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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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I'm going to have to agree. Wireless is all well and good, but don't use it if you don't bloody have to. Wireless is for laptops, so you can walk around with internet. Are you going to wander around with a speaker in your hand? Anyway, I can't see a hacked-together wireless sound solution with P3 laptops and whatnot being nearly as good as a few well-placed wired speakers.
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'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.
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.
"You had me all the way up to Monster Cable. [Shudder] You're falling for a lot of marketing hype."
ABX testing has shown Home Depot 18 gauge lamp cord to be identical or even superior to Monster Cable in all respects.
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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.
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If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable
There are several websites on converting laptops into "picture frames" http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l,
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Which you could modify slightly to add built in powered speakers and hang one in each room.
- Mike
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
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Professional "golden ears" refuse to submit to blind tests. However, some tests using a placebo cable while the real cable was hidden showed that the "golden ears" consistently claim to hear what the marketing information for the cable they think they are testing says they should hear. When the placebos are swapped and the actual cable being used is left fixed they consistently pick the best looking placebo.
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Wired, wireless, whatever, the transport medium does not really make a difference. It's 1's and 0's and whether they get from point A to point B via a wire or via EM it does not matter.
As long as the format is digital, you are correct. But typically the signal between between the amplifier and the speakers is analog. For analog, the quality of the connection matters.
In sound terms, you typically have four parts -
1. Source (in this case digital music files).
2. A Digital to Audio Converter.
3. Amplifier
4. Speakers
Wireless between points one and two (say a music server and a laptop playing the files) can be digital. However, at some point, you have to convert to analog.
In my option, a good setup for playback in each room would be an old laptop hooked up to an old stereo receiver/amp wired to a nice pair of bookshelf speakers - something with at least 5/12-6/12 low drivers. If you look around, you can probably find some nice used stereo amplifiers - pioneer, onkyo, yamaha. You can even buy decent new stereo amps for a small amount of money these days. I'd spring for new speakers in any event.
Well, any cable's fine as long as it has negligible inductance and capacitance. A bit of resistance is ok - it'll just reduce the ammount of power reaching your speakers, but as long as your amp can handle a variety of load resistances it shouldn't be a problem.
Distortion due to cables mainly arises when the cable resistance becomes frequency dependent. At that point it will damp some tones more than others, and everything falls apart. I suppose you could fix it by playing with the equalizer, but that is far from a good solution.
Prognosis: use a braided cable (many small strands, not one solid) with decent quality copper to keep the resistance down and your music should sound fine. 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).
Jw
I use to run a pro-sound company (we ran big sound systems for bands and DJs). Every now-and-then I'd get to a gig and find out I was missing a speaker cable or not have a long enough speaker cable to get to the speakers they owner wanted outside on the deck,etc.
Whenever that happened I just ran to the nearest Lowe's or WalMart and bought two 16 gauge extension cords, chop off the ends and put Neutrik speaker connectors on it. Worked great and got a 100ft speaker cable for 8 dollars. You actually don't need more than 16 guage unless you're pushing serious wattage (>150 RMS).
Of course for any install job I would use 14 and 12 guage.
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Or a slimdevices Squeezebox. http://www.slimdevices.com/ - I've just bought one, and it works a treat. Sounds good, to. And it's cheaper than the Roku stuff.
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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.
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