The new Avenue system features HomePlug technology and enables the distribution of music and control signals over a home's existing AC wiring
"I zeroed in on powerline carrier (PLC) back in the early days," says Jeff Kussard, vice president of strategic development. "When I came to Russound, everybody was talking wireless, but the future is going to be an amalgam of wireless, powerline, phone line and coax."
For the whole-house audio application, Kussard says that powerline "is still a much more robust solution. … We've done a lot of field tests as well as lab measurements. It really boils down to this: RF technologies are much more susceptible to natural occurrences that happen in the household. Even large, organic moving bodies like people can interfere with WiFi."
The usual solution to the WiFi shortcoming is to employ buffering, which introduces latency, "which is fine for data but not for time-based transmissions like audio and video," Kussard says.
