US 7,643,894 · Granted 2010-01-05

The Patent Behind Whole-Home Audio Networks

Imagine controlling music in every room of your house from one place, with speakers and audio sources all talking to each other wirelessly over the internet. This patent covers the whole system—the speakers, the devices that play music, the server that controls it all, and how they connect together.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a networked audio distribution system made up of multiple speaker nodes positioned around a home or building, independent audio source devices that can play different content, an internet interface for external connectivity, a central network control server that manages what plays where and when, a legacy converter that lets old audio equipment work with the new system, and the internet protocol network that ties everything together. What's protected here is the combination of all these components working as one coordinated system.

Why it matters

This patent addresses a foundational problem in home audio: how do you get music and sound from multiple sources to multiple rooms without running cables everywhere? By treating audio distribution as a network problem rather than a wired one, the patent opens the door to flexible, scalable whole-home audio systems. Companies building multi-room audio products would need to either license this patent or engineer around its claims if they use similar networked speaker and source architectures.

Real-world use

When you use a modern multi-room audio system to play a podcast in the kitchen while music streams in the living room, you're relying on the kind of networked speaker and source coordination this patent describes.

Original USPTO abstract

This invention is a networked audio system ( 20 ). The invention includes a plurality of speaker nodes ( 100 ), a plurality of self-sufficient audio source node devices ( 300 ), an internet interface ( 400 ), a network control server ( 310 ), a legacy converter and controller ( 600 ) that connects to one or more legacy sources ( 500 ), all connected via an internet protocol network ( 200 ).

Patent details

Publication number: US 7,643,894
Filing date: 2003-05-08
Grant date: 2010-01-05
Assignee: Netstreams Llc
Inventor(s): BRAITHWAITE MICHAEL, CARDENAS HERMAN
CPC class: H04N21/234327

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