Hasta La Gadget!

Aperion’s Intimus 4T wireless surround sound speakers, available in February, will use Summit Wireless’ auto-calibration system.

LAS VEGAS — Home theater nerds will advise you to spend hours calibrating your surround sound speakers, adjusting delay times and tweaking volume levels to place the system’s “sweet spot” in perfect alignment with the well-worn ass groove in your sofa.

Now, you can advise them to suck it. We’ve just seen a demo of a wireless HD audio system for home theaters here at CES that takes only minutes to set up, sounds awesome, and doesn’t give a damn where you’re sitting.

You unpack the speakers and just plop them down in your room wherever they fit the best. Then you sit on the couch and press a button on the remote. The system locates all of the speakers and assigns the proper channel to each one: right-front, center, left-rear and so on. It also calibrates all of the speakers, adjusting the volume and delay of each one individually.

This auto-optimization places the sweet spot of your home theater in the exact position where you’re sitting when you press the button. Calibration takes only one second, literally — the remote sends out an ultra high-frequency ping, each speaker answers, and the system calculates the distance based on the delay. Get up and move to another seat, press the button again, and the sweet spot jumps to your new location.

Best of all, the system sounds downright amazing. It’s fully uncompressed HD audio (24-bit/48 kHz, with 96 kHz capability), so there are no nasty compression artifacts gunking up the sound.

The technology was developed by Summit Wireless. The company is currently licensing it to speaker and TV manufacturers, with the first products coming to market next month. Summit’s system use the U-NII wireless band, so the audio data is streamed outside the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies used by most consumer wireless devices, keeping interference to a minimum. It also uses its own error correction and timing technology. Summit Wireless says it has latency down to between 2 milliseconds and 5 milliseconds — low enough for games, and lower than what’s required for movies, since most humans don’t start to notice lip-syncing problems until around 9 or 10 milliseconds. I certainly didn’t notice any syncing issues during the demo.

The lucky company to ship the first Summit-equipped wireless speakers is Aperion, which has both 5.1 and 7.1 versions of its Intimus 4T home theater systems arriving in February. These are the speakers I heard today. They are active units (each speaker has its own on-board amp) and the system includes the remote control and the wireless base station that connects to your TV with an HDMI cable.

Aperion’s speakers sound killer, but they are big and expensive. The 5.1 system is $2,500 and the 7.1 system is $3,000. However, Summit is also working with other companies to develop a sub-$1,000 surround system and a soundbar system. Summit also says it’s “in talks” with several TV manufacturers to produce Summit-compatible TVs, which be ready by 2012.

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