Professional studios may use anywhere from two to sixteen speakers, each with dozens of parameters that can be adjusted independently or as part of a group. Speakers are often mounted high or placed in hard-to-reach locations, and engineers may be responsible for several studios. They needed a convenient way to manage individual speakers and groups organized by location or function.

The mobile application also had to communicate in real time with multiple embedded devices over a secure wireless network. Some operations involved small data transfers sent to several speakers, while others—such as initial configuration, application launch, and firmware updates—required larger amounts of data. A single communication scheme did not perform equally well for every use case.

Software stacks and hardware component limitations added another layer of complexity. Silicon vendors implement Bluetooth standards with different levels of completeness, so the team had to determine which capabilities could be used as provided and which needed to be modified or extended. The architecture also had to meet requirements for device authentication, error detection and recovery, uptime, and network resiliency.

Gibson and Krasamo formed a joint team to develop the mobile application and embedded firmware responsible for communication across the speaker system. The solution supports wireless setup, parameter configuration, speaker grouping, and firmware updates.

The team selected Bluetooth Mesh for secure low-latency, low-overhead communication across multiple speakers. Krasamo designed the network configuration, data models, communication interfaces, and operating parameters to match the product’s requirements with the capabilities of the embedded components and Bluetooth specifications.

To meet the desired performance during data-intensive operations, the team combined existing Bluetooth Mesh data structures with custom encoding and decoding methods. Serialization, deserialization, and caching routines helped move parameter and configuration data through the network more efficiently.

Firmware updates required a different approach. Bluetooth Mesh performed well when sending small data units to multiple devices, but larger transfers to a single speaker did not meet the desired transfer rate. For these operations, the mobile and embedded applications switch to a direct Bluetooth Low Energy connection behind the scenes, transparently to the user.

The resulting system gives sound engineers centralized wireless control over complex speaker setups, while the application handles protocol changes and device-level constraints without adding complexity to the user experience.