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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 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
You had me all the way up to Monster Cable. [Shudder] You're falling for a lot of marketing hype.
I've got a hybrid house with wireless iTunes going to the kids' iMac upstairs, the Wired Xbox playing audio in the family room (cat 5 to the xbox, optical from there to the home theatre). You do NOT want to pipe video over 802.11g. You can do it, but if the main living spaces can be wired, leave the wireless bandwidth for better uses. The 'College Audiophile stereo' is hooked up to the music server in my office.
Any other music needs (garage) are handled by my iPod and an iTrip.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.
Digital sound. 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. P3 laptops should be fine for reassembling that audio and if they have a USB port or other digital audio out and connect to good speakers there is no reason why the sound quality would be any worse than any other solution. The wirelessness just makes it more portable (if you are a renter) and keeps you from having to run wires through your walls, ceiling, or floor.
Absolutely. If you haven't even closed on the house yet, chances are you're going to be there long enough to make the little extra effort of running wires worthwhile.
Even forgetting about quality issues for a moment, totally wireless is going to be way more of a headache than crawling around in the attic for a couple afternoons. It's not like a lack of interference now means it won't be a problem in the future.
And if you plan ahead and think out every possible configuration, and run all the cabling at once, you'll thank yourself later. I've got 4 RG-6 feeds and 4 cat-6 feeds going to our entertainment center, and I'm glad I went overboard when we bought our house. I'm already using almost all of them.
Don't forget about smoke detectors (you may want one tied to a monitored security system someday), motion sensors, alarm system keypads, cable tv / modem, Satellite TV (multiple feeds for PVRs)... you just cannot go completely wireless, even in this day and age. I suppose if you could you wouldn't have to worry about night lights, because after a while you'd be able to act as your own light source.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I've come across this problem as well, and it seems to me that it's really not very hard, just that none of the currently-available streaming protocols are designed to do it. It seems like it would be trivial to timing metadata in the stream, and have the endpoints buffer a second or two of data. Then you just need to synchronize every endpoints clock, but that's a problem that NTP has solved for years.
Just random thoughts.
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lds
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
A gigabit per second should be enough speed for anyone.
Seriously though, put the money you'd spend running fibre in a bank account and it'll easily pay for the upgrade when it's actually necessary. Between compounded interest and dropping prices due to better technologies, it rarely makes sense to look 20 years into the future when it comes to computer equipment.
Think back, think waaaaay back, before packets, before computers. When you wanted the same music in all your rooms, what did you do? You tuned all your radios to the same station.
Buy an FM transmitter kit for a hundred bucks, and your problems are solved. Synchronization is perfect, price is low, deployment is trivial.
I didn't know if he was joking or not, but I considered it likely enough that it was worth googling. It actually took a bit, but I believe he was referring to this, wherein it is basically revealed that there is no difference between 16 gauge cabling and, well, anything, even up into the thousands of dollars.
I have no counter examples to offer up. I see no reason why this shouldn't be true.
I believe the snarky comments should be saved for those falling for the hype, not those who do actual scientific testing and puncture it.
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.
The only way that you could reliably make that happen would be to calibrate your network of machines via a test sound file and a microphone. And even then, I don't know how well the synchronization would hold up if the machines are running anything else. Maybe you need to continuously run such a calibration program on the master machine, and restart/insert delays via pause/unpause to remote machines to correct slippage?
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.
You must be new here. This is ask.slashdot.org, where periodically through the day Cliff posts a question that basically falls in two categories. 1) Its something that can be found in the first 10 links on a google search or 2) its something completely crazy where someone is too cheap but geeky enough to spend hours/weeks/months on end to get a half baked solution that usually can be bought off the shelf at a reasonable price.
Yeah, if I were building a new house I would have it wired for both ethernet and an audio system. Heck, a grand in cables and jacks (much lest than 1% of building price) could very well add value to your home in the future.
Welcome to ask.slashdot.org.
The demand for pre-1980 houses or custom built houses is much smaller than for new run-of-the-mill houses, so you may end up with a house you can't sell when you need to.
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...
Yeah. For lower quality settings like my kitchen and outside porch. I'm going to buy an FM transmitter. Plug it into the 1/8" out on your computer and you have complete synchronous wireless transmission inside and outside of your house. They are under $30 too.
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.
JT has good points, but I'd like to comment on this snippet:
"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..."
If you go this route, please use the appropriate "plenum rated" cables for anything you run through ductwork. Cable that is rated for plenum use has insulation that burns slowly and emits little smoke - important in case of fire. Better safe than cheap. Not to mention the possibility of an insurance adjuster denying a claim if said cheap cable contributed to any otherwise covered losses...
As for the speakers in the vents, I'm not so keen on that idea from both a safety standpoint (not sure if they make "plenum rated" speakers...) and from the standpoint that they'll block airflow.
Otherwise, have fun!
-cajun
No, they're digital to the amp, at best. If they're digital headed into the speaker, then they are internally amplified and will be converted to analog at the input to the amp, at the very latest. I.E. they're run through a DAC and put into the amplifier, since the only way you can amplify sound for a speaker is with... an amplifier. And amplifiers (despite marketspeak calling lovely Class D amps "Digital") are inherently analog processes.
If they're biamped, they might be digital through the crossover even, but that's only because the amplifier is after the crossover. The amplifier is, and will always be, analog.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Parent is modded funny, but this is a very reasonable solution; that's what I do at my house and it works fantastically.
:)
You can get a nice little PLL FM transmitter from ccrane.com for around US$70.
With the addition of an antenna wire that is about 6 feet long on the transmitter, I get hiss-free FM stereo that sounds certainly good enough for me, in every room of my house and out in the shop. I've ripped every CD I own and put that on "shuffle" from the main PC, and have either nice stereos (living room and shop) or rinky jam-box radios (bathrooms) about everywhere I can expect to be. Two NI-MH batteries will last for at least a couple days in the thing, or you can use the wall-wort and not mess with transmitter batteries at all.
Implementation notes: (1) PLL synthesized FM is important; don't get a kit without it or your transmitter frequency will drift and your digitally-tuned receivers will get fuzz. (2): There are about 15 radio stations in my local market but I'm several miles out; YMMV if you are in a crowded market with no blank spaces on the FM dial. (3) When you are tired of your digital audio collection, you can always listen to the radio