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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 am sure someone else will mention it, but I use iTunes exclusively for music throughout our home. A central server with our entire 10k song plus collection ripped onto it resides in the study with an old Powerbook connected up to the main stereo system in the house that spins out the tunes for most to hear (A Mac Mini would be perfect for this task). Others who want to listen to something else in differing parts of the house (or outside) can also tie into iTunes and listen simultaneously to completely independent streams, all wirelessly. In fact, before they moved, my next door neighbors used to stream from our server as well.
I don't know if PIII laptops can run iTunes or not, but my six year old Powerbook spins tunes with no problem whatsoever. For those truly particular about their music ( or those with high end home stereo systems possessing digital audio connectors ), Powermac G5's and the new 17in Powerbook also have digital audio out. Combine that with Apple's lossless audio format and you have some kick ass tunage available without ever again having to search through your CD collection for that particular song. A cheaper option is to purchase Airport Express units for differing parts of your house that each have an audio out and can plug into any available power socket.
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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.
This is so easy, I don't even know why you had to post it to Slashdot.
So, here it is, how to have the same music play in every room in your house, in 3 easy steps:
1.) Buy stereo system with very large speakers
2.) Put stereo system in one room of your house. Orient speakers so they face toward the rest of the house.
3.) Turn volume up all the way.
If you still have some "dead spots" in the house where the sound doesn't reach, you'll need my specidal educational pamphlet "Sledgehammers and You," available for only $9.95, plus shipping and handling.
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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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.
> I don't want to wire. Anything.
I suggest batteries.. a lot of them.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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!
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...
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.
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.
Avs Forum
HDTVoice
If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable
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.
There are several websites on converting laptops into "picture frames" http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/023922 2&tid=222&tid=1,
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.JunktopRevival
Which you could modify slightly to add built in powered speakers and hang one in each room.
- Mike
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
If you have a network, and a stack 'o PIII's then you have what you need. It doesn't really matter what kind of network, as long as everything connects via TCP and has enough bandwidth for your needs.
Setup a linux server, with enough disk space for your media collection and whatever else you want to store there. Install gnumpd3 from
here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
Install a desktop linux distro on the machines in each room. Aim a web browser from any machine at the URL of the gnump3d server and viola! you have music from your collection on demand in any room!
Streaming radio style music is easy as well. Install icecast from here:http://www.icecast.org/
and aim the xmms player from here: http://www.xmms.org/ and you have streaming media! woohoo!
If you want to control a distribution system that plays the same songs things get more complicated, you'll need Apple computer's RTSP server and some client software to get everything sync'd throughout the house.
I use secure shell from my zaurus wireless pda and mpg123 and aumix to operate this from a pocket sized device. For everything else I just browse the music library with gnump3d's web interface. FWIW, I use SuSE linux. It came with all the above except for the Darwin Stream Server (or whatever it is that Apple calls it these days). I had to download and compile the icecast source, but what the heck, it wasn't to hard to do either.
HTH
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