DECT NR+ Builds a Radio Platform for Wireless Audio

At DECT World 2026 in Munich, which ran on 3 and 4 November, the DECT Forum launched an Audio Interest Group with Sennheiser among the companies driving it. The group's scope is deliberately broad - headphones, headsets, microphones, loudspeakers, intercom, conferencing and tour-guide systems - and its work is organised in three parts: ecosystem development, certification, and guidance for migrating from legacy DECT. Dr Andreas Wilzeck, who heads spectrum policy and standards at Sennheiser and sits on the DECT Forum board, framed the motivation plainly: wireless audio is becoming more demanding while the spectrum it relies on becomes more crowded, and a standard only proves itself when manufacturers, integrators and users can be confident that products will work together.

The technology behind the acronym matters more than the acronym. DECT NR+ is standardised by ETSI as DECT-2020 NR and recognised inside the ITU's IMT-2020 family of 5G technologies, but it is not a mobile operator service: it is designed for privately deployed networks. It starts from the near-globally available 1.9 GHz DECT band and extends to other bands below 6 GHz subject to regional access. The radio is new - cyclic-prefix OFDM, modern channel coding and flexible scheduling - and the topology options run from point-to-point links through star to mesh. For audio the interesting property is scheduled access rather than peak throughput: a system that grants transmission slots on a schedule can promise delivery in a way that contention-based Wi-Fi cannot. Coexistence with legacy DECT equipment is part of the design.

There is already working hardware. The Franco-German MERCI project, which Wilzeck led and which concluded in July 2025, demonstrated a DECT NR+ wireless microphone paired with RFmondial evaluation hardware and a cloud-connected production workflow, with local audio carried on NR+ and wide-area connectivity left to the cellular network. Sennheiser's existing DECT products - AVX for video production, SpeechLine Digital Wireless for corporate and education spaces - show what automatic frequency management buys in deployment. What is missing is the boring part: certified interoperable products and a migration story for the installed base of conference, intercom and tour-guide systems that will not be replaced in a single refresh cycle.

For integrators the near-term reading is cautious but useful. A new radio layer with mesh and scheduling widens what a wireless microphone or intercom can be asked to do, and the certification work is the signal to wait for before writing NR+ into a specification. Meanwhile the fixed side of the room still carries the load: a wireless microphone is the last hop into a wired audio backbone, and zones, paging priority and recording all live there. Amtune supplies that backbone - Dante audio modules, AES67 audio modules and Dante and AES67 networked audio interfaces - so a room can change its radio technology without changing its audio architecture. Enquiries: sales@amtune.com.