AxiomPlay Wireless Platform

We are finally far enough along with our hardware and firmware prototyping to begin outlining and discussing our new AxiomPlay wireless platform. The term platform is important as our plan is to employ this new technology within a number of different systems from an all-in-one single speaker system with battery power that can be used both indoors and outdoors to active desktop speakers, stereo pre-amps, and a module that can be installed during production in any of our existing speaker models. We will be starting with the bookshelf models and adding the others as we make the necessary circuitry to employ higher powered amplifiers. The current amplifier is 75 watts RMS per channel.

Much of our time over the past year (or two) was dedicated to evaluating and assessing the various systems already in the marketplace and the streaming technologies available. As many of you know, we originally intended to design a dedicated Airplay speaker, which would use a specific hardware platform. Our research suggested that this would be far too limiting for most people, many of whom do not own iDevices and prefer Android and other platforms. Thus began a search for how best to offer the widest range of device compatibility. At the end of all this work, and looking forward to the potential for new technologies, we decided that a fixed hardware system would be too limiting and decided to use an SoC (system on chip) based microcomputer to perform the various streaming and interface functions. Strapped to this embedded system is a high-quality, stereo DAC (digital to analog converter) capable of native playback up to 24bit/192kHz.

Now, without further ado, here is the current feature list:

WiFi and Ethernet network connectivity.
Wireless WiFi hotspot for use outdoors and anywhere that a WiFi network is not available.
Direct streaming from smartphone/tablet/computer via UPnP.
Direct streaming via Airplay.
Playback from attached USB sticks or USB hard drives.
Playback from NAS.
Playback of internet radio stations.
Web-based GUI for setup, playback control, and volume (USB/NAS/Internet Radio).

We are also working on allowing multiple AxiomPlay devices to be named and controlled from any network connected device with a web browser, allowing a simple to configure and use whole-home audio system.

As always, your input and suggestions are extremely valuable as we move forward with this exciting project!

Last edited by Andrew; 09/10/14 03:26 PM.