Network loudspeaker

A conventional loudspeaker is an electromechanical transducer that converts an electrical signal into sound.

Network audio was first introduced in 1983 by John Detreville and W. David Sincoskie of Bell Labs in the IEEE paper "A Distributed Experimental Communications System".

[2] Subsequently, in 1988, Polle T. Zellweger, Douglas B. Terry and Daniel C. Swinehart of Xerox PARC introduced audio over Ethernet at the 2nd IEEE Conference in a paper entitled "An Overview of the Etherphone System and its Applications".

[3] The very closely related technology (nearly synonymous), Voice over IP (VoIP), which generally consists at a minimum of a microphone on one end, a speaker on the other end, with a network connecting them; began widespread use in 1998 with PCs, followed shortly after by dedicated hardware (phones with built-in VoIP capabilities).

The audio content played by the processor in an IP speaker is communicated from its source across a packet-switched data network using IPv4 and IPv6 addressing with a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP).