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Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?
abrinton asks: "I just went into escrow on a new house. Of course, first thoughts are to the sound system. I don't want to wire. Anything. I've got a wireless network, so computers are all sorted. But what do I do for sound? I need ideas for a centrally controlled sound system that can use 802.11g for transport. I'd like to have the same music everywhere, or better still, options to play different things in different rooms. I've got access to tons of old PIII laptops, wireless gear, old computers, sound cards, etc to make this work. Has anyone got any ideas or done anything like this?"
I am sure someone else will mention it, but I use iTunes exclusively for music throughout our home. A central server with our entire 10k song plus collection ripped onto it resides in the study with an old Powerbook connected up to the main stereo system in the house that spins out the tunes for most to hear (A Mac Mini would be perfect for this task). Others who want to listen to something else in differing parts of the house (or outside) can also tie into iTunes and listen simultaneously to completely independent streams, all wirelessly. In fact, before they moved, my next door neighbors used to stream from our server as well.
I don't know if PIII laptops can run iTunes or not, but my six year old Powerbook spins tunes with no problem whatsoever. For those truly particular about their music ( or those with high end home stereo systems possessing digital audio connectors ), Powermac G5's and the new 17in Powerbook also have digital audio out. Combine that with Apple's lossless audio format and you have some kick ass tunage available without ever again having to search through your CD collection for that particular song. A cheaper option is to purchase Airport Express units for differing parts of your house that each have an audio out and can plug into any available power socket.
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Well, if you are serious about sound, you really should go for wired solutions. If you can't go for wires, then you should consider some good (and expensive) wireless sound speakers. If you -finally- are just thinking of PC-like sounds, well, I think I can't help. Sorry. PS: I'd stress you to go for the wired solutions. And wire the speakers with MonsterCable or similar. drop the cheap car-audio stuff. Ciao!
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Of course, first thoughts are to the sound system.
:-)
Geek.
This is so easy, I don't even know why you had to post it to Slashdot.
So, here it is, how to have the same music play in every room in your house, in 3 easy steps:
1.) Buy stereo system with very large speakers
2.) Put stereo system in one room of your house. Orient speakers so they face toward the rest of the house.
3.) Turn volume up all the way.
If you still have some "dead spots" in the house where the sound doesn't reach, you'll need my specidal educational pamphlet "Sledgehammers and You," available for only $9.95, plus shipping and handling.
I bought a MR814 V3 & WGR614 V4 Netgear to play UT2004 wirelessly with my wired server. *cough* to Say the least its not pleasant with LAN parties on WLAN cards.
For some odd reason I can't share the LAN wirelessly, only the gateway/NAT (internet) on the WAN port. Can't even ping any LAN connected computers while connected wirelessly, but loads slashdot like a charm though.
So, whats this wireless resource sharing everybody speaks of?
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
put that escrow BACK!
Next year they'll ask for it back x2, at least
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
When you say "new house" do you mean that it's being built for you right now? If so, forget the wireless idea immediately. Go to Home Depot, buy boxes of Cat5/6 cable, spools of coax, and heavy duty speaker cable. Pick out a closet somewhat close to your living/family room and make it the distribution hub for your new home. Get your butt down to the construction site and run coax, network, and speaker wires to all the rooms of the house from this central location. It also wouldn't hurt to run RCA, S-Video, and maybe even VGA or DVI from the closet to the expected location of your main TV.
:)
Any wires that you do not plan to use right away can be left inside the walls (Take pictures of EVERYTHING before they sheetrock the place, you'll be glad you did later when you want to find the wires!). The rest of the stuff should have standard boxes that you can add the appropriate wall plates to later.
Smarthome is your friend for a lot of the finishing touches. I recommend a box like the ChannelPlus that allows you to insert your own audio/video on an unused cable channel. I did that and now I can watch DVDs or Movies coming from the computer in the closet on any TV in the house. ChannelPlus thoughtfully has IR devices that feed back up the coax line to the source so your remote controls will activate everything hidden in the closet.
I could go on and on about this- I've done it for my current home and will be building another home this year. I've already started thinking about improvements to my original layout
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
iPod with shoulder speakers.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Apple makes a neat little device that you can use to stream music to and hooks up to your stereo. This combined with iTunes is a great way to play music all over the house.
You might look into the Sonos system (previously discussed on /. It's wireless and allows unique content at each location. I saw an early demo and it was very impressive. Cost might be a factor, but the system and controllers have a very nice look and feel.
> I don't want to wire. Anything.
I suggest batteries.. a lot of them.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You put down money for a NEW house. Studs still in the walls? Where wiring up speakers and such is a piece of cake. Putting in a full sound system in every room (you can do it yourself for free) is pretty simple and easy to do...
But you'd rather drop a big clunky P3 in the room with a wireless card.... why? I see no advantage in it. Wire up speakers in every room. All wires go to computer room. Wires then attached to a single machine that manipulates everything.
But, being a computer geek and having a buncha P3 boxes lying about is what makes you happy, knock yourself out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There's a wireless system out there that already does this: Sonos.com. You can check out the review at Engadget and I believe they won an award at CES. plus it was on Queer Eye, I think. It has a pretty damn sweet looking wirelsss controller with a color LCD screen.
Roku Labs has a neat solution.
There are going to be plenty of wires leading to all those power strips and coming out of all those computers. A couple more wires for speakers is no big deal.
Slimp3 280 USD for the wireless version. I don't think there's anything out there cheaper.
How do you plan to power these wireless speakers?
Batteries? The inconvenience of replacing the batteries, and you'll do it often because they're speakers that may play loudly, and proudly.
They'll need power cords conneted to wall outlet, so they won't be completely wireless.
I don't want to wire. Anything.
That's a serious amount of batteries, there.
You could go with any number of the "jukebox" devices... or maybe just a software solution like Room Juice or one of the many other freshmeat Music Jukebox projects.
m1m3r - n. - a leet speak performance artist that sometimes gets trapped in an imaginary glass box
What you need to do is go ahead and send me all of those PIII laptops you have available, and I'll configure all of them for you and send them back... I promise! While you're at it, you might as well send me the sound cards and wireless gear, too. Do you visit ebay very often? No? Excellent...
Linux, LTSP, and NAS. You have a server, boot other computers from network (you can use wireless), use NAS server and xmms, and you have sound on all computers. You don't need hard drives (only on the server).
ajf
n/t
My Creative Jukebox takes care of the music, but I could use a few dozen spare P3s .. =^)
Can't help much with your problem as I haven't tried it myself. Nor can my friend; he's building a house, but had ethernet, phone, TV, and sound wired to every room.
For that matter, what's the problem? You answered your own question - 802.11a/b/g/z/cokebottle, and cheap B cards with the laptops. Switch to those standalone 802.11 stereos wherever you don't wanna fart with the computer. And use an FM transmitter for house-wide sound.
Either that, or get a big stereo and just turn it WAY UP.
People are finally beginning to see that Apple makes everything better. An Airport Express is what's needed.
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
It all depends on what you want and how much you are willing to spend. Wireless speakers are an idea, but you are going to probably have sound complaints since they operate on the unlicensed spectrum and could be prone to wifi interference.
My implementation would involve a centralized media server for your house, maybe running windows media server. This way you can set up to stream any of your content on demand, or broadcast your tv/music over your wireless network via multicast. This would yield a digital connection up until the point of receiving end, which could then decode and play using a wired speaker/amp solution, which would yield much better sound quality.
For the decoding side of things, you could use ipaqs with wifi to decode the windows media stream, you could also do the same with video in this setup, you can turn any of your computers, or (ipaqs if you go that route) into wireless tv's as well.
http://www.mythtv.org can do all of this plus more. It's worth checking out.
You basically have a master backend system with tons of drive space hidden in a closet somewhere and then you can attach as many frontends as you like.
Very flexible.
.. even better because it runs Linux, works very well with your existing PC/network archives, and even gives "Apples Design Co." a run for their money or two ..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've been playing with this problem for a couple of years now. The problem is that sound streaming over IP is basically impossible to sync properly. As mentioned above, it's pretty simple to stream different streams to each room but if you want all the rooms playing the same thing, each will be off by a few parts of a second. It drove me crazy. We just ran audio over Cat5e everywhere from a central system in the living room. Home Depot's got punch down blocks that convert Cat5e into an unamplified audio output RCA jack.
http://www.slimdevices.com/
Get a few of these, they're fab.
They make an excellent HTPC software, but along with that they have Meedio Housebot. Its really a central control panel to control home automation stuff. Perhaps some newer version of X10 can transfer music? Or maybe have a Airport express plugin.
Wireless is great for things that need it, but don't skimp, just run ethernet, you'll thank youself latter. Sure, Gigabit wireless might be a year out (I dunno, just guessing). But 10GigE is already here, its like the little bunny and the greyhounds.
So it turns out that this is harder that you might think. Getting different wireless audio into different rooms isn't too bad. It's mostly a function of throughput. But getting the SAME wireless audio is into different rooms and keeping it in sync is a surprisingly difficult.
I have the SlimDevices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com/), and it works great at the first task, but only moderately well at the second. There's a new company called Sonos (http://www.sonos.com/) that just released their product which does both very well.
I had a chance to beta-test the product and it really is as good as described. It's Linux-based, but not open-source. It utilizes a proprietary mesh-network running on top of 802.11g and it worked flawlessly in my three zone setup. All three zones could play high-bitrate audio in perfect sync with no drops.
The downside is that it is fairly expensive. If you don't need sync'd audio, I might go with a cheaper option. But if you do, I've yet to find anything that can top Sonos.
I'm using ampache at home for this. I have ampache installed on a junker machine in each room - they connect via smb (over regular ol' 802.11b) to the debian box in the computer room that has all the music on it. I use my zaurus to hit the webserver on which ever machine runs the room I'm in, (zaurus is on 802.11b also) set up my playlist, and away it goes. Pretty nifty system actually, and it's all open source.
1) Sell all PIII, wireless cards, etc., on eBay
2) Hire someone to do the wiring
3) ???
4) Of course, profit.
Looks sweet, but expensive:
http://www.sonos.com/
Didn't I read somewhere that it was possible to use your home's electrical system for networking purposes.
it seems to me that something like that would be ideal for sound systems considering the fact that the speakers need to get power from somewhere... even if signal transmission became completely wireless.. amplification will (AFAIK) always require a cable.. even if it's a short one connecting to a wall jack behind the speaker.
Get the RoadTrip FM transmitter from Griffin(i have one; work's great). It's for your car, but the FM transmitter detaches and connects to your PC, too. Connect it to your PC and start the music. Use cheap FM stereo's throughout your home.
r ip /
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/roadt
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I use a central server, and store all of my audio files in a folder called "Music" with several sub-folders in it. (for rock, country, blues, etc...)
All of my other computers throughout the house have the Music folder drive-mapped as "Drive M:\" and I use Chime Tray Play.
Tray Play is a VERY small simple player that will run just fine on a P1-150 or faster machine, but only with Windows. I even have it running on my yougest son's AMD K6-166 with Win95B, and it works great. It will play mp3, wav, wma, and several other types of files.
It is also freeware. Just google for it.
About 3 years ago a company came out with 900mhz speakers. I loved the set i got, just had to have the base unit pluged into the server and the speakers with in 80 or so feet. they worked fine untill people started to use their cell phones (mainly Nextel that messes it up) gave interferance. I have not check out to see if they have the 2gig-mhz speackers out yet but as far as i know they were making them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Try www.slimdevices.com
I did this same thing a few years back in a dorm.
I had a server in a closet, multiple machines playing at the same time.
The problem ends up being where you want to put the power (as in Receivers/Speakers.)
Unless you want really bad sound quality, and buy lots of speakers... Anything wireless, laptops, pcs, especially speakers, need a power oulet.
Long story short: You're limited by receivers and power outlets not wires. Continuing to try to be wireless is pointless.
Just run the wires through the a/c vents & put the speakers in the vents. It will still sound better and require less work than a wireless setup. Plus..., no visible wires...
-JT
What's wrong with that combination? Store all your music in MP3 and then just have an MP3 player of some sort on each laptop on the 802.11g connection. Seems simple enough to me....not centrally controlled, but VNC can fix that....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If you don't want to belive me, and since I'm just some schmo on the internet you shouldn't, do a search on Monster Cable at either of these websites, and read the consensus opinions.
Avs Forum
HDTVoice
If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable
Or a cheaper way:
But it's time to shut your iHole.
You can always try out http://www.slimdevices.com. They do wireless server based music systems. And you can play it in every room or separate streams to each room.
Midget Tosser
I had similar aspirations for a central sound server, but found that the latency issue can be hard to get by. If you want to use wireless, you're going to have to have independent decoding at each wireless access point. Problem is, each device is going to decode at it's own slightly different rate. The result is speakers in adjacent rooms that are a millisecond or two off. If you happen to be standing where you can hear both sets of speakers, the sound is going to be pretty nasty. Its difficult to get around this any way other than having the wires all come from the same box.
I wrote a little Java app (actually three apps) that allow me to stream audio over the network. The cool part (well, I think it's cool, anyway) is that it's in three pieces: a server, player, and controller. The server serves the files, the player plays it out to audio, and the controller (you guessed it) lets you set up playlists and jobs from a central location (there's little point in streaming audio to another room if you have to walk there to start it up). You can play multiple jobs to different rooms at the same time.
My wife uses this to stream music (in ogg and mp3 format) from my server downstairs to a Linux box in the living room I built for this purpose. She controls it from a GUI on a Windows box on the kitchen counter. I've tested it over wireless and it works fine.
I was thinking of putting this up on SourceForge - if anyone's interested let me know (msimpson at abel solutions dot com).
Read my keyboard review.
One person has already mentioned iTunes, but I can vouch from personal experience that the Airport Express is a fantastic idea. I've got several airport express stations and I can stream music to any of them from any computer that has itunes. It wouldn't take much complication to setup one central iTunes machine with its library shared out to any number of other machines on your local subnet. Then no matter which machine you're on, you either VNC/RDP to the machine that is streaming, or start streaming from the machine you happen to be near. My non-geek and non-apple loving wife thinks our setup is the best thing since sliced bread, so there is a very high WifeApprovalFactor(tm). Go to Apple.com for all the details. YMMV, professional drivers on a closed course, blah.
I am a custom installer and I install multi-room audio all the time.
While it is possible to distribute line-level audio throughout the house (you could use the Turtle beach Audiotron with 802.11b/g for example), there are no good solutions to providing power to the speakers. You need an amplifier to power the speakers. Wireless speakers sound crappy and require you to either a) plug them into power or b) put in batteries (what a pain). If you have to plug them in, you might as well run speaker wire instead.
You have to run speaker wire back to a amplifier/receiver of some sort in order to provide sound to the speakers. I prefer a centralized system where the speaker wires come back to a central location, but you can use a distributed amp system too. Just means that each room has to have it's own local amp fed with some kind of audio signal.
Jim
Wired or wireless shouldn't make any difference, as you can use a wireless to ethernet bridge for any "wired" device. I had my house built within the past year, and made sure every room was wired. Here is what I used to get music to every room:
xbox media center Optical out, lots of other options.
Rio receiver running yarrs I have been using this for years, just a small device to play mp3's off of the network. You can hook speakers up to it directly or just use it as a component.
qcast lets you stream mp3's to your playstation 2. Not as useful or functional as the xbox media center.
netjuke this let's me stream music to any other computer in a nice and tidy web interface.
you can also go with a squeezebox but I have no experience with it. The rio is much less expensive.
A wired Squeezebox plus 802.11g bridge ought to do the trick.
It has its issues, but the Squeezebox works well in the Living Room because it's unobtrusive and self-contained: you don't need a computer or a TV to control it. In the Office, the Airport Express is perfect because it can be controlled by any computer in the room, and being an office, there are plenty of them.
The biggest downfall, actually, is the wireless. Wireless just isn't as reliable as wired. Once every few weeks, I'll find that one of my base stations needs to be power cycled. Sometimes all of them do. And this is something that's a pain for my wife, who just wants to listen to music.
The problem is worse in the Living Room, which is close to the kitchen, which contains the microwave. As you know, microwaves interfere with 802.11. That's not a big deal when you're surfing the web, but it sucks to have your music drop everytime you make a bag of popcorn.
This problem is only going to get worse when sharing movies starts becoming possible. Ethernet totally has the bandwidth for this. Wireless does not.
It's a pain, for sure, but now's the best time to do it.
"...access to tons of old PIII laptops, wireless gear, old computers, sound cards, etc to make this work..."
Are you having a lan party for old school games any time soon? Ever think about setting up a server cluster? I'll bring drinks!
Ok, this is a "NO BRAINER".... get a Mac Mini ($499), and a AirPort Express with AirTunes ($129) for each room youd like to have music streamed to. If you dont want wires, then purchase seperate wireless audio speakers (5.1 ch wireless audio packages can be had for $199). So, $330 per room as clients with a $500 server. Did I mention is looks great too.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Do some research. There is no reason that wireless cannot transmit sound as well or better than wires. (After all, look at the wireless microphones used on all sound stages.) There have been transmitters to send audio from the sound system to remote speakers for years. Even go visit Radio Shack, check with Bose, or take a look at the audio magazines. Are you an audiophile? If so, be aware that each room will have different characteristics, even with the same speakers, and we still have to deal with that "sweet" zone. Large wire cables are indeed best for the connection from the amplifier to the speakers, but only because low speaker impedance requires a lot of current for any power levels. (Power=I^2*R, where I is current and R is the speaker impedance in ohms) Also large wires reduce the inductance which can cause some delay for the highest frequencies, but unlikely that you will hear it. I expect that the computers can provide you with what you need, but again, remember that the computer systems require amplified speakers.
I use old (or not so old) computers (running linux) to deliver sound from my library of music (flac, ogg and mp3s) over nfs. I never have any problems with linux or the network. Anything better than a PII should work.
Computer sound card sound quality sucks, in general - budget for some decent sound cards (maudio is a good one) or get a USB sound external card (I have a Xitel that works pretty good but has no volume control)
nothing is real
Kenwood offers a media server that sets up a network through your telephone lines. You have to buy 'Axcess'(sp) points to pull the data streams out but they work nicely.
Check it out here
it is a pinch dated technology so don't expect to spend anywhere near the $1750 they quote on their web site. Referb models go closer to 500 bucks.
If this is new construction you would be a fool not to wire the house as it is built. Wireless is good but wired is always a better connection.
Get a FREE Sony PS3
How about an FM transmitter hooked to the main soundcard? Then any FM radio in the house can listen to you music. There was a recent slashdot article on some of these, if I remember ccrane.com and ramseyelectronics.com had recommended models for around $70.
If you're looking at 802.11g for transmission, I'd assume you're taking intereference with your wireless network, 2.4GHz phones, and neighbours' wireless setups into account? Nothing like all your wireless/cordless devices not working at the same time and your neighbours upset at you :)
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
If you do not want wires at all, you extend your stereo rack with a Netgear MP101 or Netgear MP115.
You can use wireless speakers like these or, what is more geek like (and more expensive) is a new speaker system called pursonic. Check the pursonic homepage.
Now your speakers are your wall and your floor...
iTunes sucks on windows.
$41 for a 3-foot component cable?? BARF!!
There are several websites on converting laptops into "picture frames" http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/023922 2&tid=222&tid=1,
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.JunktopRevival
Which you could modify slightly to add built in powered speakers and hang one in each room.
- Mike
Telepathy works for me.
That was classic intercourse!
I do this with music and videos.
1. Setup your laptops in each room with wireless lan cards.
2. Connect them to your shared music/video directories via your wireless access point.
3. Profit
My file server in on a linux box so I use Samba to share music/videos to my windoze machines.
D-link and some other vendors have a $179.00 device that plays music and videos from your network to your stereo/TV except it won't play mpegs over 2Gig and I couldn't get it to talk to my Linux file server (Winblows only, could be wrong though.). So I took it back. Nice idea but it's not ready for prime time.
Nix the laptops for audio. They're handy as webpads so I'd still leave one in every room, but laptop audio systems are just plain bad. You'll get noise leaking in from the hard drive and the wireless card, at the very least. Not something you'd want to listen to regularly.
I'd go with a media server in a closet somewhere, small PCs for media access in the different rooms, and full fledged HTPCs in the primary viewing areas (why stop with just audio).
The only thing you can't do easily is pipe the same audio throughout the house. IP Multicasting may sound like fun, but you'll be better off wiring for whole house audio or leveraging the existing wiring. For example, you could get a good quality RF modulator and inject the signal into an open cable channel.
It all depends on how bad the wiring in the house is, how determined you are not to run cable, and how big your ears are.
Honestly, you'd rather have a bunch of ugly, old computer equipment sitting around (and plugged into the wall no less) in every room in your house then put in wireing? Are you planning on buying high-fidelity amps and good speakers for every room too?
As much as I hate apple, just buy an Ipod and cary it around with you if you can't stand to be stuck in just one room listening to music.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
iTunes with an iTunes express seems to work quite well in my home. IIRC it should work with up to 4 streams simultaneously, but syncing is not possible. Note also that some people have complained about skipping (datarate) issues with just one, so perhaps 4 is asking a bit much unless they're all in the same room.
With a PDA you can get a copy of "RemoteAmp" which will function as a remote control for your setup. It is quirky but functional. Works well for playing playlists and random music. Viewing/playing a single album is not as nice. Add to that when you view your library it sends the *whole goddamned thing* every time. With my 6k library it's a good 20-30 second wait via Bluetooth. It's better with WiFi (still not good though) but my PDA's batteries won't last an evening powering the 802.11 connection.
You'll hear it in any room you're in. Sorted.
--#voxlator
Take a look at sonos. It looks like the best system out there. The scroll wheel and color lcd remote are killer. I wonder if the licensed with apple to use the scroll wheel?
Personally, I find this simple and easy. A modded xbox runs great as a media server. It can be both a central server and an end user. I have my xbox running the quite available Xbox Media Center which is capable of running pretty much any audio or video format which you could dream of. Add a 120gb hdd and a wireless ethernet adapter and it makes a lovely server. It can be accessed via ftp, or simple http for a webcast. It also supports samba, which is widely used for file sharing between windows, linux, and mac, so you can use it to quickly access files on other computers. The whole thing is pretty simple to set up, very cheap (most expensive part is the $150 xbox), and xbox is sending digital dolby surround sound as opposed to the stereo you would get out of those old laptops.
Learn to sing. If bandwidth is a problem, hum or whistle. All three formats go with you from room to room, and the hands-free interface is amazingly intuitive.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Install Slimserver (http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html) on a central server with all your music. Put a P3 laptop (or some other machine) with wireless in every room you will want music. Run SoftSqueeze (http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/) on each client, connecting to the server. Get a PDA with wireless and use Slimserver's built-in handheld skin to control your music.
Done!
-ZA
I haven't heard about this before. Do you have a link to an article about this?
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
iTunes is an ok player but you don't want to buy iTunes by paypal or credit card. With those recent events it seems you'd take a fairly high risk of having your account cleaned out. I prefer sharing oggs or mp3s via torrent, gnutella, openft, etc.
Wireless sound to me is an expensive non economical way to get sound from one room to multiple others. different sounds or music in different rooms, will require WAY to much cash for you to even want to consider the wireless solution. However, Wired is your friend. If you are buying a new house, and want to set it up just rite, there is no better way to do it than wireing your house for sound. I wired an apartment I had in Toronto, for less than 100 bucks. was able to get different music and sounds in different rooms, at the same time. I would assume this is your ideal set up. All I used is my current dual AMD box, with my audigy 2 Platinum sound card (I only had 3 rooms to worry about) and my RCA 600Watt surround sound reciver to JUICE it all up. My PC was my central control unit, running a version of Slackware 9 at the time, and a couple different winamps running, I had a winamp for each room, configured it in linux that each version of winamp was set to a different audio channel on my sound card, (reduced to stero sound for the most part) I hit play on living room, that sound played there, play on bedroom winamp, again, different sound played there, and of coarse music in the shower was a big thing for me, so Bathroom was 3rd chanl. Great setup till I had to move and take it down. If you have questions or help, look me up!
... of those PIII laptops for dirt cheap? :)
You probably want a Stereo FM Modulator.
Ramsey makes and sells kits like this one for home/hobbyist use.
USE THIS DEVICE AT YOUR OWN RISK -- I'm not taking the heat if you end up with an FCC fine. They're legal devices, but they can be used illegally if you turn up the power too high, so make **SURE** you understand the regulations that cover the use of these things before you plug it in.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
you're fucking retarded.
Sonos is very, very cool looking, but even their discounted bundle is a fortune. $1200 for what amounts to a remote with a little LCD and 2 wireless combo receiver/amps? Ouch. Even if you can easily afford it, it's hard to justify. Then again, it is terribly convenient. Even if the functionality doesn't justify the price, maybe the ease of use does for some.
...then get in-wall speakers. And speaker wire run under floors or within walls usually needs to be CL3 rated, for fire protection. Of course, it costs more than exposed speaker wire. In general, the best sound will be from wired, free-standing speakers, then possibly in-wall speakers, then multimedia speakers. Even the laptops in every room will need to talk to the speakers via wires, or is that supposed to be wireless too. And the computers themselves put out noise and heat and need wires themselves for power.
Anyway, if you go the PC route, use iTunes with AirPort Express. Or get a Mac Mini.
Preferably a solution based on generic networked hardware (P3 or greater), with the added ability to control the stream/queue from any of the output (platform independent) points.
Unfortunately SlimDevices doesn't concentrate enough (for obvious reasons) on a software player (softsqueeze). Last time I checked, softsqueeze had some sync problems and the author was looking into it.
My question is: is there an open-source audio protocols with built-in sync capabilities? Maybe something with a time-stamp?
Analog streaming+radio makes it look so simple.
Build or buy:
Speakers for every room, with builtin amps. (You'll have to live with "wall power" cords.)
"WiFi" receiver for each. DAC (sound card) for each. Wireless laptop to control the streaming server and to control each speaker's audio stream to use.
Sounds like a huge pain in the ass. Enjoy!
If I were doing a wireless home audio project (even though I wouldn't), I'd use FM recievers for all the powered speakers and use a transmitter for the audio.
My personal choice would be to just wire everything by the cieling/wall edges, everything hung on metal hooks. It would be utterly hideous, like a warehouse or large shopping center with all wires/plumbing/conduits exposed.
I am using a product called cd3o, which allows a central server holding all my mp3s to stream to multiple mp3 receivers, which then plug into a stereo system in each room.
This is the best of all worlds.
I have this unit and I really like it (for what I do with it). It's just not the right solution for pure wireless...
Negear makes the really pleasantly affordable Netgear MP101. You can usually find it for about $70 at Best Buy every so often (vs. the normal full price of $150).
It syncs up to UPnP so Windows' free media broadcasting stuff works. It works with Rhapsody - so you can have direct access to 400,000 tracks. It's a really nice solution.
It also works both wired and wireless.
The reason I'm recommending against it is because it suffers from stupidly long handshakes over the network and equally stupidly long searches for servers etc. Wired, as I use it, it's not a problem - it happens once and then you're pretty much done. Wireless... Expect to spend five minutes screwing with its menus each time a telephone rings and briefly interrupts the 2.4 GHz range. Or when someone walks through the signal (yes, that's enough to upset it just enough to trigger a reconnect). Or when there's a brief 1/10th second power outage. You name it, it'll want to spend five minutes reconnecting. It'll drive you nuts.
What kind of new house is built these days without cat5 in the walls already? If its not to late I'd add it to the house. It will help in getting internet everywhere as well as your music problem. It will also help the resale value. If you do decide to wire put in a lot more than your initially think you'll need. Believe me, you'll need it.
Or $32 for a 2' S-video cable: wow!
Pros:
Cons:
What, me worry?
If you have a network, and a stack 'o PIII's then you have what you need. It doesn't really matter what kind of network, as long as everything connects via TCP and has enough bandwidth for your needs.
Setup a linux server, with enough disk space for your media collection and whatever else you want to store there. Install gnumpd3 from
here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
Install a desktop linux distro on the machines in each room. Aim a web browser from any machine at the URL of the gnump3d server and viola! you have music from your collection on demand in any room!
Streaming radio style music is easy as well. Install icecast from here:http://www.icecast.org/
and aim the xmms player from here: http://www.xmms.org/ and you have streaming media! woohoo!
If you want to control a distribution system that plays the same songs things get more complicated, you'll need Apple computer's RTSP server and some client software to get everything sync'd throughout the house.
I use secure shell from my zaurus wireless pda and mpg123 and aumix to operate this from a pocket sized device. For everything else I just browse the music library with gnump3d's web interface. FWIW, I use SuSE linux. It came with all the above except for the Darwin Stream Server (or whatever it is that Apple calls it these days). I had to download and compile the icecast source, but what the heck, it wasn't to hard to do either.
HTH
This sig kills fascists.
But no, I'll just use your advice and use wire-wrap wire for my speakers.
Add a Homepod. (http://www.homepod.com) You'll essentially be able to use your PC as the host and deliver music to different rooms as you want. Interface it with your existing speaker systems, or let the little gadget run on its own. Only key is that it needs a power cord of its own. ^_^
My first thought is to buy a low-power FM transmitter if you want to send the same audio (synchronized) to different locations. I can't think of any easy way to do this using 802.11, and actually keep it completely in sync (instead of having 1 room be 1/2 second ahead of another room).
Here's what I would do.
Take the most powerful computer, and set it up as an mp3 streaming server. QTSS, Streamcast, whatever you feel comfortable with.
Then take a laptop, mac mini, or whatever small computer you want, and hook into the feed with iTunes, WinAmp, etc. etc.
Store all your tunes on that 1 server, and just stream them.
You can use WiFi to do it without cables, or cable it.
An old system can easily hold up to quite a bit. I have an Apple G3 266MHz, it can easily handle several streams with no problem.
Only downside is easy control over what plays. There are a few scripts you can use to help control it remotely. Though you can just leave it random and think of it as a radio station without annoying commercials.
http://www.andrewkilpatrick.org/mind/distributed_a udio/
I did something like this at my house -- except its not all wireless. It can be controlled wirelessly - which was my requirement for the project.
Components:
* Wireless router
* Old PIII tower running Windows XP Pro set up to boot headless
* SB Live w/ digital (Coax - spdif) output
* coaxial (tv) cables with RCA adapters (instant digital audio cables!)
* Coaxial splitters
* Drill
Set up the tower with remote desktop and hook it up to the router. This is your audio source. Connect via remote desktop to control Winamp or whatever. For an easier solution (easier to control), you could set up a shoutcast server on the tower and DJ from whatever workstation you want (laptop, whatever).
Connect coax to SPDIF out on the SB Live, then run it (with splitters, whatever) to your amps in the rest of your house (i've got two hooked up). Boom - you've got digital sound.
I suppose you could even set up a web interface for this... i haven't had the ambition (Boredom?) to do it yet.
So - the only problem here is not having the audio connections be wireless. The beauty is I can take my laptop with me around the house and control the music. One of these days i'll set up a wi-fi enabled palm to do the controlling.
Considering i'm on a student budget, i'm pretty happy with the results. I only had to drill out a couple of holes (actually just making them bigger so I could piggy back with existing TV coax.
By the way - NO, I didn't consider using Linux on the server. I haven't been able to get Linux to output digital audio yet (SB Live! SPDIF). Anybody have a solution to this?
--
Sigs cause cancer.
Buy a box for each room that needs music, add any old (active) speakers (or a hifi amp), and you're good to go.
It comes with (Free & Open GPL
Each box comes with a remote, and they can all be controlled through a web GUI as well.
They come in both wired and wireless variants; The wired ones cost $200, The wireless ones are somewhat more expensive at $280.
The nice thing about them is that all the smarts are in the server - the squeezebox is basically just a network adapter, an MP3 decoder, and a soundcard (with a nice bright display and a remote IR receiver, of course). It will (knock on wood) last as long as I don't drop it on the floor, and I won't need to buy new devices next time the industry switches media again
Multiple squeezeboxes can be synchronized to play the same stream; You can't sync a software player and a squeezebox, though (no buffering control over the SW player, i guess).
No Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Slim Devices in any way; I just love their product
What is the difference between a real song and a simulated song?
realistically any unbalanced cable will give you similar results because shielding can only do so much to prevent EMI/RFI.
balanced is a much better solution however it is probably more than most people need in their home system. I have it in mine, but I have a project studio that I use for personal listening as well.
I have to agree. There may be some advantage to Monster Cables for patch cabling and whatnot (they do make nice high quality stuff), but for speaker cables it's a waste of money. 18 guage zip cord will do just as well or better, even with exotic components it tends to work just as well (and a whole lot cheaper).
Store all your music on a server somewhere. Set up multiple clients around the house connected to local stereo. Stream music to all of them in-synch or different songs to different players.
I have the older wired SPLIMP3 and I love it.
It is a lot easier than listening through the computer.
The SqueezeBox is wireless and has digital output on it. Plus the server is all open, so you can help contribute if you want!
www.slimdevices.com
-- I stole your sig!
If you actually want to have high fidelity reproduction of sound in rooms other than the one that houses your audio system, your only real choice is to run cable. There are some wireless speaker rigs that operate at 900MHz or 2.4GHz, but by the very nature of their design, they are very band limited, and have an onboard amplifier that always has an absolutely horrible harmonic distortion rating (I've seen it as bad as 10% THD). Another words, they sound like crap. If your house is being built, then I would suggest (as others have here) to go buy a spool of speaker cable (and no, it doesn't have to be Monster Cable, any decent copper conductor will do), and run some additional speaker lines in the walls. Even if you don't use them initially, they'll be there when you need them. This is what I did when I had my house built a couple of years ago, and my only regret is that I didn't run even more cable.
Wireless is great for digital data transmission, but not for hifi audio.
Just make sure that the wire is thick enough for the intended application.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I originally wanted to do the same thing but the whole needing a PC everywhere got real old, especially outside at the bar-b-que or in the shower. I already have plenty of FM radios around, mostly doing nothing since commercial radio suxs so bad. So what I did was install a cheap FM transmitter kit on my tunes server and use winamp to play them. I even used the little winamp server application to let me change tunes from a PC or my Zaurus 5500 when outside until I upgraded to 3.0. All I need to do then is tune into my local broadcast which reaches anywhere in my house and little yard. If someone wants to listen to something else in a different room, they can open a local copy of winamp (or whatever) and play the files locally. Maybe not the best fidelity in the world but after many years of acid rock and head bangin', my ears don't notice...
This is probably too late a response to get noticed, but having just put a contract on a new house as well (as of today actually), my mind went to similar directions.
After quite a bit of googling, I've found that Sonos (http://www.sonos.com) has a really nice setup. It's not Linux-friendly, but if you're a Windows household, or can have an old Windows box lying around, it'll be great for you.
The basic setup is as follows: You can have up to 32 base stations, which act as both input and output. Plug a base station into your PC and install the software, and voila, it will now interface with the remote. The base stations communicate with each other wirelessly, acting as repeaters, or a wireless mesh, if you prefer.
You can have multiple sources (with multiple base stations, that is), but I don't know whether or not it is available to the other base stations if it isn't coming through the PC (and through their software), so you'll likely want to check into that.
All in all tho, while it is a little pricy, does involve zero wiring (except power, and ethernet if you don't have wireless), and the cost of putting together a 5-6 room thing with 4 remotes is still cheaper to put together a decent quality multi-zone whole house audio system.
-9mm-
Instead of trying to use 802.11g and multiple computers, why not just buy your own FM radio station and put a radio in each room?
0xfeedface
get into iTunes. don't get me wrong, its clunky, but it is really nice. I'm in the process of doing this. check out Airport express with analog or optical outputs, hook it up to your stereo. then on one of your computers, you leave iTunes running. throw in a 400 GB drive for $200 & start encoding CDs & vinyl to Apple Lossless, you'll be able to store most of the music you need instant access to w/ no loss of quality like mp3 (you can convert Apple Lossless to aiff/wav/aac/mp3 for portable use). you could use the laptops to terminal in, but you don't really need em, there are remote controls.
If you could afford it, it'd be best to run big diameter EMT from your hub location to your satellite locations. It's much easier to fish through, and even if it gets hard to fish a single new line through you can always empty and re-pull everything at once if you have to.
In an ideal world the house would have been planned for this to begin with and a wiring plenum would have run been established between all the floors (a riser plenum) and there would be a cross-shaped plenum in each and every room, as well as a plenum connecting all the rooms. With a few access panels here and there, you can go from any room to any room without a lot of painful, finished-wall fishing.
There's a commercial building accross the street that has a 3" raised floor encompassing every square foot of every floor of the building. Now that's what I call planning ahead.
Just remeber NOT to use your 2.4Ghz Phone... Everytime the phone rings in my house.. The music stops - Once you actually answer the phone it continues (strange that only the "Ringing" signal interupts network conenctivity. Of course... Some could see this as a plus
We have a music streaming server in a closet with a wireless base station. Fresh, configurable music streamed throughout the house on-demand. Nice. but: playing the same stream on multiple computers is AWFUL, because the computers inevitably end up out of synch. Even a quarter second is awful, but it can get as bad as a second or two. The issue is that stream clients have to fudge the stream to stay synchronized, and inevitably different clients fudge in different ways. Since most streamers keep a 5-10 second buffer, in principle your different rooms can get up to that far out of synch, giving you an awful echo effect.
If you must go wireless, use one of the wireless-speaker solutions like they advertise in Popular Science, where the sound is sent as FM radio throughout the house.
However, here's my idea: you could buy two of them, grab an M-Audio Quattro (see: http://www.maudio.com/ or http://www.ebay.com/ or any soundcard with separate L/R outs), and hack the headsets so one will carry through the left channel and one will carry through the right channel (make the nec. connections so that you can jack your speax into them).
:P jk
It's pretty wicked so you can use a central computer or a bunch to connect to various bluetooth speakers throughout the house. So imagine, from any computer being able to choose any audio to play anywhere. w00t!
I'm a genious. I know. Thank you. No please. Really.
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
I am thinking of doing exactly what you describe: Mac Mini connected to a string of large Firewire drives housing my movies and music as a central entertainment 'server' connected wirelessly to the home. My question: How do you access iTunes and other entertainment software from the computers on the network? I've thought about remote access software (server on the Mac Mini, clients on the other computers) that would allow someone to directly control the Mac Mini remotely. From what you describe, though, iTunes at least can be accessed by more than one computer on the network without having to go that route. What about DVD playback software, though?
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
I have a wireless network with a KiSS ethernet enabled dvd player on the LAN hooked up to my tv. The DVD outputs audio to the TV and a wireless speaker system. The DVD looks up track names from freedb.org and I can browse my music/video folders throughs my TV. A bunch of coaxial cable routes the video around the house so I can watch streamed movies from my filestore. On a sunny day, I just plug in the wireless speakers into a socket outside and Robert's your mother's brother, as they say.
UPnP is designed to provide music and video content over an IP network. I use Twonkyvision http://www.twonkyvision.com/UPnP/index.html on a 233Mhz Linux server, and a Philips SL50i Wireless Music Player. Because UPnP is a standard protocol, a lot of companies support it and you can get lots of different types of players, from a box that you connect to an amp, to a standallow hi-fi system.
Well...my house net is wireless and we have iTunes, iPods, etc. HOWEVER, I like music to sound like music and movies to sound even better , so I went with bulk cable and ceiling and wall speakers. I have Niles Audio CS series speakers, Definitive subwoofers (2) run by a Denon AVR3805 receiver. Trust me, the "iCrap" stuff is for the gym...for decent sound, I fire up the big boys. As for Monster Cable, it's not a good value...even in bulk. I do have some Monster stuff, but I have "homemade" that sounds just as good, including lamp cord from Lowe's that I tinned myself with the trusty Weller soldering iron.
:o)
Bottom line...for best sound, get thee some copper!
Ninja Nerd
"The sky is wood to a bug under a board"
I have a multi-room sound system.
It is broken down into 6 zones with 6 sources.
Each Zone could select one of the sources.
This is run by a Nevo home audio system.
Behind this I am running a digital audio juke box with a CD player/writter.
The interface is via a typical TV, touch senstive LCD, PC, or wireless palm or pocket PC. In each zone you can select one of the 6 sources. The sources can be manipulated by turning the TV to the correct channel for the source or by a locally run web-style interface for the digital juke box. I have set up the TVs in the house to accept a wireless broad cast from the digital juke box and provide feed back to change tracks, source, etc.
I can also drop in a CD into the system and make it one of the zones. I have also altered one of the Zone to play the audio off a selected TV station (Great for listening to the game outside). As I have a CD player/burner on the system you can select auido tracks from the 120 Gigiabyte server to burn a CD. Great for when you want to take tunes on the road or share with a friend (legeal for me to do in Canada).
I have at least 100 watts to each zone - my office has 500 watts. I also have high quaily speaker wire (QED Qunex). Running all 6 zones on 6 digital source all at once is not a problem. The all weather outdoors speakers can be clearly heard from a 1/2 block way - the people next door love me.
The Nevo audio system also comes in a 12 source 12 zone version but it just one part of the interface. You will need a digital Juke box (either created yourself or purchased for big bucks). Most digital juke boxes are just a application specific PC. I am sure if you are reading Slashdot you could us a PC with 6 audio cards and create nice wireless inferface (via a intranet browser). To continue with the wireless aspect you could hook the up wireless speakers to the 6 sources of the PC hence by passing a nevo audio system.
I will warn you that wireless speakers sound like crap. Spend some money and lay down some good audio wires in your home before they drywall or insulate it.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
What does that sig mean?
Really, iam seriously asking.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Why not? If you want something reasonably cheep (free), set up a radio station on your home LAN. You can sync everywhere in the house, or probably send multiple streams, and tune in the one you want. Heck, you might be able to diddle with playlists by remote control.
For example, if you have a satellite setup, you've probably seen the occasional signal breakup. When this happens, there is usually met with a pretty harsh audio chirp. If you listen to your music with any significant volume, those chirps can be very bad news to the tweeters (and your ears).
So, for the stuff you you need to be near perfect or secure.. don't use wireless. Run the CAT5+.
I just use 1 box with an FM transmitter. The signal is spotty in some areas (so I just move the antenna), but I can use any FM radios almost anywhere in my house. I wasn't really out for super high quality. The box runs a modified version of tunez. I can control the box from any web browser on my network (wired and wireless).
Monster is an outstanding marketing machine.
That's true.
They've suckered so many people that they can buy a freakin' football stadium.
(Of course, the real monster is John York for putting together a 2-14 team.)
Share and Enjoy!
Clearly digital is digital when you're looking at the data and hence the sound quality will be identical regardless of wether you use a different network link for delivery. I think the questionable aspect is the continuity of the delivery those 1's and 0's. Anybody who frequently uses wireless knows that there can be lag problems due to RF interference or heavy traffic on the wireless network segment. Dropped and late packets causing pauses for rebuffering aren't going to sound great with high fidelity speakers, especially when turned up loud. Also, anybody who's used XP Zero config knows that it can be a fantastic source of frustration, and Windows would have to be the platform if iTunes is to be used on a PIII. XP Zero Config is easily enough bypassed if you dont' use XP or if you use the vendor-supplied management software, but I don't know for sure that those options would be any better. I say that if you're building a house, definitely use a switched ethernet network. If you're buying a house, definitely consider any possible way to install ethernet. The worst-case solution would be wireless, and in that case you might consider ad-hoc for your audio units since it relieves strain on your access points.
Yeah, I think "GOLD PLATED CONNECTORS!!" on optical audio cables is all I have to say about Monster Cable. [shudder]
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I am not doubting this, and I have heard similar (that wire is wire, as long as gauge is same). However, I would like the references for my own satisfaction, but also to pass on to the so-called "golden ears" that make outrageous claims regarding sound equipment (usually to sell it).
Install iTunes on your PIII laptops and spend $129 on the AirPort Express.
Where Macs Belong in the Living Room
I've had a lot of success using IceCast for casting ogg/mp3 files over the network. You can always setup a web frontend for moving between songs, etc.
Should work as well with wireless or wired.
Keyspan's infra-red Express Remote has the capability to plug into an Airport Express for simple controls like rewind/ffw, volume, pause/stop, and switching between shuffle and in-order play.
Think of an AirTunes installation with the Keyspan remote as functionally equiv to an iPod shuffle, but streaming music from your central mac.
Kevin Fox
I had this same issue, and I settled on the Terk Leap Frog system. It's a 2.4ghz audio/video broadcast system. I hooked my stereo receiver (audio and video) up to the transmitter, and put receivers in my bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.
Downsides:
The sound quality's not great: there are a few hisses and pops. Think somewhere between FM radio and a good cordless phone.
It goes haywire every time my phone rings.
Upsides:
It's nice and cheap--$99 for the first transmitter and receiver and $50 for each additional receiver.
It works with ALL my A/V sources--TiVo (which talks to my MP3 server), DVD, even Xbox. Whatever's on the TV in my living room is what's throughout the house.
It's easy to add more nodes--just buy another receiver.
As a bonus, it does video, too--the television in my bedroom is slaved so I can watch TiVo from there.
It even transmits remote control IR for you so you can use a remote to control the main unit from any room where there's a receiver.
Not a perfect solution, but it does what I need it to (play music through the house), is nice and flexible, and didn't require tearing up any walls. Wired solutions are great if you want to put the effort and money into quality, but all I really cared about was having a house full of music--and this works quite nicely.
AK
No considertaion for the Tivo solution here? I've got a Tivo connected via Linksys WAP11. MP3's and photos stored on a windows box running Tivo Desktop (download free from Tivo).
This passes music via wireless to the stereo. Works like a charm, plus I can copy Tivo'd shows to my PC.
Assuming you have a basic wireless network, a few strategically placed computers with decent stereo systems would provide you with a complete wireless network and central music server to solve the rest.
http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.ph p?postid=38129#poststop
for the latest. search google for the rest. they make rambus look like saints.
JON
there is a company that makes a wireless device called the SqueezeBox or something that will accomplish what you are looking to do..
further to that, they offer the server software that runs their hardware for download (and free)..
just search google for "SlimServer", it'll be the first result.
i've implemented this in my office so that everyone can have control over the playlist and skipping songs etc..
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/11/08/BUG1J9N3C61.DTL
Notice that at the bottom of the monster.com page is a link "For patrons of Monster Cable"
What about including video playback to this kind of a solution as well? Is there any not too expensive alternatives for this kind of a purpose?
Go to slimdevices.com get slimserver. Load Linux on to your old PIII load your music away you go. Java clients run on all OS. Yous can buy a squeezebox and hook it into your stereo.
try using an FM transmitter.
I've tried to get cat5 through the same conduits the coax uses, but it just won't work and I don't want to rip out my walls. Is there a way to run ethernet connections via coax? Maybe some kind of cat5-coax adapter?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Airtunes
Just my two-cents' worth:
... but I would definitely give the OmniFi some consideration. (And they also make a nice car stereo version that can synch with the same server!)
I, too have a new home, and have reviewed the available crop of "networked music devices" - both wired and wireless. I have checked them ALL out. I do agree that in the end, wired is better (at least until the next-gen wireless hits).
In DEC, I picked up a refurbed OmniFi DMS1 on eBay for $99. http://www.omnifimedia.com/
I LOVE IT!!
The chief drawback is that you have to run their proprietary server software, but it is pretty much unobtrusive and non-system-hogging from what I've experienced so far. The build-quality and UI are really great. Works wired or wireless. Multiple units can be placed throughout the house all served from the same PC running the software.
Aesthetically, it is by far the best of the lot. (Our living room is sort of a "tech-free zone," but we still wanted music. The OmniFi and a small set of powered speakers fits the bill perfectly.)
Bottom-line is that none of the devices on the market are perfect. Pro's and Con's everywhere
YMMV
See you space cowboy
You mean you were too lazy to do your own homework and that well-known audio component manufacturer Yamaha has what you need?
I do these installations all the time. I use the Squeezebox from slimdevices for the client and their open source server software, which runs on linux, windows or Mac.
The squeezebox is available as a wired or wireless box. However, you still need an amplifier and speakers, and they need wires, at least for power. There's no way around that.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Build a Home Theater PC. My choice, because I am smarter than I am rich, is a MythTv box http://www.mythtv.org/
Or
You could buy a Microsoft Media Center box.
Either should stream content to any room over 802.11g. Just don't plan on doing anything else on the wireless network.
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
I've tried everything to get the same sound in multiple rooms using wifi and I could never get it working.
I have a smallish 1bdr flat and I like to have the same music playing in my bedroom, kitchen and bathroom as I roam through the flat in the morning (my neighbors must love me). I tried to stream mp3 from a central server but the laptops would all have a different buffer and the sound was out of sync in all three locations.
My final solution was to use an FM transmitter. The upside is I can use cheap receivers in the kitchen and bathroom. The downside is poor sound quality in those locations (the bedroom is wired to the source).
I am another person that uses iTunes throughout my house and it works just like it should. It is also great when someone brings a laptop over and wants to play a song.
I know quite a few people that have multiroom/wireless/wired/whole house/multiple zone/ etc setups and not one person really uses it much after about the first 2 months, or they only use it about once a year. It all looks like an outstanding design, great in theory and looks like a tremendous advantage to have such a thing but when it really comes down to it, they just do not use it. Throw computers into the mix and it makes it seem even much more the hassle of maintaining it and although a lower cost, still maybe not worth the time investment. I am all for geek projects but it is hard to justify the cost for a specialized system. Of topic here but i know one guy who went through a tremendous effort to broadcast the output of his central DVD player to any tv in the house. He had signal combiners and notch filters and attached the output to his house cable system along with a IR remote extender. Neat idea, you can tune any tv in the house to channel 80 or something in that region and watch what the downstairs DVD player is playing and using a universal remote control to control it. Well, you can buy standalone DVD players from Wal-Mart for $29. Was the effort worth it? Maybe to some but not others.
On that note.. I have a multipurpose computer near my stereo and I use plain old mapped drives to get to my music and video. For the audio connection, I use the coaxial digital output of my SBLive directly to my reciever (limits ground loops and much less noise then using the analog outputs). If you go that route, use the KX driver pakage, not the drivers from SB, they are much better.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
So it's natural to assume he meant no electric wires, no phone wires, no cable television wires, etc. :)
iTunes streams music digitally, which means that the quality of the sound depends on the quality of the DAC in the Airport Express. In this case, the quality of the wires is irrelevant.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
http://bluejeanscable.com/store/speaker/index.htm
Speaker cable is a bit different from a lot of the interconnect cables we handle, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn't required.
What about a bunch of XBoxes using XBox Media Server. A central server with samba shares, and a few wireless bridges and you are set. Also I guess you could go with MythTV clients to a single backend. Might be better since you already have access to the PC Equipment.
Monster cable is for people who have no idea what they are buying and just feel like they need to spend a ton of money. All they do is take plain old cables, wrap them in a ton of plastic so they feel big, advertize the crap out of them, and sell them at Radio Shack for ten times what they're worth.
Anything that's oxygen free copper and sufficient gauge will be just fine.
you just install the slimserver software onto your music server and use it to stream music to your assorted laptops. it supports mp3, aac, vorbis and other music formats. the server can control multiple players and can optionally synch them, if you want the same music in diffrent rooms. you can control it from a web interface from any computer, and have it control any of the players.
the server and related software are free, it's the backend to the squezebox, which is a stereo component mp3 player that can do wifi. depending on your budget you can just use the free stuff and your old laptops/desktops, or you can get a couple squezeboxes. the squezebox is nice since it's got a remote, but it's not really necessary.
philo
He needed some time to put his name on some one elses project, and write a configuration script authoring tool for it.
The Airport Express modules also act as wireless repeaters, so it also means you (and even a few neighbors) should get great reception all over.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Recently, I was asked by a client if I could come up with a wireless audio link for between his computer and an existing sound system. It seemed like a pretty straightforward proposition, but after asking around I soon learned that it is always a better to use cables if you can help it in order to avoid possible interference problems. It's one thing to listen to a digital broadcast over the Internet using a laptop and a wi-fi card, but anyone thinking that it's therefore also possible to replace their speaker cables with radio links and not suffer a loss in sound quality is making a mistake. Such solutions are only a last resort.
I have to say, if you are going for a whole house setup, have the walls open, and want any type of quality - buy some wire. I bought my house almost completed (model home - I was in a hurry), and just gave up on wireless two weeks ago after 6 months of wasting time. Running the cable took a day. My house is 3900sq ft including the basement and I ran cable to 4 locations (for now)that break out to 7 different devices (desktops, DLink DSM-320, XBox, JetDirect). I centralized my networking (Router, VOIP Modem, Cable Modem, Switch, Media Server) and could not be happier with the results. Wireless is great for the laptop (running 54Mbps/G), but is less than suitable for high quality music. Video can be done, but your bandwidth is going to bet hosed as soon as someone begins talking on the cordless phone or using the microwave. You could even run a dedicated wireless network (dirt cheap), but the bandwidth is not there. I am good to go now, and can upgrade to GOC when the need arises. If I would have had the choice, I would have run structured wiring through the whole house, and may do that yet. Even in a finished home it is not terribly difficult (I have become somewhat fond of my fish tape and Rotozip). As far as coordinating music in different locations is concerned, you have options. Most of them are expensive. If you run: Speaker wire: I have done this on a large residential install for some very nasty and particular people (my parents). A basic system ran about $8k. For each zone you will need an amp and you will need to install an ohm balancing volume switch (and don't forget your IR repeaters). This system style is old-school, but will have the highest fidelity and the highest material and install cost. www.nilesaudio.com and www.rotel.com Cat5E (non-network): (Don't bother with 6 now) You can buy systems that push the music to a zone controller which contains a small amp just for that zone. This is very flexible by old-school standards. Packages can be all inclusive. Moderately priced. See www.nilesaudio.com Cat5E (Network): www.sonos.com. Way expensive for what you get, but I still want it. It looks like everything I want save the lack of videos, pictures, and open source. My rant: I figure if there is already a PC in the room that has memory to cache music, than why can't some client software run a some kind of crc to validate that the music is coordinated? I have nice (for computer) speakers on all my machines, and don't need a timbre matched system. What is so hard about coordinating clients? I don't know - that is probably why I have not solved it myself. That part I don't have down yet, but I have to say stick with wires. Seeing that 100Mbps light up is soothing...
you won't go wireless.
All kinds of things will interupt it.
now, if you don't mind the quality of sound you get from a broadcast radio station, then wireless will be fine.
I tend to believe you want higher quality then that, since you asked.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's more to cabling than oxygen-free copper, pair twisting, and stranding/braiding. Most people seem to ignore insulation and installation ratings.
If cable is installed inside a wall without conduit, it must be rated for in-wall use. Most lamp cord and extension cords are not, as well as your typical clear-jacket lamp-cord-style speaker cable. If installed in a plenum (air-handling space, typically the space above a false ceiling in your office building), then the insulation must be plenum rated. This means that in the event of a fire, the insulation a) does not support combustion, and b) meets standards for emissions in the event of a fire. If your cabling does not meet the standards for the particular installation, then you'll have to run it in conduit.
In addition, most of your "Home Depot" cord and most audio cables are not rated for permanent installation. Usually, cable designed for permanent installation has individually insulated conductors and a durable outer jacket. (Rule of thumb: interconnects between equipment are considered temporary. If the wire runs thru a wall or is somehow fastened to a surface, then it's considered permanent.)
Don't run your cables under a rug or carpet. This is dangerous: the slight bump in the carpet can be a tripping hazard, the carpet does NOT protect and in fact increases the wear on the cable, heat dissipation is hampered by the carpet, and the cable cannot be visually inspected for damage.
Oh, and another thing about twisting pairs -- for speakers, twisting your pairs won't necessarily improve RF rejection (considering the amplitude of the signal), but will help prevent your speaker signals from inductively coupling to your other signal lines. That is, with parallel non-twisted cable, your speaker lines are not a magnet for interference, but rather are a source for it.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You misspelled "iPod."
Hopefully, someday I'll have as much spare stuff as you do! I recommend one central machine running iTunes, so you can share your music collection through the house to satellite machines (also running iTunes). Also, why not put Shoutcast on the same machine? You could then either tune into the house stream from different rooms, or use iTunes to grab specific stuff from the shared library if you wanted something in particular.
The Slim Devices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com)can use either wired or wireless network interfaces to your computer. It has its own open source server software, SlimServer, that runs on PC, Mac, or Linux, and can use either iTunes or other music libraries. However, it doesn't yet play the Apple Music Store formatted files, so you'll have to rerip them to a non-DRM crippled format.
Muliple Squeezeboxes can be set up to play either synchronously or independently. A remote control is provided that allows remote selection of the music from the location of the Squeezebox via the network.
I thought that multicast was designed to fix this problem. I'm no expert, but use the correct tool. . . Maybe it's not perfect, I've never tried it, but I didn't see anyone else mention it.
If you require true synchronisation of multiple libraries, then a little rsync is your friend.
rsync is great but if you have a windows system and are looking for a backup/sync client, you might consider SyncBack for syncronizing music libraries. I have a number of Windows XP based laptops and a linux (SuSE 9.1) server. I use SyncBack to keep the Music syncronized between them and it's easier to set up on Windows. It lets you schedule backups/syncronizations, and is really fast and easy to use. It's free,though not open source, and as best I can determine has no spyware or ads. They are working on a pay version but the free version works great. There's even a version which doesn't require installation; just copy it into a directory and start using it.
In case you are wondering, I don't have any relationship with the company or individuals that make SyncBack. It's just a good application I found useful and thought others might too.
The real solution, is to run conduit. I understand single wires if you are retrofitting, and don't want a big job, but running conduit from the attic to each room is the end all be all solution. In my home, I just did a complete renovation. With all the sheetrock down already, I went ahead and ran a 1" plastic conduit in each room. Not 6 months after I finished, I subscribed to Dish Network, and found that their new 2 tuner boxes require 2 cables to be run from the dish to the box. If I had not run conduit, I would have been tearing up the walls I just put in.
As it was, I just pushed a new RG6 cable through the conduit, and added a connector to the faceplate.
If you're stuck on iTunes, the airport express stuff works well, otherwise:
http://www.slimp3.com/
Use a Real Networks Helix server. They're free, and you can broadcast from a central location to anywhere you want.
Many of us already have some kind of a system to play music in digital form. iPods, Rios, hell even PCs with some kind of media player on them or... the venerable CD player. A while back I sat thinking about the best way to be able to listen to music throughout the house without needing to either:
1. Run speaker wires to every room
2. Cart the music playing system (I use a PC with XMMS on Linux) around the house
3. Run network cables to each room I wanted to listen to music in
4. Or just have a device in every room
All of these seemed cost/time prohibitive. Then I got to thinking... What do I have in every room of the house that I could use to get music into the room without a lot of effort? It dawned on me: heating/cooling ducts. (If you have steam heat or baseboard heat, then my post doesn't apply to you) What I wound up doing was moving my music playing PC from the living room down to my basement (yeah mine. not my parent's) and putting a speaker transducer in the heater that connects to the main ducts. Then I set the volume high enough the the vibrations travel through the ducts to every room at a suitable volume.
Pros:
1. Wireless!!!
2. Plays music!!!
3. Answers silly Ask Slashdot question!!!
Cons:
1. Tinny sound at best
2. Too loud when you are closer to the first floor
3. Can't control what your listening to (I play in random+repeat mode)
I'm pretty sure that the majority of you have ductwork in your house and could take advantage of this innovative approach to whole house wireless music distribution. Let me know what you think!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
feeds troll...
Speaker wire is nothing more than fancy AC power cables, and with a good reason- analog audio is represented electrically as AC current. Nothing special, just simple AC. It's voltage and frequency vary considerably (voltage = volume, frequency = pitch), but it's just AC nonetheless. The only reason why it doesn't look like it is because most of the time there's a fancy connector on the end of it... or other times, just bare wire.
The only reason why your dryer has thicker cable than your TV is due to the fact that the dryer pulls much more current than the TV, and to avoid literally melting your cables and starting a nice electrical fire the conductive material is thicker to carry the increased current. The same is true for speaker cables- the cable used on big, multi-kW PA systems is much bigger than the 1 W headphones you've got.
As long as you don't do silly things like running audio parallel to power cables (tends to induce a 60 Hz hum into your audio) and make sure you cross all power cables @ 90 degree (or pi/2 radian) angles, you will get great performance with either Home Depot extension cords or Monster Cable speaker cable, because they are the exact same thing. Keyboard magazine ran an article a few years back on cable comparisons. The listening test, done with at least 10-15 people, showed no superior performer. The only way they could rank them is in how well they lasted (one of their tests: slam the cable in a pickup truck bed door 10 times and see if it still works).
There is differences between different kinds of cable, but the differences are for signal types. Analog audio is AC, so AC cables work just *great*. For example, twisted pair ethernet uses a differential signal to avoid interference problems, more details can be found here. Check up on your stuff next time before trolling so hard.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
With all of the constrains you have given I would assume you want to stash the P3 in each room to output to the speakers. As a geek I would assume you like *nix :)
;). This signal would arrive to the port of your choice (unused hopefully) and would contain the time on the server the diffrence between your time and the servers is your refrence time. You send that back to the server. This way your server knows by the delay how much to buffer to achive its goal. Final step is when the command to play is given the server sends a specific time in the future for the music to begin (as accurate as possible, milliseconds) using the refrence and buffering time as a factor.
You would need a main server that would contain or know how to get at the raw music files (mp3, wav, etc) and of course have the software to play it. They sync problem can be solved by sending out a timing signal to each of the clients (P3's). It is also a good idea to make sure all of the machines clocks are working properly and set to the correct time
This way each client can be fed and synced with the others at the request of the server, this also means the server can send diffrent streams (using threads) to each client.
The client could even run on a script but hacking the software its self might be a good idea. Since they are pretty quick machines you dont have to worry much about cpu latency as much as timing within the mp3 or audio file its self. That might be worth reading up on.
Also you could skip a step and decode the audio to PCM from the server. It shouldn't take too many clock cycles but it will eat your bandwidth. Also rememeber each connection to each pc (WIFI) is unique, meaning 1Mbps to the family room and 2Mbps to the bed room is 3Mbps of your total 54Mbps and PCM (although not sure how much) would be much greater then sending compressed mp3 over.
One thing to keep in mind is that you will need an amplifier. Most soundcards struggle at giving out a full watt let alone powering speakers so your dream of complete wireless is going to be short lived (unless you buy a whisper 2000).
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
LOL! That's awesome! If anything it's creative and absolutly halarious. Hey, if it works!
-SumDog
i mean, it is true that different linux audio solutions are rarely every truly friendly with each other, but i don't know if i'd brandn sonos as 'not linux friendly'.
thats what its running, isn't it?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This might not be the best solution - I've never used it over an internal network - but its worth a shot. Shoutcast... its a Winamp-based streaming audio system. You can learn more about it at Shoutcast.com Here is a tutorial on setting it up and everything. Tutorial And the Formal Documentation? Here it is Hope this was helpful.
Samba is very good exchanging files with other computers/platforms.
Take a linux box that has access to your music in shares on the network (or houses the music shares itself), and use icecast to create streaming "channels". Icecast can run on a playlist of file paths/names or it can take a stream from winamp/xmms/vlc for its input audio. Music is played from the central server to any number of PCs with speakers and network access. If the laptops are able to mount the music shares, each room can either run the "house" stream(s) OR play the music of their choice off of the music shares with a native/familiar media player.
These functionalities are common, and you don't have to invest $5k in Apple equipment to accomplish this.
For the sake of ease with the laptops, you might as well get familiar with knoppix. It has all common computer abilities out of the disc.
In addition, going the FOSS way, with softwares from the VideoLAN project you can transcode and multicast video files to all of your remote computers (provided you have the bandwidth and elbow grease to make it work). Put a DVD drive in your linux box and all of a sudden the whole house can watch the DVD with high quality sound.
If you had a Mac, you could use the audio space http://media.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/asp.html
It's a nifty system where you set up a single "audio server" and stream audio to that server via ethernet. The driver on the client machines just shows up as a regular output device in the Mac control panel. Quick, painless, seamless.
AC
Setup shoutcast (preferrably on a fanless computer/server). Connect to a bunch of wifi tablet PCs. I haven't experimented much with shoutcast, but I'm sure you can configure it to create streams on-demand so that you can tune into what room 1 is listening to, or simply browse the server for individual audio files. Then get Creative's Audigy for laptops and you are good to go with unlimited 24bit surround sound systems.
Ah yes, that glorious month between buying and house and when you have to make the first mortgage payment. Wait 30 days and you will never think of audio again...
Ogg Vorbis - need I say more?
- Wireless
- Can synchronize between any number of players
- Supports almost every music format (except for DRM-protected media)
Additionally, it offers:- Digital audio out
- Server software that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X
- If you run it on a Mac, you can use your ITunes music catalog
- Open source software
- A plugin architecture to the software, so you can use the squeezebox to notify you of new email, weather, news, play defender or tetris, etc...
- An infrared remote control
I have three of these babies. One in the living room, one in my office, and one in the garage. They are worth every penny, and designed by nice folks in Mountain View, CA.SIGUSR1
For a fixed speaker installation, soldered contacts is your best bet.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
FileServer: I have all of my tunes on a central server. This box's main function is to hold the files. This machine is running gentoo linux, and exports the files via samba and NFS. Anything else it does (see below) is ancillary, meaning it could be done with another entity (software or hardware). I know of others using a Linksys NSLU-2 with the "enhanced" firmware for the same purpose.
Server Software: I'm using mt-daapd. This is an implementation of the daap protocol used by iTunes to stream the music, and the revdevous (sp?) to publish the server location. It Just Works (tm). This currently runs on the Fileserver, but may not forever.
Players:
What's curently missing here is the syncronized play. I also considered the Squeezebox from slim devices and decided I liked the Roku better. The Squeezebox uses Slimserver software to serve the music, and supports syncronized play. While the Roku can emulate a squeezebox and use the slimserver backend, I was not happy with the result and decided that synchronized play wasn't that important to me.
Some other random notes:
Links:
Linksys NSLU-2
Unslung firmware for the NSLU-2
Roku Soundbridge
Squeezebox and Slimserver
mt-daapd on Sourceforge
JWZ's Gronk
Grind
A review of a REAL FM transmitter
My brother adapted a piece of open source software to stream sound from his powerbook to a linux box in his house. Anything he plays on his powerbook comes through the sound system hooked up to his linux box. I'm sure he'd put it on a public ftp server if you or anyone else is keen.
However, speaker cables aren't unbalanced. They are balanced/differential by nature. You have send and receive on separate wires, but there is no ground.
interconnects, on the other hand, *NEED* good shielding, or need to be balanced/differential. Low current, very high input impedances, and very suceptable to noise.
LOL@U. You sound like someone who barely grasps the difference between AC and DC. Coax cable can carry AC as well...
I have installed a home network in our home (2700 square foot, 7 rooms). Here's the bottom line- wireless is unreliable and slow, you'll need plenty of repeaters to make it semi reliable. After trying different base stations, repeaters and cards I gave up and pulled cable. It was a hassle but I now have an extremely reliable gigabit LAN. Audio is streamed from a rackmount system in the garage to Audiotrons in the various rooms and video is streamed to a PC with an xcard in the living room. The video streaming was a semi-custom solution, I can play ripped DVD's in full quality mpreg2 over the network. Watching a DVD involves a menu click using the xcard remote control, the DVD starts playing almost instantaneously.
Wireless is great for certain applications, but if you own your home I would go with a gigabit copper LAN. It's cheap and it works even when your neighbor is microwaving a burrito.
Kenwood has a networked home theatre system. It has a NIC at the back of it, you can connect it to your wireless router and then use your laptop to play music etc. I use this and its pretty useful to stream music, pics and videos using your home theatre system. You need to install a java based client onto your PC/laptop and create playlists and then you can start listening to music/videos etc. The only limitation is that you need to use it from the hometheatres' remote control and you can't PUSH the audio from the client itself. This idea doesn't seem to be very popular though. Does anybody else have this ? or considered this ? I wish I could tweak this so that I could PUSH the music and control it from the PC itself. Would be cool if you could write up some scripts to control the music! It also has an option for a firmware upgrade, if only kenwood could provide more firmware for it. Just the fact that the firmware is upgradable is pretty cool since just a s/w upgrade could make it ipv6 capable! Pretty futuristic I'd say, but not sure if it is going to reach that phase....
Pros:
4. Annoys all roommates simultaneously!
Cons:
4. Annoys all roommates simultaneously!
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Order bulk cable, order connectors. Solder away...
My recording studio is all Mogami cable with Neutric connectors - thousands of feet in cable. No way could I have afforded Monster, and what I installed is far better spec-wise. There are lots of reasons while audio profesionals sneer when the say Monster cable....
Check out Redco for good prices on bulk cable and connectors.
I wouldn't recommend wireless for anything but the occation that you want to sit on the couch and do homework on your laptop...
I have to do wireless in the rental I currently live in...it is slow, and expensive to set up.
RUN Conduit!
We are building a home, and I am installing conduit. Running a 1.5" conduit at 18" off the ground, and a 1" conduit at 18" off the ceiling.
If you have walls up already, and want to take the time to do it, you can simply run conduit vertically, just like you would a wire, just drill the holes to the size of your conduit.
Install boxes and tiled faceplaces, so you can add phone, fiber, gigabit, power, etc...
--E--
If you live in the states you could get a Creative SBWM.
I'm still trying to work out a way to get one outside the states.
It has a RF remote that lets you build playlists on it. Creative says you can have 4 running at once. I don't know if you can have them all playing in sync. Would love to find out though.
Forgive me for being late, forgive me for not having the time to read all the ~500 posts that were made already.
I saw many problems already pointed out in commments - synchronization, bandwidth, latency, quality - I know them, and I (more or less) solved them. My thesis was about a networked multichannel audio system, with an implementation for Mac OS X. It's called AudioSpace and you can read about it at the link. I hope I find the time to turn the whole thing into a conference paper, if you have any specific questions now, feel free to email me.
For the impatient, here a few figures:
* OS X native, full CoreAudio support, runs with any application
* multichannel, 16bits, tested with 48kHz sample rates uncompressed
* clients can have different sample rates and channel numbers
* latency ~20ms
* tested with wired Ethernet and 802.11b and 802.11g wireless
This is the answer the OP was looking for, not the 100's of "Use iToonz" posts that don't offer a proper solution.
When we built our house in 2001, one of our local Home Depots sold Monster Cable by the foot with all the other wiring stuff they sell. Apparently, it didn't sell well and they discontinued it just as I was shopping for speaker cable. They sold it for some ludicrously low price (5 cents/ft? I don't remember, but it was the cheapest wire they sold at the time.), but I bought it all when I wired the great room for surround sound. The sound is great or it was until I blew one of my old JBL speakers out. Oh, well, I got 10 years out of 'em, and even now they're still not too bad at low to moderate volume. I'd buy new ones but I'm conserving cash so that my wife can (hopefully) attend Clarion West.
I still have a couple hundred feet left on spools in the garage for those inevitable audio projects that crop up from time to time. So, I got Monster Cable for cheaper than Home Depot 18 Gauge Lamp Cord.
here are some:
Onkyo NetTune
Yamaha MusicCAST
The Onkyo system is easy and basic, with excellent audio quality. The Yamaha adds more flexability and is a tad more stylish. Both systems are quite fault tolerent and well-thought-out from and end user stand point. Of course there are more geeky solutions if ultimate flexibility is what you are looking for.
There's also Streamium from Philips.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
You may have lots of old junk laying about but this is more elegent. http://www.smarthome.com/7664.html
The streaming to various little sound clients using iTunes, or some hacking together of some opensource solution is pretty easy enough to setup. The problem that is really interesting, and which many people have said is difficult already is the synchronisation of two digital streams so two different sound sources in two different rooms are in sync. This is a difficult task.
One way I can see that it could work digitally (this is probably a case were an analog switching solution is probably more robust and easy to setup) is to have some combination sound server and clock synchronisation server. A number I've pulled out of my rear-end but have some memory hearing some where, that sound sources need to be within ~10 ms of each other to be in sync to a listener. My idea would be have dedicated sound clients and a dedicated sound server, the sound clients would be continually updated with the servers correct time from the central server (how networking delays would be dealt with here I haven't figured out, it would have to be within 5-10ms probably, but a quick google seemed to show a fair bit of literature on the topic). When a song is streamed to two clients there is also an instruction about the exact time the stream should start playing. Of course there would be some nasty headaches getting this system to be reasonable robust, dealing with networking delays and recovering from glitches. Assuming no gaps in the playback, the two streams should remain in sync, but if one stream skips a bit, it would require some hack to recover or wait till the next song to regain sync. Also the realtime hooks needed to get the accurate commencement of playback on the sound clients pretty much rules out getting this to work on a desktop computer running an OS without good real-time capabilities.
You should check out Netjuke for managing your music library - http://netjuke.sourceforge.net/ It's all web based, so you don't need any iTunes software - just a browser and an mp3 player app! Developed in PHP and was mainly written for MySQL, but I believe it supports other DB software.
Just hook up one of those cheap laptops in any room, plug some speakers in to it, browse to your Netjuke server on your local network, and play away!
I've been using this for a couple of years and it's been awesome. It's also good for sharing music with communities - it has different levels of security that the administrator can set up. Once you get Netjuke up and running, all of the administration is via the Netjuke interface.
Build custom playlists, play all tracks in genre randomly, see the latest artists and albums that have been added to the DB, and much much more!
Also, Netjuke's music importer reads in the ID3 tags in mp3s, which makes it very fast and easy to get all of your music info into the Netjuke database.
"The braids will reduce the increase in resistance due to the skin effect (where high-frequency current migrates to the surface of the conductor, reducing the effective cross-section of your cable"
Electricity is electron movement. Electrons are negatively charged and repel each other. Hence the electricity (the current) is all on the outer skin of the wire; so more skin equals better; so many small wires are better than one big wire cause the middle is wasted if the purpose is electricity.
If Monster Cable really isn't any better than any other kind of cable, then surely they would be setting themselves up for a costly class action lawsuit by claiming otherwise?
There's a lot the people here are ignoring. For speaker cabling, distance can come into play. Given, a normal home theater setup has little issue (and will be unnoticeable over the 20 feet distance) but I definitely can tell a difference in sound quality when using lamp cable over monster cable on my PA system (with 100ft speaker runs). But for interconnects? I can't believe some people are suggesting that the $5 radio shack cables are just as good as the $25-50 monster cables. There's -audible- sound improvement and noise rejection when using good cables - just try recording into a computer with one brand and then the other in your signal chain. You can improve your noisefloor by 10-20db, especially if you've got one of those component cabinets with stacks of not-quite-high-end audio / video gear.
I just moved into an apartment complex and I can see 20 other routers, when my 802.11b connection is stable. I've heard of horror stories much worse.
Do you think you might be able to spare one for me?
Sig, we don't need no stinking Sig!
Freescale's short range uwb (which is not the same thing as zigbee) should be leaking out into the hardcore hobby market sometime this year.
Would take a fair amount of work at this point, but unwiring the entertainment system is one of the markets they are targetting.
D-Link make a multi format video/audio player. Looks pretty decent and you can pick it up retail for $189.00 USD. http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=318 other than that get a pda with wifi built in (will probably cost more)
Some time ago I worked up some ideas for how I would build an all IP based digital A/V system.
They are at The ideal A/V system but of course the products don't exist yet.
But I do know a lot of people who feel the same way and are interested in perhaps making a company to build this stuff, even some funders. I don't have time to do a lot myself. But someday, somebody will build this and it will take over.
Then Monster can sell gold plated twisted pair for your walls to run ethernet over them.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
A shoutcast(or something similar) server with a few different stations would work well. That way, you can tune whichever room into whichever station, having them all on the same station, or all different, or any combination thereof. The only downside, I suppose, would be the lack of music-on demand.
No mention of Prismiq? Only $150, cheaper than the Squeezebox. I just bought one and it should be in the mail. The big benefit is that it also has a video output and can display photos and movies, including Divx. For wireless you can optionally plug in your own PCMCIA card.
I did the electrical wiring in the house. If you do it yourself or if you hire it done, believe me when I tell you that you have to put in the extra time to do a neat, clean job. Runs should have square corners. Multiple runs should follow the same path(s) back to the panel. This allows you to route your voice/data/TV cables and conduit away from runs of romex or at the very least cross them once on the way to the closet. Yes you have to staple the wires up every 4'. Plan ahead and use 3m Stack-It clips. Yes you have to have a dedicated circuit for your entertainment center and primary computer installation(s). All this means you'll spend extra in wire but it won't cost you that much more (under $50, easy. 1000' of 12/2 is $127 @ Lowes). The contractors will hate you for it but 1) some of it is code, like the part about stapling up wire runs), and 2) they work for you. Tell them to deal with it. I was in a friend's basement early last Fall. The house he lived in was built new a year or two earlier. The 1st floor trusses were an absolute cluster-fuck of wiring. You could trace a wire through that mess if you life depended on it. It seriously looked like one of those pictures I know you've reached from some buddy that shows a telephone pole in some 3rd-world country that has a couple thousand various strands of wire pulled off of it, running every which way. A cluster fuck. There was no way he could route his voice and data runs through that mess without succumbing to the interference. Clean, neat, professional (better than the average professional!) runs are a must. Now, back on topic.
I ran Carlon (Lamson Home Products) 3/4" ENT (Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing) flex tube from most boxes back to the accessible side of the basement. It's too expensive to buy well over 1500' of conduit for each and every cable drop. In all honesty you don't have to run conduit to drops that will probably never updated wiring. The drop in your kitchen wall for the family telephone is a good example. Ideally you would run it everywhere but realistically it's not worth the expense. In some cases actually running PVC water lines is cheaper (not to get into a discussion about plenums, PVC, fire, and toxic fumes).
I also used Carlon's low-voltage gang boxes for all the cable drops. They have a knockout in the top and bottom to allow to quick and easy connections to the flex tube with a Carlon Terminal Adapter and an appropriately sized knockout nut (not supplied).
I highly recommend not going with flexible conduit that's any smaller than 3/4" if you expect to pull more than 3 wires (Cat5, RG6, whatever). I pulled 3 x Cat5 and 2 x RG6 lines through 3/4" flex tube but it was a tight fit. 6 would have been very tight. 7 wouldn't have fit. Ideally you would run 1" to all major drops with more than 5 wires, 3/4" to all drops with 3 or 4 wires, and I suppose 1/2" to anything with fewer wires (but only if you got an extremely good deal on it). It's worth noting that the Carlon gang-boxes do not have a 1/2" knockout. The boxes come pre-cut to 3/4".
A good fish tape and some Gardner Bender Wire-Aide(tm) pulling lube is an absolute must (I think that's what I'm using currently). Don't even think about attempting this without both of those items. Depe
Here's a good review of bluetooth product that allows you transmit audio to a small receiver box that could easily be mounted with a powered speaker. Now you just need wireless power and you're set.
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http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=3
I have a similar setup at my house, one thing that is useful is just to have a Network Attached Storage drive http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_slc.asp?CatId=207 and just store all your music on there. Then connect all your computers to that (over 802.11a preferably), and you can install winamp or a similar program on the laptops, and access the drive, that way you have full control on each computer.
You could also buy one of these http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1081512 624434&skuId=6584779&productCategoryId=pcmcat25300 050005&type=product and you would get the same effect (but without those laptops)
I had a similar project. I built a media server from scrounged parts (533 Celeron mb, scrounged ps, built my own aluminum chassis and hard drive shock mount, etc.) Server software is Debian Sarge, including Glirnath and gnump3d. All the CDs were ripped onto their own partition on the hard drive (Lame-based encoder) The server is hooked up to the A/V unit and the TV in the living room. Using the web-based interface in Glirnath, I can play music on the main stereo. Using gnump3d I can play music at a local console (desktop or laptop). Since both software packages use a web interface, the "client" machine can be any machine with a browser.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
It's not cheap, and it'd only 1st generation at the moment, but the MusicCast system from Yamaha shows a lot of promise.
You have a central server, that's got a hard drive and a CD-ROM in it. The server is designed to look like a piece of hifi equipment, so it doesn't need to be hidden in a cupboard.
You then have remote stations, can be in-wall mounted that connect via wired or wireless ethernet and stream either MP3s or lossless-compressed audio from the server. You can also plug the server itself into your existing amp, and play music from it as well.
Sure you can roll-your-own for cheaper than this costs, but for ease of installation and WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) a black box that looks like the rest of your hi-fi equipment rates a lot higher than a beige box - unless you want to use, say, a Mac Mini =)
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
How do I do gigabit ethernet wirelessly?
You may prefer MY speciale educationale pamphlette "You and the Sledgehammer," available for only $8.95, plus shipping and handling.
While supplies last.
I've thought of using GPLed libraries and whatnot to make an app that uses UDP broadcasts to deliver a radio stream.
The problem with shoutcast or whatnot (especially on a wireless network) is that the rooms in the house will not be in sync. It sucks to have two or more different sources with a 1 second difference between/among them. This is because shoutcast uses buffering and I believe it requests dropped packets as well.
Not sure what audio formats would handle dropped packets ok. But with UDP broadcasts over a wireless network, you could theoretically have as many listening stations as you have IPs on the subnet - and they would all be in sync. I don't know of any software out there that does that. I imagine if you want to have different channels being broadcast (for different music in different rooms) that would only be a matter of changing the port. Would be much less network traffic than individual TCP streams to each listening station, but again susceptable to dropped packets.
I'd like to see the source for that. Modifying it to do that sounds like something I might be interested in, but then again with college who knows how long I'd actually end up working on it heh.
ve got access to tons of old PIII laptops, wireless gear, old computers, sound cards, etc to make this work
I've put the system up on my site here. There are screenshots there too. Enjoy!
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An A/B/X test is a type of blind test used to impartialy show a statistical preference for A, B or Undetermined. The X sample is A or B (random) and is just used to determine the number of surveyed test subjects that could/couldn't tell the difference between A and B.
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On this topic, anyone have a recommendation on wireless headphones? Personally, I don't care about the quality, as I listen to talk radio, but the headphones I've tried have really crappy reception. It tees me off because with my $20 cordless phone, I can go down the street and never lose reception. Wireless headphones don't even work three rooms away.
Posted by yintercept - "...science...[is] the study of the 'divine creation.' "
Sans fire code! Yay!
There is one huge problem with all those stuff:
The codec problem. Most software like iTunes only works with a limited set of codecs, and my music collection contains MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC and AAC.
This is also a big disadvantage of all those fancy streaming clients, making them inflexible and much more expensive.
What I'd like to have is:
A client/server solution that can use Foobar 2000 (or anything else that plays all the formats Foobar does) to decode the audio files on the server for the clients not powerful enough or clients without controls (kind of radio).
This app will do all you want and more...
at $ 35.00
http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/
to see if somebody already mentioned this system from SONOS its just an add and I saw it in Tech Review but it sounds like what you were looking for.
It might be funny or overrated, but it's neither offtopic nor informative.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, take a loook at http://www.control4.com/. It doesn't ship for a couple of months but it works well in my beta home. I have the option of playing from multiple sources simultaneously streamed over 802.11g or Ethernet and can synchronize to any stream playing from a source in any room. General pricing is $1600 for the server (media controller) and $700 for each wireless 4" touch panel client. It is standards-based but proprietary, and "yes", I work for the company. Other competitve options are Yamaha, Sonos, and NetStreams.
Speaker cables are unbalanced. There is also no such thing as "send and receive" on speaker cables.
It is true that speaker cables are generally not prone to interference, but that is because there is no signal amplification once they get to their destination.
Illustration:
Your signal comes in from the DVD player - a few mW in total. If there is a lot of noise nearby, it could be noticable, since noise is probably in the uW-mW range. Your amp then boosts whatever input it gets to 1000W and sends it to the speakers. Now if you add a few uW of noise it isn't noticable at all, but any noise that came in via the DVD input got boosted by the amp and is quite noticable.
A balanced signal is one which is sent via twisted pair where each wire in the pair is 180 degrees out of phase with respect to the other, and where the sum of the two signals is ground. This is noise resistant, since incoming noise will be in-phase in each cable, and when the signals are inverted and combined the noise will cancel out.
Unbalanced signals are still differential - you can just take an unbalanced microphone signal and put it into a speaker and you will get sound (albeit virtually inaudible). In fact, a speaker will function as a very poor microphone - if you put two speakers back-to-back on the same line, if you speak into one it vibrates the diaphram, and induces current in the wire, which then travels to the other speaker and causes its diaphram to move.
Where you do benefit in running balanced signals to speakers is when the speakers are powered - since you're now applying gain to the signal.
I'm pretty sure that just about every balanced system out there uses at least three wires. Ethernet uses only 2 for each way (for 10BaseT), but that's probably because the plug in the wall provides a ground reference. Is anyone aware of a battery-operated device that successfully uses an ethernet interface with no other cables attached?
Disclaimer - I'm not an EE. And if somebody who really is one cares to illuminate this discussion, please feel free to do so. However, kindly provide more than "you're wrong"...
I want to do something similar using my old PIII/500 laptop, that currently runs Fedora3.
I'm planning to plug it's headphone out into my hifi and run some sort of web application that allows machines to connect to it remotely and control what's playing.
I'd really prefer to just let the clients tell the server what to play rather than the server stream the file to the clients to play themselves. I figure that way, the only ethernet traffic is small HTTP requests, rather than whole MP3 files, much better for 802.11b.
Isn't there just a software system that could do this - maybe even something as simple as a web interface for XMMS?!
I'd rather not go the VNC route either.
I could write the web frontend and probably a client/server system myself, but what would the backend be - mpg123 is a bit crap, do XMMS/MPlayer/Xine have any kind of console mode?
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Moderators, please give this AC his due. The link leads to the opinions of an engineer who has actually done physical, psychological, and thought experiments about high-end (I refuse to say audiophile!) audio cabling.
Don't believe me? Check this:
http://www.qed.co.uk/multiroom/index.html
Or is it the conduit that makes it better? I imagine a vibrating string would be fairly "lossy" in open air, so I could see a conduit being helpful. Kind of like a voice tube in an old Navy ship...
Seriously, though, I have one of these strings you describe running to one of my ethernet drops, because I'm not sure I put enough wires there, but I get way more bandwidth out of the cat 5 I did put in.
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And never mind the cabling; either tuck it under a skirting board or run it under the floor.
I'm currently trying to decide between the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro and the Microsoft Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth. The bluetooth one is $50 more, but do you guys think it's worth it?
OK, looks like several people have already posted on this one, but I concur. I have two and they are great. I have had problems getting them to play in sync, but I usually don't want this behavior anyway, so hasn't been a problem for me.
I'm an EE.
Speaker cables are balanced.
Balanced signals only require 2 wires, all current passes through each wire, not through ground. the third wire is usually shield/ground, but it's not really necessary.
Unbalanced signals only require 1 wire, the signal, which is referenced to ground. But, ground is never really ground, it's an ugly thing.
If you disconnect the "ground" of an unbalanced RCA jack, you'll still get audio, just much noisier (it has to fall back on the common ground of the mains ground (or neutral, if two-prong plugged).
With a balanced signal, if you remove one of the two signal wires, you don't get anything at all. Nothing is referenced to ground.
Balanced pair
A transmission line in which the two conductors are electrically identical and symmetrical with respect to a common reference point, usually earth.
Unbalanced pair
A transmission line in which the voltages on the two conductors are unequal with respect to earth.
http://www.wavecor.co.uk/gloss.htm
Twisted pair is used to ensure that all intereference is picked up equally by both wires, thereby making it invisible when the difference between the wires is measured.
Since speakers respond to the voltage difference between the wires, and all current flows through both wires, and isn't reference to ground, they're differential, and balanced.
Makes sense - I was unaware that one of those cables was not grounded...