Sonic Immersion Wireless Digital Audio Link Review

Pre-wiring a complex multi-speaker home theater system in an existing single-family home, condo or townhouse can be a daunting task even for the highly trained professional A/V installer. Obstacles such as tile floors, no attic or cellar access, two story homes, and location of windows and doors in your future home theater room can compromise locations of speakers. The last thing that many new homeowners want to do is demolish wall plaster or ceiling sheetrock in their new home to install wire for speaker and subwoofer locations. Many simply give up and what they end up with is wire running on top of the floor, across doorways, or worse a two-speaker home theater system. Another possible installation consideration would be if your amplifier is permanently installed in your media room but you wanted to distribute audio from a source such as a CD player or other analog device located in another part of your house.

There have been many attempts to find a solution to these very common problems. Wireless technology has been touted as the perfect fix for applications like this. Unfortunately there have been no cost effective products suitable for high-end home theaters or whole house audio distribution. Many manufacturers claim reliable operation, but every wireless transmitter and receiver we have tested and evaluated to date has been plagued with intermittent operation, signal interference, and limited bandwidth problems.

Sonic Immersion Technologies, located in the beautiful state of Kentucky is yet another manufacturer claiming a solution to this long, hard, fought problem. We must admit that after several failed wireless product evaluations, we started this review with a high degree of skepticism. Read on to find out if this manufacturer has found the magic combination to unlock this complex problem.

The Digital Audio Link is a wire-free 5.8GHz class "B" receiver and transmitter system. The system consists of a transmitter, receiver, and two nine-volt AC adapter transformers the transmitter and receiver feature changeable transmitting and receiving channels and encryption codes. This is accomplished with eight encryption dipswitches and three channel dipswitches. This feature is very handy to have and should prevent interference from devices such as cordless phones.

The transmitter has a red LED power indicator and gold plated right and left line level channel inputs. The receiver features a red LED power indicator and a green LED signal receive indicator. The receiver also has right and left line-level channel outputs. The transmitter and receiver is very small, compact, and elegantly designed. As Shown below both the transmitter and receiver are smaller than a DVD case. We ordered the short distance version of the kit; this would most likely be the correct version to order for most single room home theater systems. The Digital Audio Link short distance kit has an effective range of about 150ft. The kit is also available in a medium range for longer distances up to a claimed 300ft.

Looking through our CD collection, we selected the new age instrumental CD The Private Music Of Patrick O'Hearn. This older CD released for sale back in 1992 is chock full of high-energy electronic synthesizer, horn and percussion music. If you're a fan of instrumental music you should have this CD in your collection.

We selected the LFE intense DVD War Of The Worlds for evaluating the performance of transmitted LFE signal between the Digital Audio Link and our Axiom Audio EP-600 subwoofer .We selected this DVD because it contains a significant amount of gut wrenching LFE effects. We use this DVD regularly for product evaluation and that gives us the benefit of knowing what the sound track should sound like.

We began our LFE evaluation with chapter six, "Machine Emerges". As the alien vessel begins to make its assent from under the ground, the road begins to crack, break up, and splinter apart. The wireless transmitted LFE signal between the Digital Audio Link and the Axiom Audio EP-600 subwoofer was absolutely flawless. We could detect no amount of signal degradation or loss of information transmitted from the DVD's LFE sequence. As usual the Axiom Audio EP-600 subwoofer rocked the house and had everything in our room human and non-human feeling the effects of the awesome LFE content. At no time during the DVD LFE evaluation period did we experience any noise, signal degradation, or any other strange anomaly. All that was heard and felt were the clean glorious LFE effects provided by the excellent sound track found on the DVD.

The manufacturer claims a useable range between 30-150 feet. We placed the receiver and transmitter in various locations in our building and we were only able to obtain a steady useable range of about 50ft with one wall between the receiver and transmitter. Distances longer than 50 feet produced intermittent signal dropouts and/or no signal at all. We were pretty disappointed with the range performance of the Digital Audio Link considering it's a 5.8 GHz device. We expected far better range and we therefore cannot recommend the device for use in multi-room installations.

The Digital Audio Link is by far the best wireless receiver and transmitter we have tested to date, and it should be considering its somewhat lofty price tag. We started this review with skepticism and a simple question: Is the Digital Audio Link the product that finally unlocks the combination for successful wireless home theater? Our answer to this would be that the Digital Audio Link fell just short of providing a viable solution for a complete wireless home theater system. The Digital Audio Link can be of great benefit for home theater installations that require wireless rear surrounds or wireless subwoofer locations.

This is the first wireless transmission/receiving device that we have reviewed that can be implemented and successfully installed in a high-end home theater system for transmission of wireless low frequency information to subwoofers and tactile transducers. The Digital Audio Link would also be a viable solution sending full bandwidth information to surround sound speakers providing the engineers fix the interference problem we encountered in our review. The simple fact is that the Digital Audio Link is a giant leap forward in wireless audio transmission devices, considering the previous devices we have evaluated.

This little transmitter and receiver may have the ability to open up doors for difficult installations where wires can't be installed. For many, this may be the difference in listening to their systems with or without surround sound speakers and subwoofers. Keeping this simple fact in mind, we find it hard not to recommend the Digital Audio Link for these types of installation scenarios and hope to see the bugs worked out for improved performance of full range wireless transmission.

Sonic Immersions Technologies
MSRP: $549
www.ibeambass.com
Tel: 270-444-0491
Fax: 270-442-7638