Frustrations around remote controls
This week’s blog is rooted in frustration.
It baffles us that in this day and age, many high end (and not so high-end) AV devices still rely on IR (infrared) or RS-232 (a serial computer protocol that dates back to 1970 and that was for instance used for the first computer mouse) for operating these devices. I mean… really?
I hear you mutter, ‘They do come with apps, though’.
True, but as many of you will have experienced, these apps are clearly developed by audio-video geniuses as opposed to computer savvy developers who know how to keep a consumer happy as far as user-friendly-ness and reliability is concerned.
We’re talking about the different apps for as many different devices. Peanuts in the greater scheme of world problems, but as an audiophile, we find it utterly annoying and unbelievable at the same time that we are talking about 4K and now even 8K we can’t get a remote control into the 21st century.
Some hope is offered by companies like Simple Control or Logitech Harmony app version who allow you to control all apps together but reliability highly depends on the implementation of the control over your computer network.
And thus, we end up pulling out the IR remote control again in utter frustration. It seems my own frustration is shared by many of you out there. Time to have a dig at what IR is about and how we can work as best as we can with the dinosaur technology behind AV remote controls.
The History of IR
Sir William Herschel first discovered infrared light in 1800. He split light into a rainbow (called a spectrum) by passing sunlight through a prism, and then placed a thermometer in different colors in that spectrum. Unexpectedly, he found the thermometer showed a rise in temperature, even when placed in the dark area beyond the edge of the red light. He hypothesized that there must be more light beyond the visible color red that we simply could not see with our own eyes.
The Physics behind IR
What Sir William Herschel observed was infrared light or IR.
As he correctly assumed, infrared light falls just outside the visible spectrum, beyond the edge of what we can see as red. Other types of ‘invisible’ light include gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, microwave, and radio.
Light in general has common properties. It travels as a wave, but it is rather different than the ripples we see moving across the water. Light waves are made up of electric and magnetic fields. So you will sometimes find light referred to as electromagnetic radiation. And the entire spectrum of light is similarly called the electromagnetic spectrum.
One of the basic properties of any wave is its wavelength, which is just the distance between the peaks of one ripple and the next. For light, it is the length of one full cycle, or pulse, of the electric and magnetic fields.
Related to this is the frequency (expressed in Hertz), or the number of waves that pass a fixed point every second. Wavelength and frequency determine the type of light you are dealing with.
The uses of Infrared radiation are wide and varied, ranging from industrial, scientific, to medical applications. Just a few examples are night-vision devices, Infrared thermal-imaging cameras are used to detect heat loss in insulated systems, to observe changing blood flow in the skin, and to detect overheating of electrical devices.
Another example of everyday use is short-ranged wireless communication. Of course, this is what we at Rapallo are interested in. This particular application of infrared is called Consumer IR, Consumer Infrared, or CIR. We’re mainly talking about IR used in remote controls, but also in wireless applications with laptops, digital cameras and mobile phones
Some examples where IR is used for short ranged wireless communication are: sending a document from your laptop to a printer; sending a wireless fax to a distant fax machine, coordinating schedules between portable devices, remotely beaming digital photos to your computer, etc.
Of course, for us at Rapallo dealing with AV, it’s the remote controls that got us to write this weeks blog.
IR in the audiovisual world
The reason why IR is still around, despite the rise of Bluetooth and Wifi is that IR does not penetrate walls and so does not interfere with other devices in adjoining rooms. IR requires the two communicating devices to be in each other’s line of sight and they can’t be further away from each other than more or less 10-20m.
Of course, this makes IR highly usable in densely populated areas.
While this characteristic is an asset in many situations, it can also be extremely annoying if you want to operate for instance your MySky box while watching TV in the room next door. The MySky Wireless Remote Control IR to RF Extenders are the answer to that. They convert the IR signal into RF (radio frequency), allowing the signal to penetrate the wall and at the same time boost it over a longer distance.
Of course this is all fine and dandy, as long as your next door neighbour doesn’t come up with the same brilliant solution, changing your TV channels from his lazy boy next door.
A way around that (on condition that your MySky box is connected to your TV with an HDMI cable) is the use of an IR to HDMI extenders
But the biggest problem with Consumer IR is that it is largely not standardised. As so often in the world of AV, different brands developed their own protocols as an answer. Yep, here we go again…
Some well-known IR protocols are RC-5 (developed by Philips) and SIRC (developed by Sony).
Needless to say that the lack of standardization creates problems for consumers: it can for example mean that you will need to purchase a universal remote control (available here) because the remote for one device cannot control your other devices, landing you with 5 different remotes to juggle. I’m sure you are all very familiar with the frustration.
How does a remote-control really work?
To further understand this whole IR thing, we probably should explain a bit further in depth how a remote control actually works.
Here’s how: When you use your TV remote, an IR LED diode is used to transmit information to your TV. So, how does the IR receiver in your TV pick out signals from your remote among all of the ambient IR? The answer is that the IR signal is ‘modulated’. This really means that the signal is coded so that the receiver knows to listen. It does that by switching on and off in a determined pattern, to prevent interference from other sources of infrared (like IR light present in sunlight or artificial lighting).
The receiver in turn uses a photodiode to convert the infrared radiation to an electric current. It responds only to the determined rapidly pulsing signal created by the transmitter, and filters out slowly changing infrared radiation from ambient light.
A very common modulation scheme for IR communication is something called 38kHz modulation. It is very popular, because there are very few natural sources that have the regularity of a 38kHz signal, so an IR transmitter sending data at that frequency stands out among the surrounding IR that is naturally present in day-light. 38kHz modulated IR data is the most common. In fact, it is used by almost all AV manufacturers… apart from Sky-TV (They use what is called White Band IR).
This exact fact explains why in so many cases there are hick-ups with marrying your MySky box with your other AV equipment. They simply don’t speak the same language! The good news: The extenders we talked about just earlier are MySky accredited and speak both modulation scheme lingos. Sigh!
So what about the use of these all-in-one apps?
Which leaves us with the introduction of one last device that may be of use to you. At the very beginning of our blog we talked about mobile apps that allow you to control all your devices at once. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, provided of course that these devices are equipped for remote control over Wi-Fi. If that is not the case and your device only offers remote control via IR, the Global Cache iTach allows you to translate the IR command into a Wi-Fi command. As a result, it can be integrated in you one-app-rules-all-devices. Bingo!
And with that, until the world of AV sees the light when it comes to control of your many AV devices, we hope we made your list of frustrations just a tiny bit shorter.