVER WALL SHELF
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