Day after day, the wires around us get thinner and eventually disappear from our surrounding. Electronics manufacturers seem to have made an agreement to replace all of them, bit by bit, with radio or infrared signals.

On the one hand, this is good, as we cannot trip on radio or infrared signals. On the other hand, wireless equipments have a major drawback, which is called interference.

This applies to wireless speakers as well. Wireless speakers were conceived by the manufacturers as a convenience for casual listening. You can have the stereo equipment in the living room and listen to music into the bathroom, kitchen or even in the backyard. On condition that you remain in the specified reception area - usually 150 to 300 feet from the transmitter. Wireless speakers that are based on radio waves transmission work fine through walls and floors.

It appears that 900 MHz wireless speakers were first released by Recoton, which marketed them under three brand names: Advent, Acoustic Research and Jensen. But Recoton went bankrupt in April 2003. Thompson, the mother company of RCA, bought the division of accessories from Recoton, that included headphones and wireless speakers, and decided to continue their manufacture.

For the time being, there are some inconveniences about these devices. No matter the brand-name, up to this moment, they do not raise to the efficiency of their wired counterparts. In this case, if shopping for wireless speakers, our advice is to wait a bit more for the next generation of wireless speakers that hopefully will repair these drawbacks. But if you're decided to have them anyway, here's your guide on how to.

In the next section, we'll see how wireless speakers work. We'll talk about the two technologies (radio waves and infrared signals) and the differences among them; about their interference with other household devices, the battery life, the range of transmission and weatherproof.