US 7,483,538 · Granted 2009-01-27

The Wireless Speaker Hub That Untangled Home Theater Cables

Imagine your home theater system didn't need a tangle of wires running between every speaker. This patent protects a wireless hub that sits near one speaker and beams audio signals to your surround speakers and subwoofer without cables. It's the blueprint for how modern wireless home theater systems talk to each other.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system architecture where audio and control signals travel wirelessly between a central transmitter (positioned near a speaker housing) and multiple wireless receivers connected to remote speakers like subwoofers and surround speakers. What's protected here is the specific method of routing multiple audio channels through this wireless hub setup, where the center channel speaker acts as a relay point to distribute audio to the remote loudspeakers.

Why it matters

Before wireless speaker hubs became standard, home theater setups meant running speaker cables across rooms—a mess of wire that made installation painful and rooms ugly. This patent represents an early approach to solving that problem by creating a central wireless hub that could coordinate multiple speakers. It helped establish the concept that home entertainment didn't need to mean visible cables everywhere, making systems more flexible and aesthetically appealing to consumers who wanted cinematic sound without the installation headache.

Real-world use

When you set up a surround sound system today and your subwoofer communicates with your receiver without a dedicated cable, you're benefiting from wireless speaker architecture similar to what this patent describes.

Original USPTO abstract

A method and system for communicating audio, video, and/or control signals within a home entertainment system. A plurality of audio channels is communicated between a wireless transmitter and a wireless receiver. The wireless transmitter is located proximate to a speaker housing. In some embodiments the speaker housing also encloses a center channel loudspeaker. The center channel loudspeaker transmits an audio signal to a remote loudspeaker. An exemplary remote loudspeaker is a subwoofer loudspeaker. The subwoofer loudspeaker provides one or more received audio channels to one or more surround loudspeakers.

Patent details

Publication number: US 7,483,538
Filing date: 2004-03-02
Grant date: 2009-01-27
Assignee: Ksc Industries, Inc.
Inventor(s): MCCARTY WILLIAM A., KING, JR. JEFF
CPC class: H04R5/02

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