Mixhalo Wireless Phone Audio

Back at NAMM in January I went to a fascinating and bizarre demo of Mixhalo’s wireless technology. In short, they transmit low-latency, high quality audio to an app on your phone; you listen on headphones. Their pitch was for live events so that listeners could get high quality sound in their ears rather than through speakers in the air. In those pre-pandemic times, I thought this was pretty bizarre as an audience experience; here’s what it was like in the room:

The audio quality was pretty good, but there is some latency and so the lip sync was slightly off, but different than what we are used to acoustically. Here’s a short Mixhalo video on how it works:

Now, with drive in concerts and lots of socially distanced performances in the works, this seems less weird than it did, and could be an interesting solution for things like drive in concerts and so on. Interestingly on a quick search I couldn’t see any pandemic usages of the system.

As a live sound guy, of course I was wondering about latency and time alignment, with the sound travelling so much more slowly through the air than the wifi ether. I didn’t see this in action but their website says, “Mixhalo’s dynamic latency system time-aligns audio at any desired locations at your event.“

Our world has changed so much in a few months and it will be interesting to see where this goes.