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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?"
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.
Yep. I had pretty much the same setup in my old house. My G4 lived in my bedroom and we had a PowerBook G3/500 hooked up to the stereo and tv. Sharing MP3's wirelessly with iTunes worked flawlessly. We also used the PowerBook to watch downloaded TV shows (BBC stuff not availabled in the US). It'd stream most formats (Divx, Xvid, etc) wirelessly from the G4...but higher bitrates needed to be copied over first. Everything looked fantastic when connected via S-Video. Also, the only real limitation to the AirPort Express is that they will only play what's playing on the main iTunes "server"--i.e. no different songs in different rooms. Another cool thing that you might consider is to have a BlueTooth cell phone. I never got around t to it, but there is some software called Salling Clicker that'll let you control iTunes (skip songs and stuff) from your cell phone. Here's the link (too lazy to do HTML at the moment) http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Cli cker/
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.
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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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