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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?"
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.
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.
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!
Roku Labs has a neat solution.
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...
As far as i can tell, your setup doesn't require iTunes to work at all - you're just sharing a massive collection on a central server and accessing it via iTunes (unless you are relying on Apple lossless as your format of choice). I do have a question though - if you have multiple airport express units, can you stream different tunes to each? Not sure how this would be done. My problem is that I have apple DRM'd songs that i'm too lazy to burn and re-rip, so i need an iTunes player for each stream, and there's a limit to how many can be authorized...
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.
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.
You can definitely do cheaper than a slimserver (though mine is on its way).
The
NetGear MP101 can be had for ~$75 after rebate at your local Big Box Electronics Store. Note, though, that the experiences with this product range from miserable to acceptable, largely because of weak wireless capability (it works for some, not others) and a flaky server software package.
The slim, on the other hand, has a fairly amazing open package with some awesome plugins developed by the community. The downside, though, is that it's not compatible with UPnP (which the MP101 is), making alternative servers, like Twonkyvision
useless.
Why am I switching to the slim, even with the higher price (3x)? Two reasons: first, the open server software - perl based! - means that I'll get features I really dig and not get stuck without answers. Second, the MP101 can only really do radio streams if you pay a one time? $20 fee OR monkey around considerably. While the service is pretty nice during the trial period, I'd prefer to not pay for something I can do for free.
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.
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
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!
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).
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).
A Celeron 300A running at 450MHz (remember that bit of overclock history??) runs iTunes with no problems.
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
The amazingly stupid thing about Sonos is their marketing folks don't scream this time-base synchronization feature. This thread shows how important it is. I've been looking for a multi-zone digital playback system for years and this is the first one I've found. To me it is the ONE thing that makes them stand out. Well, that, and their cool iPod-like remote control.
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
Although they could use wireless mics, I think you will find that the recording studios have a much better reason to use wires. When you are 20 feet from the pre-amp, there is no need to have a seperate transmitter-receiver for multiple mics. The main reason the studios do not use wireless is that the extra audio stages can be avoided and that means that the amplifier only needs to handle 20Hz to 20kHz. Everytime the audio has to go through an audio stage the bandpass is reduced. For instance, if each stage (one in transmitter, one in receiver) has a bandwidth of 20-20kHz (-3db) the result will be a 20-20kHz with -6db. Assuming the standard -6db/octave (its not), this would put the -3db frequency range as 40Hz to 10khz, not a very good system. One other reason for wires is the shielding from the surrounding equipment.
The advantage of wireless is that you can transmit a digital signal to a remote location where wires are difficult to run, and then D/A the signal back to a very good, but not perfect audio. Unfortunatly, you cannot get away from the problem with multi-audio stages when digital is used;A/D and D/A.