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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?"
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 am sure someone else will mention it, but I use iTunes exclusively for music throughout our home."
What, are you famous or something? Why would anybody else be telling us what you use in your home? And BTW, who the hell are you anyway?
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!
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."
Yep. I had pretty much the same setup in my old house. My G4 lived in my bedroom and we had a PowerBook G3/500 hooked up to the stereo and tv. Sharing MP3's wirelessly with iTunes worked flawlessly. We also used the PowerBook to watch downloaded TV shows (BBC stuff not availabled in the US). It'd stream most formats (Divx, Xvid, etc) wirelessly from the G4...but higher bitrates needed to be copied over first. Everything looked fantastic when connected via S-Video. Also, the only real limitation to the AirPort Express is that they will only play what's playing on the main iTunes "server"--i.e. no different songs in different rooms. Another cool thing that you might consider is to have a BlueTooth cell phone. I never got around t to it, but there is some software called Salling Clicker that'll let you control iTunes (skip songs and stuff) from your cell phone. Here's the link (too lazy to do HTML at the moment) http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Cli cker/
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.
"You had me all the way up to Monster Cable. [Shudder] You're falling for a lot of marketing hype."
ABX testing has shown Home Depot 18 gauge lamp cord to be identical or even superior to Monster Cable in all respects.
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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.
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