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Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?

Posted by Cliff on from the screw-conduits! dept.

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?"

7 of 641 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm, go wired! by Paolo+DF · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

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  2. New House? by CommanderData · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

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    1. Re:New House? by jedinite · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No question, if you're still in the pre-rough-in stages (i.e. no drywall up yet), wire your house.

      Even if you've got drywall down, depending on your insulation type you may still be able to fish wires through, especially if your ceiling/floor is not directly insulated - you can easily run wire parallel to floor joice if its not insulated, cut a small hole at the ceiling, and fish through the insulated walls - assuming its a spray-in non-hardening insulation, which most people use these days - my house is blown recycled newspaper which is apparently a very common insulation.

      In more detail, I just (this weekend) closed on my new custom-built house. I've got 1.26 miles of wire in the house (easily calculated since everyone sold me the wire I used by the foot). Cat5e for phone, Cat6e for data, speakerwire, multiple coax runs to almost every room (so I can RF-mod signals and broadcast them to any other room), and in appropriate places audio, video, even two 25' DVI runs and two 25' RGB runs. In fact, voice/data/coax terminates to a Futuresmart panel in my furnace room where signals can be routed...

      As someone has already said, wireless is good for walking around with the laptop/etc. Not what you want for speakers. But not to mention when you've got the opportunity to build a gigabit backbone for the majority of the house, take it while you still can. Especially if you're serious about moving music or especially video.

      My recently-received Mac Mini will be taking over as a media center in my home theater, and i'll be pulling MP3s and videos from my WinXP boxes via Samba (cut me some slack on the Windows comments, my dedicated server is BSD but XP still is my best machine for gaming and video).

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      There is no try at jedinite.com
  3. [tt] lemmie get this straight... by FortKnox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Ethernet (wired or wireless)... by WonderSnatch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  5. My Home-Grown System by SlipJig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

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  6. Use Slimserver and Softsqueeze by ZedmanAuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

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    -ZA