The Home Theater Problem: Why so many wires?

For decades, home theater speakers meant two wires per speaker carefully installed and threaded around your living room to pump power over copper wires to get you full immersive sound from 5.1 tracks on your DVD’s. It required an audio visual receiver (AVR) that no one remembers how to set up and has a remote with too many buttons.

Why did it need so many wires?

Speakers need power to make sound.

Speakers need power?

The short answer is: yes because of physics. Your wired home theater system relies on an AVR to first take your DVD’s Digital signal and convert an Analog signal (Digital to Analog Converter: DAC) to amplify that signal’s “vibrations” to each of your speakers.

What you hear from a speaker is air being vibrated from a cone/diaphragm that’s being pushed and pulled by magnets. And those magnets are powered by electricity that’s flowing through those positive/negative speaker wires across your living room. The bigger the speaker, the bigger the magnets. The bigger the magnets the more power that needs to be amplified to get a louder sound.

What about wireless speakers?

Basically, wireless speakers have both a built-in DAC (to receive a digital signal such as bluetooth, WiSA, WIFI) and a built-in amplifier to power the speaker drivers inside the speaker. This is known as an “Active Speaker” where everything is built-in and just needs power vs a “Passive Speaker” which needs an external AVR or Stereo Amplifier to function.

How does Enclave make wireless home theater work?

Our CineHub transmitter uses a single cable to your TV to take audio from your Netflix, Hulu, Spotify apps or cable box and sends out that audio signal to each of our speakers in perfect synchronization and no compression/signal loss. This means no more speaker wires, simply connect each of our CineHome’s speakers with power and our CineHub will take care of the rest.

Resource: How stuff works