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?"

Comments

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[Matey-O]

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.

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:sound in all your rooms

[ldspartan]

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.

--
lds

Buy a walkman

[delmoi]

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.

Re:sound in all your rooms

[Wugger]

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.

Re:iTunes

[MultiModeRb87]

Unfortunately, I think that the first post in this thread was referring to sound synchronization. It's easy to get multiple machines to have access to the same song files, but it's more difficult to get multiple machines to output that sound in phase with one another.

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?

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[Kiryat Malachi]

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.