The distance is not very important now. Maybe 100 meters is unrealistic. I will be happy with 30 meters for now.
Actually I am not sure whether I need and encoder or not.
Can you please explain, what advantage I would get if I use an encoder in this particular application. Also what disadvantages are there if I don't use an encoder.
Thanks for your reply.
An audio encoder. People usually think of it as data compression - an attempt to faithfully represent the original message with fewer bits per second. Normally this comes at some marginal, possibly insignificant, loss in signal quality. I am guessing from your prior posts that you would not be interested in that.
However, it goes both ways. Audio coding, or source coding in general allows a higher transmission of information per bit. In other words you can also send more information (better quality) at the same bit rate.
So totally hypothetically, lets say you sampled even faster with even more resolution than 24 bit 44KHz, and then you encode down to the same bit rate as 24bit 44KHz, it would be better quality at the same bit rate.
Slightly higher complexity to encode but its not much.
Brings me back to my original point. I think you're pushing the spec too hard on that. If this is outdoor through a loud speaker, I don't think you'll hear the difference between 24bit wave and 16 bit wave. And either way you should encode. Check this article on a comparison between MP3 320KBs and 24bit wave.
http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2010/04/sound-test-difference-between-wav-vs-mp3/
He even posts the wave files so you can test it out. I bet you couldn't tell the difference even wearing those fancy studio recording headphones. And its 25% the data.
So next question you should have is, "yeah but I need a real time codec for this?" I know they're out there. Maybe somebody else on this forum knows about that.
Another thing that's dangling around in my head, is that 802.11 is packet radio. It's latency is time varying. Now it's so fast (especially if you only have one wifi connection running on it) that I assume the latency wouldn't matter. But on that front, I guess you will need to buffer the data at the receiver before you stream it?
My sense is that the latency of all these things will be insignificant. Codec latency.. low frequency filter latency.. Wifi connection latency.. But if I was going to build that project, I would pin all that down first.