LG’s new OLED and LCD TVs support WiSA’s wireless audio technology

LG reports that the OLED TVs and some high-end LCD TVs to be released in 2019 support the WiSA standard. This is a system from the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association that supports wireless, uncompressed audio with up to eight channels.

The partnership between LG and the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association means that all OLED TVs and some high-end LCD TVs released in 2019 will be certified for the wireless audio technology. It concerns televisions in nine new series that will be released in 2019. LG is the first major TV manufacturer to adopt the technology.

In concrete terms, this means that these TVs are compatible with special WiSA USB transmitters and a number of WiSA certified speakers. Users can use the audio technology by plugging such a transmitter into a USB port of the LG TV and using the appropriate wireless speakers.

Brands such as Bang & Olufsen and Harman Kardon, among others, have speakers that are certified by WiSA. All certified products can work together. In September 2018, the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association released the WiSA Ready certification program for TVs, game consoles and computers, among others.

WiSA uses frequencies from 5.2 to 5.8GHz, which in practice would yield 5ms latency at most when playing 24bit uncompressed audio sources. This makes the technology much better than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, according to Summit Wireless Technologies, a founder of WiSA and a partner of LG. High-end audio standards with height channels, such as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, can also be decoded.