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Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom Audio?
jimicus writes "I'd like a multiroom audio system but I'm thoroughly confused by the options available — and the difference in prices is huge. For instance, Philips have a wireless system which starts at around £280 — and Russound have a product which comes in around £1,000. I've already got all my music as MP3s and it lives on a NAS box — I don't really want to repeat that process. I also have a perfectly capable amp and speakers in my living room, so I don't really need anything else there. Whatever I go for has to pass the wife test — so something which requires a separate amp, speakers and PC in each room and requires a keyboard to control is right out. I don't mind spending a little money but I don't really want to find that every little extra thing adds up to £thousands. Has anyone else dealt with a similar problem? How did you solve it?"
Just set numrooms = 1 (or even better, 0). Makes the problem much easier.
You have a wife?
I haven't tried it myself, but this looks like a very interesting product. http://sonos.com/
The squeezebox family from Logitec (used to be slim devices) rocks. It will read all of your music + internet radio stations plus more, available as inexpensive component audio, boom boxes and even high end audio components
nothing is real
I would get a bunch of old netbooks on Ebay. That would work with either Linux or Windows (shudder;).
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Squeezebox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_%28network_music_player%29
Have some, they work great.
I don't understand the part about not wanting separate "separate amp, speakers and PC in each room". I understand not wanting computers everywhere. But you pretty much need speakers in every room that you want sound (unless you are OK playing it louder in an adjacent room). Get some decent powered speakers if yo don't want a separate amp box. (Don't skimp on the speakers, btw. The squeezeboxes have exceptional sound quality.)
I have the Boom and it works great. It also comes up with server software that runs on Linux or Windows so you can serve your music. You can read more details on the Logitech website.
If you want good class-a amps, you'll have to pay for them. If you want good electrostatic speakers, you need pay for them and sample your CDs at 400kb otherwise what's the point?
'Good' relative to a high end system is about 'good enough.' Nothing is simpler to configure and operate than physical cable connecting your consumer-grade speakers to your class b or class d amp.
After that, it really doesn't matter what your source is 128 vbr is effectively indistinguishable from higher on consumer grade sound gear.
I just replay the music in my head. This helps avoid copyright infringement suits.
Be sure not to get carried away, and hum or whistle because that's a performance not covered by Section 117.
Any internet connected machine will control the audio programming, and any old FM-radio will do the trick of receiving the signal. Simple. Effective. _AND_ Wife-Friendly(TM) (at least, according to my wife ;)
Because of FM-modulation, this technique is not hi-fi. But a decent transmitter does an admirable job in retaining audio quality.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
-Possum Lodge Motto
I like the combination of iTunes and Airport Express - http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/ - devices. Each Airport Express can join a wireless or wired network and has an optical digital and analogue audio output which you can connect to a hifi / radio with aux input etc. Each Airport Express appears as a remote speaker in iTunes and you can tell iTunes to play to any / all remote speakers. And you can control everything with Apple's free Remote app - http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/ - on an iPod Touch / iPhone. It all works rather well.
C Crane sells an FM broadcaster which has a variable potentiometer which can be easily adjusted to boost the range beyond what the FCC allows.
If you attach this to your NAS as an audio output or your main stereo, you can relay what you're listening to in nice FM stereo throughout most of a large size house (goes well through my 3-story house and even our detached garage).
FM broadcast is cheap, it's easy to add new devices that are easy to use, and the music is perfectly in sync.
If you're broadcasting from a NAS, add a usb sound card to broadcast the music, and control it with MPD, which will allow you to change music via a lot of clients, including an iphone.
I hired a band of six-piece midget mariachi band to follow me around. I had to buy a mini-bus, but it's by far the best solution.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Check out Squeezebox Duet combo which consists of a Controller (Wifi remote control) and a Receiver (small black player box that can also connect via Wifi). The central library can be installed on a Windows/Linux box and the software is written in Perl and open source - heck, everything is Linux powered, remote control included.
I think that you can use a single remote to control multiple players and it might even be able to auto connect to the nearest player automatically (not sure, I only have one).
It isn't very sophisticated or slick (the remote doesn't have a nice feel, the wheel isn't very smooth), but it's cheap.
I use a couple Airport Express routers which do audio, each room has one Airport Express plugged into a stereo in the room. Through iTunes I can play something in one room or 2 rooms or all rooms at the same time. I control that via the iphone which can do with the ipod touch too. The main system us plugged in with a digital optical cable. If you have 2 itunes running you can have totally different music playing in different rooms using the same library.
SONOS
Could not be simpler to set up and use, I won't go into all of it here as the site lays it out pretty well. Plays many non-DRM formats (MP3, FLAC, WMA, etc) but WILL NOT play anything with any DRM of any kind. Rhapsody, Pandora and a bunch of others are available for streaming.
All of the zone players (including the recently released all-in-one player/speaker) can be hooked up via ethernet or use their proprietary zigbee mesh network, and are all controlled with their own wireless (zigbee) controller, your iPhone/Touch, or a computer running the Sonos software.
One zone player/bridge has to be hooked up to your network, the rest can be wireless.
For your living room system, or anywhere that features other components, be aware that Sonos is an entirely closed platform - you can't control it except as mentioned above, and it will not send any feedback to a 3rd party system (you'll need one remote to control your receiver/dvd/etc, and another for Sonos).
Duet, Touch or Classic in the living room - Boom or active speakers and one of the aforementioned in the other rooms.
Get a couple of small computers like a alix1d (has audio)/sheeva plug(usb audio)/beagleboard install and configure (ssh) debian, pulseaudio and lirc.
If you buy a Zotac ION ITX A Series 330 or similiar and install a xbmc you have a nice HTPC as well.
Now you can send your audio around the place.
Now if only someone could make it easy to use rfidiot with pam (unlock the screensaver)and someway to track movement where I walk, I would chip my self. :3
I've often wondered about this, too. Looking at Philips's product information though, I'm not sure I'll be handing them my cash. All I see are tiny product images and meaningless slogans all over their page. I want details, damnit! Like, does it also have built-in FM radio? What's the remote look like? Can I have multiple remotes in each room and does each thing receive commands from the remote? Does it have to be connected to the internet or can it operate stand-alone? Some companies' marketing departments are really so clueless these days.
I have a 5.1 speaker system in the living room. Another in my bedroom. Usually they are connected to the same source (my bedroom computer), but if I want them playing different music, I have my older laptop next to the one in the living room, so I can easily use it as a source.
When they are both on, they easily cover the apartment. If your house is bigger, just get more speaker systems. I never gave wireless any serious consideration. The wires are barely noticeable. I don't understand your wife test; she doesn't want more speakers?
Anyway, I don't see why it would have to get much more complicated than that. The only thing I could wish for is the ability to turn either of the speaker systems on/off from other places in the house. Sometimes I forget to turn off the living room set while playing the type of thing that should really only be heard in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
If you have stopped using your landline like most people I know, you can attach your amp to the phone lines and small speakers anywhere in your house that's near a phone jack. You need a reasonably sturdy amplifier if you want to drive more than 6 speakers or so, and the sound quality won't be dazzling, but it's real cheap and easy. You can also attach a cheap potentiometer to each speaker for volume control.
My S.O. and I are KCRW.com freaks. We also have FM radios throughout the house, along with the living room stereo system - where my S.O.'s PC also lives. I split the audio line from her PC: one line goes to the living room stereo, the other goes to a cheap C.C.Crane FM transmitter. This is the absolute cheapest way to get a single source of audio (CDs, MP3 library, streaming audio) into every room of the house. Note: the FM signal strength from the Crane transmitter sucked at first - then I found a web page that showed how you can open up the Crane transmitter and tweak the signal strength to maximum. Works great now.
If you want decent audio you need oxygen free speaker cables. Hand made valves for the amps are a given.
Oh sure, if your gear is CONSUMER GRADE then you could hook it up with a coat-hanger wire.
I personally avoid anything digital, because I inherited superior hearing, and those 70 kHz frequencies are conspicuously missing from digital compressed audio made for mere mortals.
Enjoy your 44.1 KHz on your CONSUMER GRADE gear you PEASANT.
How about a Mac Mini with a remote control? They have good audio hardware, you can connect it to your network wirelessly, and you can use Mac OS X, Linux or Windows on it for playing audio. They're also small, nearly silent, and women think they're cute.
About five years ago I, spent about $75 on a low power FM transmitter from CanaKit. I can get music anywhere in my house (or at close neighbors' houses) with a simple radio. CanaKit's transmitters cost from $20 up to $300 and have about a 150 meter range (about 500 feet).
Recently I added the "Remote" app to my iPhone. Now I can chose songs and playlists without needing to walk over to the computer. Obviously this will not work if you can't, or won't, use iTunes.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
(Disclaimer: I actually DID used to work for a place that set systems like this up, and have designed several myself as well) To determine what you need, a little bit more information is needed. Do you simply want on/off speakers in each room, all listening to the same thing? Or, are you looking for a system that lets you listen to different sources in each room? If you want different sources/songs/whatever in each room, you're actually looking for what is called a "multi-zone" system, which is where you start seeing the higher price tags. You mention you've already found the Russound products, which is actually quite a flexible system that gives you a lot of options. It looks like they recently came out with what they are calling their Collage system, which will pull music from any uPNP server on your network. In addition, the keypads have a FM reciever, and built-in intercom between keypads. It also uses HomePlug for communications between the various keypads and the media source, so once your individual keypads are connected to power, they will not require any additional wiring for data. The keypads also have a built in amplifier, so all you will need to add beyond the cost of each keypad and the HomePlug adapter for your server are speakers and wire from the keypad to the speakers. Russound has older systems that are quite cheaper, but not all of them are designed to handle the music being on a server like you currently have. It appears that Collage is specifically designed for this type of setup. The downside is that the cheapest price I could find for keypads was $549USD.
Airport Express base station with a decent set of computer speakers. Remote control via iPhone or iPod Touch.
The Rocketboost system at best buy is a wireless solution that will work for you: http://www.bestbuy.com/rocketboost gives a good summary of how it works.
You can add speakers and audio sources around your house, and the speakers have a "next source" button that lets you flip between your audio sources. It is modular, where you can buy as many units as you need and they all join together into one big network in your house. It isn't super-cheap, but it is cheaper than other products that are equally as flexible in how you set them up.
Disclaimer: I worked on this product (wrote the protocol stack for moving the audio data over the air), so you may want to take my recommendation with a grain of salt, but I am happy with how well the product turned out and I think it's pretty neat.
honestly, that's probably the simplest solution. add an airport express for each room you want and you have an instant wireless music network. add an iPod touch or an iPhone and you have a really excellent remote that lets you easily switch the music from one room to the next and multiples at the same time with no delay, as well as creating custom playlists on the fly and using itunes DJ and genius playlists. plus it can join your home wifi network and share printers, charge USB devices, or even extend your wifi network. to me, this is probably the most under-hyped apple product ever. it's made my life so much easier. i only have one, but i can just unplug it and move it to another room and have it hooked up somewhere else in seconds, and the remote app on the iPhone is worlds better than any other audio remote i've used.
I just replay the music in my head. This helps avoid copyright infringement suits.
Nay, you only think you are...
I say you are guilty of illegally creating a derivative work based upon copyrighted material.
You want a "distribution amplifier". These usually downmix to mono (seriously - You want mono for this purpose. Stereo coming at you from several direction at unbalanced distances will get annoying fast), and have a large number of channels (12-16 would work well for most houses, unless you really need it in every corner of every room including the attic, basement, and garage).
They don't cost all that much, which leaves you to spend your money on decent speakers. Depending on your home layout, you may want surface-mount, or recessed, or just cube-in-the-corner. As for wires - Keep in mind you either have signal, or power, or both going to them. So wireless doesn't really buy you all that much unless you absolutely positively cannot make discrete 1/8" holes hidden in the corner/wall/floor/ceiling/whatever. Personally, I consider speaker-wire easier to hide than power, so have chosen to just run an array of speaker wire through the basement up through small holes between the floorboards (old-style New England house with a decent gap between floorboards, so as close to invisible holes as you could ever want).
But yeah, you don't want a high-tech solution, you want an old-school distro amp. What you feed it with depends on what the wife will put up with, but you can find a huge number of digital car audio solutions that provide minimalist interfaces with decent functionality.
(subject)
maybe someday xbmc will have multizone audio support.
there is also a thread about this topic: http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?p=367551
I just use speaker wires to distribute the audio. I use a cheap stereo amp (~$150) and then a 4 pair impedence matching speaker distribution box w/ volume controls for each pair of speakers (~$150). The amp & distribution box are in the stereo rack with the rest of the stereo equipment. I have this amp connected to the 2nd room output of my receiver. I get the 5.1 in the main room + 4 pairs of speakers for other rooms. Wiring is very easy this way. Only benefit of the more expensive systems is that they let you control the volume in the room itself and some repeat the remote IR signals that let you control everything from any room. Still, CD/DVD players that use radio frequency (not IR) remotes can be found for $50 so why bother.
I've posted some more ideas to my site: http://www.diyaudioandvideo.com/
If you're happy to run wires:
Plug a small/cheap portable mixing desk into an Airport's audio-out: You'll need a desk with multiple audio-outs and a pre-amp (Mine cost $100 in New Zealand). You'll be able to produce a bunch of line-level outs from a single audio source.
Run an RCA pair cable to each room, plug them into various amplifiers, and you're away.
If you need wireless, well:
(I do something similar to this to drive a bunch of hardware from a DJ mixer: I end up needing 4-5 stereo pairs at line level).
You might want to check out Slim Devices (acquired by Logitech now) - http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/how-it-works/overview.html.
I'm usually not a big fan of all-in-one solutions from vendors like Logitech - but this is a no-brainer. If you have a NAS, you can hook it up, and control it from any web-enabled device (computer, android phone, iphone, netbook, maemo, ...) throughout the whole house over wireless. There are remote controls that work over a wireless network (Duet controller), and they also got speaker+player combo's.
The software is free, and available for Linux and Windows (no Mac I think?) - and it scans your library you point it to, indexes pretty neatly, and sports a good search, shows new music added ... ...).
Also - same system streams internet radio, and there are a lot of plugins and small apps available (alarm, multiroom vs. synced audio stream,
In my setup, I hooked 5 players up over cable in the rack closet, which are connected over audio cable to separate amplifiers. Speakers in the ceilings are connected to those amplifiers.
My rooms stay clean and uncluttered, and I control the whole thing through my HTC Hero phone, and the misses through her Iphone. The navigation and lookup on all devices (webinterface, phone apps, duet controller, Nokia 770) is pretty quick - given that I run an MP3 library of around 60Gb.
To pass the wife test - you can try and set up one of the products they have, and expand later on.
Total cost, without amps or speakers - 5 rooms, 5 different streams --- 5 players, 1 Duet controller - around 750Euros (around 1000$, approx).
However - if you'd only need one room to be connected to the NAS over wireless - you'd be set with about 400$, I guess (Duet controller + player).
When clients or friends are curious about the setup - I just give them the Duet controller or the Maemo tablet, put them in one of the rooms that are kitted out - and let them have a go at it. Even the n00bs or the laymen understand it without any info, and are quickly listening to their own stuff ...
Just my 2 cents ...
Knowledge first. Social contact later.
Its called an iPod.
You don't have to listen to someone elses choice in music, and they don't have to listen to yours.
You will no sooner get this installed than you will realize what a huge mistake this was. If/when teenagers arrive in the house you have a disaster in the making.
Music, like your reading material should be a personal issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The Sonos is the best deal out there and you can even control it now with an iPhone or an iPod touch.
I've got two systems setup (home and work):
Home:
A Mac Pro (could just as well use a Windows PC, but this is my home server) running iTunes. AirPort Express with AirTunes units in my bedroom, office and kitchen, with powered speakers attached to each. AppleTV (ehem - "enhanced", of course - http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/) in my lounge, hooked up to the TV and hi-fi. I use an iPhone or iPod Touch with the Remote app to control it, and it works great. You could get more functionality with a Sonos setup, but I already had the server and AppleTV, so it only cost me about $70 with eBay AirTunes units.
Office:
A VM running on our office server with Squeezebox Server, serving the tunes. A mixture of Squeezebox devices and PCs running the software player throughout the office. A whole load of apps and web interfaces to control the server, and the multiple streams coming out of it. With the exception of the Squeezebox hardware, it was free to setup, and you don't even really need those if you're happy to use spare PCs.
By and large, both arrangements work well - the aim was to have systems that we could just setup and forget about, and save the odd server reboot, that's what we've got.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I filled one of my houses with sound simply by using a 500 watt P.A. system with some 15", 12", horn, speakers purchased at a flea market for around $500.
Another house I put the same P.A. in the basement, eq'd it for low end and split the signal to my home stereo upstairs. Basement as a sub.
Neighbors will love ya. Bathe in sound.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Just move into a studio apartment. Problem solved.
you might work something out with ampache using localplay.
It does have downsides. The magic peering technology seems complicated and is not very well documented (at least when I was reading about it). I don't think you can use it purely wirelessly, I think at least one device needs a cat5 network connection. I think it then NATs all the other devices over an 802.11 network. It's also on the pricey end of things, although for a couple rooms it is not thousands of dollars.
They also have new models and capabilities pretty regularly so the above may already be out of date. Check it out, though.
I've also heard good things about Squeezebox, but it didn't appeal to me for several reasons that I forget.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Just broadcast it on FM. You can easily set up a lot of radio stations multiple ways.
1. Buy some 0.5W (thats 1km) stereo mini Radio Station for $15 on ebay and hook it to:
A. 4GB mp3 player $10. Download one flavour of music here. Repeat, and leave connected to the USB port.
or
B. One of many PCI or USB soundcards on your PCs and stream from Muziic, TubeRadio.fm, Grooveshark and Pandora(Only US) on some.
2. Get some FM radios. Both table, wearable and rack will work.
3. Enjoy
This may sound simple and low tech, but a) it is cheap, b) has a familiar user interface (tune knob)
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I have 3 airport express', one in the bedroom, one in the dining room, and the other in the kitchen. They all work wonderfully and it has replaced our stereo to the point where we simply don't use anything else. That was great, but the thing that kicked it into overdrive was the remote control app; with the iphone or ipod touch, I can control everything wherever I am. Absolutely brilliant setup!
I assume there are other setups like this, but I don't know of them.
http://www.auraliti.com/
amp with volume control needed and speakers
-=[ place
I boosted mine so high I'm picking up Free Bird from my teethe. Is that bad?
having your music on nas is a waste of electricity but if you insist on having it as part of your solution, get Playstation 3 for every room. As long as your nas supports DLNA, you should be able to stream any videos or music to it/them.
And you don't have to buy brand new playstations - there a lot of them available used or with broken bluray drive - since you don't need the drive for streaming or updating firmware, any ps3 that's not completely fried will do. What's good about ps3 is that you can get a bluetooth remote control - uses radio waves instead of infrared - works through walls. You can also stream content from PC to PS3 using free software - http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/
What about Speakers and a few Airport Express stations?
This makes sense in an office, or a dental clinic... but I don't understand why would someone want this in a house. What's next? a coffee machine in every room? Multiroom toilets? I think an iPod would do what you need, you can even get two iPods, one for you and another for your wife, she can listen to something else even in the same room!
My other signature is a car
...with a range of 20-30m or so. One that lets you tune the frequency within a nice large range. Provided it's legal where you live. Then all you need in each room is a standard radio to receive it. If you already have one, total cost is the purchase and running cost of the transmitter. Won't give you optimal quality but it's cheap.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Just turn the volume on the equipment in the living room up to 11. Unless your house is huge, that should cover all the rooms.
Pedant.
I've setup an 8 speaker multiroom audio system using a 12V switch mode power supply, 1F capacitor, 2x 4 channel car audio amplifiers and 8 ceiling speakers. I feed the car amps using two 4 channel sound cards in a PC and run MPD. For wire I used ordinary house lighting wire ( 1.5 mm2 2C+E ). I was going to use pulseaudio but it's very glitchy ( more glitches than music ) over a wireless network. I am considering changing out the PC and connecting the amps to something else. The electricity bill from having a PC constantly on is expensive. I would like to get some sort of embedded, i.e. 5W or less computer, but finding one with sufficient outputs is difficult.
I bought everything on ebay ( except for the 12V supply ). Car amps ~90AU ea, speakers ( all 8 ) ~200AU. Roll (100m) wire ~80AU. 12V supply ~80AU. Cap ~70AU
The sound quality is excellent.
Tune the radio in each room to the same station.
Duh.
You can broadcast on your own low-power station if you want to listen to your own CDs, MP3's, etc.
In the upcomming months plenty of companies will start offering DLNA DMR devices (https://coherence.beebits.net/wiki/MediaRenderer).
You can stream the music from your NAS directly to this devices, as long as you have the software (ushare, twonkymedia, windows 7 has it as 'Play To').
There are not many devices available as of now, but they will be in the next few months.
DMR software: foobar2000 (need a plugin), rythmbox (needs a plugin)
Just an idea, you can google the rest.
Mu
The idea is genial per se, also seen the large number of 'vintage' fm receivers, easyness of finding them... et voila` the all house has sound. But:
1) Is this legal?
2) Is it legal when it's "adjusted to boost the range beyond what the FCC allows"
3) Any idea if this is possible anywhere else than in America without breaking the law? European countries for example?
Thinking of average european city density I can already figure the neighbours either listening or complaining because their favourite station is disturbed by another (unallowed) signal?
Otherwise one could think of some unlicensed space (not 2.4G please, too crowded already!), but not sure is there's any, and it strongly depends on which country you are in.
This is the technical way to make it happen, but I use MPD and have pulseaudio outputs throughout the house, connected through my network. Enable output, disable output, etc.. or open them all and have a out of sync symphony :)
I built a cheap FM transmitter from a hobby kit and use existing FM receivers in my house to listen (and have a $5 thrift store boom box to go outside).
Maybe you could clarify your requirements. You say "something which requires a separate amp, speakers and PC in each room and requires a keyboard to control is right out." Which of those things do you have to avoid? You certainly can't avoid speakers. When you say you don't want an amp, do you mean you don't want any amp at all, or you just don't want one the size of a traditional stereo amp? If you don't want any amp at all, then you're going to have to run speaker cables around the house, and that's that. When you say you don't want a separate amp, speakers, and PC in each room, do you really mean you just don't want a PC in each room? What kind of audio quality do you need? If all you want is the ability to play some tunes while you're cleaning the bathroom, then a portable music player would probably do the job.
Find free books.
Check out Airfoil and Airfoil speakers
Sonos is awesome if you have the cash to spend - it even has a pandora interface!
I recommend the soundbridge http://soundbridge.roku.com/soundbridge/index.php for the working middle class.
And it definitely has that audiophile look to it.
I'd unhesitatingly recommend sonos. Its one of the few electronic products that I own that I am completely satisfied with. It should pass the wife test - the controller is very pleasant to use (though controlling it with the iphone is pretty nice as well), and its hassle free. You don't need to do anything on the computer at all to use it or even to set it up. They have 3 solutions for audio output - a bare module which outputs line-level audio and so requires an amplifier + speakers, a module with a built in amplifier (so just hook it up to speakers), and a system similar to an ipod dock which includes speakers. The whole house control is excellent, allowing you to arbitrarily link any units together for synchronized audio, or play differnet audio on any unit. There integration with internet streaming is excellent, and their rhapsody implementation is particularly good - songs streamed from rhapsody are usable in playlists as if they were on your local nas. You get a free rhapsody streaming demo account with it, and chance are after it expires, you're going to end up subscribing.
You could always go for the E-Mu Pipeline transceiver. I use them to connect audio systems in different rooms. The living room is treated as the source, and all other rooms are receivers. There is no noticeable delay (only 5ms or 10ms, depending on how you have them configured), and it's just like having a wire run between the rooms. They cost about $100 each but they really do work well, and couldn't be much simpler.
Assuming that each of the rooms is a proper room with proper walls and a proper door, stereo bleed shouldn't be a problem. But perhaps the submitter should have clarified whether "ambience throughout the house", or "easy access to music from several scattered locations" was the goal.
I have one of the old Sirius Sportsters with a built in FM transmitter and it works around my entire house. In fact, it works in the yard and even the neighbors house and I have five acres. I seem to remember getting a letter in the mail from Sirius referencing some FCC issues so they must have got in trouble with that model ;)
I know broadcasting Sirius around your house is not your goal but I do know that using a decently powered FM transmitter is very convenient for listening to a specific source of music around the house, in the garage or out at the pool.
Another option is a set of powered speakers plugged into a cheap HP mini or Asus netbook running Windows or Ubuntu and pulling songs from the NAS. You would have music anywhere you get a wireless signal and a small cheap second laptop for other uses like Hulu or video or doing basically anything else you can use a netbook for all for about $300 + the cost of speakers of your choice.
I bought an Apple Airport Express a while back, and this is mainly what I use it for. iTunes can sent its output to one or multiple of them. You plug it in, and plug the speakers into it. It's much smaller and cheaper than a PC (though you need to configure it from the computer).
The negative side is that you have to be using iTunes - or hack together something else to control it. (There are some open source tools that can send audio to it, but...)
I personally use CasaTune, http://www.casatunes.com.
Add me to the list of folks who wholeheartedly recommend the Logitech Squeezebox coupled with a decent FM transmitter. You can then have your mp3's or any Internet radio station anywhere you're willing to put an FM radio. If your living room amp doesn't include an FM tuner, simply run the Squeezebox output to an aux input and then feed the tape rec out to the FM transmitter. I do it this way and it works beautifully. My FM transmitter is a Ramsay kit that came pre-assembled.
If installing an amp and speakers in each room is out of the question, then perhaps the best solution is a hardware mod to your existing amp so the volume goes to 11. That way you'll be able to hear it all over your house, and as a bonus, you can extend it to your neighbours' houses at no additional cost.
A few years ago I installed and setup one of these http://www.linearcorp.com/intercom_music_speakers.php M&S systems, which is now owned by Linear Corp. It uses Cat 5 cable which had been run before my installs. Great sound, cool features, lots of options http://www.linearcorp.com/communications.php, maybe a bit pricey...
Anyone have any experience with these?
I have a pretty decent "wander area" between my headset and the cellphone or computer before voice quality degrades. I haven't tried it with music yet but I'm grabbing an inexpensive receiver that will be plugging into my stereo head unit
By the time it arrives this thread will probably be a bit dead (where I live delivery takes a few weeks), but can anyone else comment on bluetooth audio transmission for music?
Get a divorce
Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom - pick any two.
Some day I hope someone will invent a music player small enough to carry in your pocket...
Sonos = cheese when you factor in cost, flexibility, freedom. Squeezecenter runs on Windows, Mac, Linux. Web interface. Internet radio. Quite affordable. Very flexible. They're so damn good that most people don't own just one. I have four at home and two at work. One is the BoomBox which is perfect for the kitchen or other small rooms. The newest models have touchscreens which I'd love to get my hands on (literally too!!). You can keep a setup small and the sound big when you pair a Squeezebox with a T-amp and a nice set of bookshelf speakers. You could buy a unit with a speaker built in. You can even get a unit without a display and a pretty remote.
And flexibility in Squeezecenter is unmatched! You can stream FLAC, MP3, OGG, WAV, AAC, or darn near anything else and choose what to transcode and where to do it, server or client side!
Seriously, Sonos can even come close?
I bought my first home about a year ago, and even before I moved in I installed a whole-house audio system. I didn't put in the expensive source-selection room controls, but I did install per-room volume controls and in-ceiling speakers in each main room. I have home-run speaker cables to the same spot where my network cables go and an input cable that runs to where I have my receiver in the living room. The speaker distribution panel I have actually has two inputs and per-output switching, so I could send an alternate audio source to some of the rooms.
My receiver has dual outputs (5.1 plus a separate stereo output), which is important since it can be easy to run at too low an impedance if you have multiple pairs of speakers. This arrangement allows me to send the main channels of a movie or the like everywhere in the house, in case somebody goes to the bathroom or to get popcorn.
I purchased my cable and wall plates from Monoprice, and my speakers, volume controls, and the distribution unit were from Outdoor Speaker Depot. I was able to do stereo audio to four rooms, with volume in each room, for a little under $500 in materials.
It's called a cable. Look into it.
Seriously, they come 50 foot lengths with plugs already on them, or add the plugs later. "Y" and male/female adapters are cheap and so are remote volume controls. Goes under floors and inside walls to pass wife test.
Happy pulling...
I've been looking for a solution to this for many years, via HTPC-enabled system. When Apple released the Iphone/Itouch "Remote" application, it solved all my needs. It brings up all your Itunes library, including album art, onto any PC, Iphone or Itouch. The Itunes library will play in any room(s) where you place a $99 Apple Wifi router. The router connects to any powered speaker or receiver system. I have 3 of them around the house, including outdoors. You turn each router music source off or on via any PC, Iphone or Itouch. In effect, this is all free, since I needed 3 wifi access points to cover my house/property anyway.
"variable potentiometer" is redundant. A potentiometer is by definition 'variable'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer
Get a portable device with a screen on it.
Use iPhone/iPod Touch Remote or VNC.
Then, buy a transmitter from here:
http://www.edmdesign.com/
Enjoy your music throughout your house and property.
Kriston
I think what he is getting at is audio amplifier/matrixes. These are devices which switch a source (i.e. mp3 player or jukebox) to one or many rooms. Right now I use squeezecenter as the most used source, plugged into a Russound. I have had trouble with the best control mechanism. You need a simple control which controls BOTH the source AND the amplifier/matrix. Russound and others have panels for each room. I have tried them, have them all over my house in fact. However, we dont use them. They can control the amplifier, but getting to them to control the source is a nightmare.
SO, using an itouch is the easiest. IPeng will control squeezecenter, and the Russound can be controlled serially through a number of programs, the easiest I have found i Cinemar connected to a GC-100.
This said, it is definitely not a bullet proof answer, but it will get to the wife simplicity level using the itouch as the front end.
Right now, the easiest for "simple to use" is to use an insteon switch for a light, connected to an ISY controller. Set up doubletap for on and off and have it control the squeezecenter and amplifier. In our case it turns on whole house NPR. There is no controlling it, other than on or off. If Wife wants to get into more detail, well, then she has to use a different controller like the itouch, or web browser.
You need to be a little more specific. Forget about any stupid audiophile ideas. Being an audiophile is a compulsive disease. I have it.
You probably want multi-room audio because you anticipate moving around and listening to music, so while sound quality is important, your probably not going to notice every little detail or blemish. Considering the wife factor, how attractive does this system need to be? Do your speakers need to be built in? Do you have an area in your home where you can conspicuously store a lot of equipment? Lastly, how much control do you need? Do you need to have the ability to run several streams of audio at the same time? Does the system need to interface with AV equipment in individual rooms? If you're handy, you can find reasonable in-ceiling or in-wall speakers, wall volume controls, and amplifiers for not a ton of money (though don't count on spending less than a few hundred dollars), and install those yourself. If you're in a one story home, that's definitely the way to go. Go get some good used computers. Use one per audio stream, and use iPod touches or iPhones for remotes. The interface is great. Also, you're not investing in anything that isn't pretty easily upgradable. If you do a good job on you're installation, you're speakers will add value to you're home.
Sonos is the answer. The problem with all of the lower priced squeezebox-style systems is that they save money on components by not having the decoding hardware inside of them. That is the reason that even with a stock-standard samba share, you STILL need to install their "server software" on the system you store your music on.
In reality the "server software" is actually doing some or all of the transcoding of the music format because the units themselves don't have the horsepower to do it.
The sonos systems, OTOH, have the necessary horsepower, so you can just point them at your A/UX based fileserver (or whatever else you want to point them at) and say "just work".
I've had a 5-zone sonos system for 4+ years now and could not be happier.
A "music box" in the basement runs a custom (and very bad) web app which we use as a media player of sorts. That box is connected to a stereo. The stereo outputs to a custom switch box, which has an AVR that talks to the music PC over serial. Using that switch box, from the web app we can switch four sets of speakers on and off. We have speakers in the living room, on the back patio, in the garage and in the basement. It sounds messy, but it works surprisingly well.
If you have cat5 in place (or the means to run it), A-Bus is probably the most cost-effective strategy for whole-house audio. It's not as sexy as something like ZonAudio, but the hardware components are dirt cheap.
Here's the basic network topology of A-Bus. You feed the left and right audio to a box that's basically a balun. It sends the audio to the A-Bus hub on two pairs of cat5... one pair for left, one pair for right. At the hub, it distributes the source to typically 2 or 4 destinations, and outputs ~24v (48v?) on the remaining pair or two (somehow, it relays remote control signals back... I'm not sure offhand whether it uses one pair for power, and one pair for the remote/control backchannel, or whether it multiplexes it on top of the power wires). In any case, from the hub, the cat5 runs to the keypad-amp. Usually you'd put this someplace convenient, like next to a light switch. The keypad contains a digital amp that draws power from the cat5. A simple keypad has little more than a volume control and power button. The next level up adds a remote control sensor. The highest-end ones can handle 4 sources, and I believe Russound's has a feature that enables you to shut down the entire system from any keypad.
The speakers themselves connect to the keypad-amp. Additionally, you can run additional speaker wires off the keypad to connect a powered subwoofer and/or a local audio source (like the cable box). Anytime an audio signal is present on the local input, it overrides whatever's being sent by the hub.
A-Bus is far from perfect. Because it only draws power from the cat5, and draws only half the max allowed by (US) law, you can only get ~5-11 watts RMS per keypad. IMHO, they should have an option to put a typical wall-wart coaxial socket on the local input box and use it to power a beefier amp. Or, if you have 16/4 installed alongside the cat5 in a home run, they could repurpose the 16/4 to carry power (actually, I think Russound did something more or less like that with their new non-ABus liene)
If you have an amp and speakers in the room already, and just need to distribute the raw preamp-level audio, just use cat5 and baluns.
For the record, I researched this pretty heavily ~2-3 years ago. From what I remember, the big problem the digital alternatives to A-Bus had was timing. In theory, there's no reason why you couldn't use PoE to drive speakers directly from their own local amp connected via cat5, but unless you give it its own dedicated wires and use noncompressed audio streamed via UDP, you end up with serious timing problems (ie, speakers in two adjacent rooms might be 50-100ms off from each other. It's kind of like the problem lots of people now have with digital TV and adjacent rooms... unless the two TVs are absolutely identical, they won't decode the same signal at exactly the same rate, and the two rooms can be up to a few seconds ahead of or behind each other.
I have used this thing with wifi for years, and it works great.
http://soundbridge.roku.com/soundbridge/index.php
In my last house I installed a russound 4-room 4-zone A-bus system. The raw kit (distribution hub, control panels and local source overrides) was $600. The system has a hub from which you run cat5 (carrying power & audio) to the control panels and then speaker wire in the walls to the in wall speakers. The only drawback was a limit of 4 amps to the speakers unless you bought (and wired in power for) an inline amplifier.
1) no woman reading slashdot (I'm male, but still, it is veeery long ago that I didn't hear something so reactionary...haha..."the wife test"...incredible)
2a) how old are you guys? 16? are you still fixed in the penis age?
else
2b) you are older and married, but you see your wife doing her things and you can only imagine that she comes from another planet. You cannot understand why she would never have one amplifier per room, or everything full of computers (with command-line linux, of course). I.e. you married someone you have nothing in common with.
3) this situation is so amazingly common and extended, that none of you even detect anything strange in the sentence "the wife test"!! my god..
PS: Just for fun, in gypsy language (at least in spanish gypsies) there is something called "the handkerchief test". It is done when a young gypsy girl is to married to a gypsy guy, and consists in the elder women going with the girl to a room, opening her legs, and sticking the handkerchief into her pussy. If it gets bled, she's virgin. Otherwise she's a "used product" and cannot get married.
Chances are that someone trying to do this on a small budget doesn't have sound proof rooms and high-end speakers. Just a thought. They might be doing good to have additional insulation in the rooms, they may not even have that.
I get annoyed with stereo bleed in my house due to this. For the record, just because people are in the tech industry doesn't mean we have nicely built homes. Most don't even own a home. A lot of us are fairly poor and try to do cool things scrounging through others' discarded "crap".
http://jackflapb.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/howto-bluetooth-multi-room-sound-system-in-ubuntu/
get a walkman, a wogbox or a proper stereo an mount it on a cart.
Hire a Mexican to follow you around the house with a boom box.
One up for iTunes/Airtunes. If you only want one song playing in multiple rooms and are happy to control it via a PC/iPhone, this seriously is a great solution for next to nothing.
How about plugging an old xbox (what? $20 per unit these days?), installing xbmc (another $20 for softmod equipment), and then using them to drive powered speakers ($no idea). You can then use the living room one to generate music for the existing amp, and upgrade amps in other rooms where you want improved quality. Of course, without a TV you'd have to control the xboxs with another device. I recommend any web browser or even one of the iPhone/iPod touch based interfaces available.
as stated in other posts an fm transmitter is the way to go. check in the automotive electronic accesseries section.you'll need the xmitter,and a power adapter.(12 volt input to 3 volts for the xmitter-typical) instead get a power adapter for home 120 or 220 volt to the xmitters power requirment. plug in to line out or headphone jack.there you go. first seen them here in the states when people coupled them to there single walkmen like cd players to listen to there cd's in cars without cd radios. the ones i've seen advertised for home use may have more xmitting power but are way overpriced. unless you have a large home the ones made for automotive use are fine. i have 2 xmitter regards.
Just bring your laptop and small but great sounding portable speakers into whatever room you want to listen to music in?
That's what we have done for oh, 10 years? Works fine...
Dunno why people always have to over-complicate problems.
I haven't looked at all the options listed here, but they all seem pretty geeky. What's wrong with just running speaker wire through the walls? Having to walk twenty feet to change what's playing doesn't seem like much of a hardship to me.
I have my Apple TV connected to my tv and a panasonic, PT-sc760, surround system. The Panasonic system has a wireless receiver, SH-FX85 that I have in the kitchen. I can listen to my iTunes library or the ballgame in the kitchen. The only downside is that I have to have the tv on and the living room setup turned on to listen in the kitchen. Overall though, it's a relatively inexpensive way to get sound in multiple rooms and the functionality I want (music and video through itunes).
Hi, I'm going to get a LogiTech Squeezebox Touch when it gets available. For multiroom, you can combine it with the other squeezebox models, if you like (e.g., the 'boom' with builtin speakers). cheers jzimmer
I can also vouch for the CCrane FM "Whole House" transmitter. Works great for us since we already have a decent radio in every room anyway. As it costs only ~$80US its really on the cheap side, requires no extra wiring and can be set up to use ANY FM band frequency (Not just 2-5 different preset frequency like most whole-house transmitter).
Their website also tracks signal strength for most US & Europe stations so it's easy to find a frequency "Hole" to transmit to.
A good year ago there was this _awesome_ tech demo of video & audio that followed you around the house, remotes which worked in 3D, lighting that went off when you left the house etc etc etc...
I have been looking for this stuff for ages, but as I can't seem to remember the name, I have been unable to find it again... Any help?
When I was a lad we didn't have any of your fancy pants electronics. If we wanted cheap multiroom audio we tore down the drywall.
purchase used pcs from auctions, tagsales, craigslist or your local equivalent. preferably horizontal workstations running xp ($30 each). they fit well under receivers. they will wreak havoc with analog am but the world is migrating to digital ota radio so this problem is receding. pick up a small amp and speakers from same (again some $30). repeat per room. finally network them with either a wi-fi based router or simply clone your media onto outboard drives. either way you can do each room for under $200 and that's with no audio equipment in those rooms now. in rooms that already have systems this solution will be much cheaper. alternately you can pick up western digital's media player. it's a stand alone codec box that streams both music and movies from outboard storage and goes for around $100. more expensive but you get your hd-tv along with your tunes. plays downloaded content well. you know, for all those romantic hi-def linux how-tos wives clamor for on friday nights. makes them purr like a penguin.
- js.
We have 5 Apple Airport Express Basestations and our Macs, one AE is connected to the main WiFi-Router by Ethernet and acts as roaming Base. We do use our iPhones as remote and stream from our MacBooks. Works flawlessly, the only thing missing is a way to tune the accoustical delay in the connecting rooms, but that's just nitpicking.
There are even free tools to stream music to the AE but since we really like iTunes and have a lot of Music in it, I didn't really try them.
I'm using the multiroom audio system from HTD and it works quite well. Much less expensive than the other similar products and works well. The whole setup was about $2000 USD, a little pricey, but compared to the other products out there it looks really cheap. The control pads pass IR back to the base so you can control the devices at the head end, you can also wire sources from the control pads. I plug an iPod into a control panel and start it, then any room in the house can listen to it.
The downside is it's all hardwired, so you need to be able to get wires to the proper locations. The control pads need Cat5, speaker wires go from the amp to the speakers directly. The system can send up to 8 sources to 6 zones. Each zone can choose what source it wants to listen to.
I've seen wireless and powerline based systems, but the reviews online didn't seem very good. The HTD system works very well for me. I'm also using their in-ceiling speakers and they sound quite good.
Don't assume.
I have a nice living room stereo. It's useless when I'm cooking, because the speakers are pointed the wrong way, and ambient noise of the onions hitting hot oil. It's also useless in my bedroom-- where I do most of my programming, because the speakers are pointed the wrong way, and there's a wall and a door in between.It would be nice if I could listen to a single repository of music throughout my small home, regardless of what room I need to be in. If I ever put something like that in, I'll probably end up with Apple airports.
Don't confuse that need for "ambient music everywhere".
Sony Ericsson has a BT based system, typically you use your mobile phone as the media server, but with bluetooth in your home computer, by default or with a $20 dongle you have choose to place the audio in any room.
The MBR-100 is for connection to your audio system,
MBS-100 or MBS-200 is portable speakers with buit in battery and connects wirelessly to phone/computer
You have use 2 MBS-200 together and thus you get left and right in each, with a very powerful sound. MBS-400 is a economy pack with both in one.
They have also an MS500 which is even cheaper and more portable than the others. MBS-200 is around $40.
I have most of these components and they solves the music in every room problem for me, and you can also bring them with you.
Surely you have a few old boomboxes laying around?
Check out this post, should be an... inpromptu solution.
http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2007/07/stupid-wifi-speaker-tricks.html
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
I can confirm that the remote application running on either my wife's iPhone or on an iPod touch passes the wife test. My wife loves to show off to her friends how she can now access her extensive music collection. All the systems I looked at had steep learning curves for operation. My wife picked up the remote app and within a few days was happily choosing her own music.
The problem with all of the lower priced squeezebox-style systems is that they save money on components by not having the decoding hardware inside of them.
Absolutely incorrect! The Squeeze units decode most common formats in hardware--e.g., MP3 and FLAC. One advantage of the server-based format is that the server can transcode unsupported formats or bitrates, etc., so that you can play any format on them if need be.
I have a Squeezebox Duet. Beyond easy to set up. Runs on my dinky little linux server that's connected to a NAS. I love the remote (you can ssh into it!) and the wife is 100% on board.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
now you're got music in an infinite number of rooms
1. I already had a good computer with great audio as part of the recording studio in my basement.
2. The studio's firewire audio interface outputs to an 8-channel Behringer headphone distribution amp (and another headphone amp for actual headphones).
3. Nearly every room in the house already had a stereo or computer sound system.
4. I bought long cheap headphone extension cables from yourcablestore.com. Most were 25 to 100 feet long and my total was under $100.
5. I ran the cables from the headphone distribution amp to each room's sound system. Since computer speaker systems typically use 1/8" stereo headphone connectors, it all plugged together without any adaptation.
6. Now when Pandora is playing in the studio, any room of the house can choose that source (the wire from the studio) and be on the house "channel."
7. Using a netbook, I can RDP to the studio computer and control the music wirelessly. I also added an RF remote (ATI Remote Wonder) so I can use that to skip/pause songs in Winamp all over the house.
This system works well for us. There aren't the latency issues you find in network-based distribution, so all the rooms are in sync. Maybe not in perfect phase, but I can't tell while roaming around cleaning. I've played with wiring in different sources, so for example we can listen to the Satellite or an ipod upstairs on the desk. I've ran video out to the projector in the theater so one wall of the house can enjoy milkdrop visualizations. All fun geeky ways to pass the time, but ultimately it's a fairly simple system that even the less geeky inhabitants can use.
It's fun to crank the whole place up at once; many watts of power and countless speakers at my command!
Wireless (digital 900Mhz) speakers from Cables Unlimited (available at Newegg) are simple and work well enough to satisfy many listeners. I use 4 of them with a server running the Squeezebox Server (free) and the squeezeslave application to get whole house audio.
(redundant bit) As someone else has pointed out, this is incorrect - the Squeezebox players decode FLAC, MP3 etc. directly from the stream.
(non-redundant bit) And the Squeezebox Server is a very useful central controller for setting up plugins, playlists etc.
I guess the Sonos players can also synch to each other tightly so that playing the same thing in multiple rooms works nicely? The physical Squeezebox players do, but the version you might run on a PC (Squeezeslave) doesn't as far as I know.
And if you're paying in GBP, you'll probably be interested in the BBC iPlayer plugin which is very convenient. No neat Spotify integration yet but it's on the cards.
With some 1/4" to 3.5 mm adapters and 3.5 mm cable, you can run a signal to 4 PC speaker systems. The individual gain controls for each line out allow you to compensate for the specific loss in each line due to varying cable lengths.
If you buy the right speaker systems, they could also have local aux in jacks in case you want to listen to an ipod or something. You might want to check whether it replaces or is layered onto the main input, though.
If you happen to have a TV around, then your best option would be a cheap Media LAN client like the Zyxel DMA-1000 (100 Euros - not in any way afiliated - just a happy customer). There are also Wireless options and you can play from USB sick oder drive.
This works pretty well.
I've got an "AirPort Express" in 3 rooms. They just plug into the mains. A 3.5mm lead connects to your hifi.
The music is on a hard drive plugged into an inexpensive computer.
A second hand first-gen iPod touch acts as a wi-fi remote control, with the free 'Remote' app.
With the iPod, finding music to play is dead easy. And I can use it to control which rooms it plays in.
Assuming the original poster already has a computer, the costs would be:
AirPort Express, £79. (multiply cost by number required) http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB321B/A/AirPort-Express-AirTunes
iPod touch (refurb) £119 http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FB528BT/A
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I use a very inexpensive device known as the radio.
I can control the volume in every room - plus have a wide variety of musical choices. One room can be listening to rock, another country, another pop - tec.
Works great!
I choosed Russound since it does one thing and does it fairly well. The biggest limitation is probably that it is limited to 6 amplified zones; another one beeing that the unit comes up front with a 12 channel amplifier and a corresponding power consumption. The future solution I see in a industry standard real-time bus for all AV equipment; think about the technology to replace HDMI but able to distribute AV to a number of room at distances up to some 100 meters. Biggest technical hurdle would be synchronization. Conventional networking technologies from the PC Lan space (Ethernet, Bluetooth) is not up for the task since they rely on buffering and for this application syncronization is an absolute must.
I haven't purchased any of these yet, but I've been wondering the same thing as you, and the E-MU Systems Pipeline looks really interesting.
Here is a fairly cheap solution
1 - Carvin DCM 1204 Amp (4 channels, 300 watts a channel)
16 - Monoprice 8" in ceiling speakers (Four per channel, 2 groups in series of 2 parallel speakers (8 ohm load)
1 - Onkyo tx-607
7 - Monoprice 8" in-ceiling speakers.
About $2000 with 12awg speaker wire.
I have a split level house and a pool in the back yard. I ran Coaxial Cable (with RCA ends) from my computer to my coat closet where the Carvin Amp is located (along with a 20 amp outlet) so I drive the system with mostly pandora, but there is no reason an ipod or such could drive it. It powers 4 zones (Upstairs, Kitchen/Dining Room, Basement, and outside) all with plenty of power. It is only a single source system, but I can see much of a need driving different rooms with different music. The onkyo is in my Home Theater on my main level. It also has coax run from it to the Carvin so I can have both system driven by the computer at the same time. I find it works very well, the in-ceiling speakers are very wife approved and are a decent trade off. My friends all like the system and it is very nice to have music through out the house for cleaning, parties, etc...
You want to reproduce music in rooms where there is no amp or speakers, without putting in amp or speakers..... What about surfing the net using trees? I think this defies logic and physics. For every zone, you need an amp and speakers.
My solution: $20
- 1x second-hand 2GB MP3 player (free to me, but may cost up to $20 new)
- 1x pair of headphones that I already owned
The best part is that I can even go OUTSIDE with it, and the music is still crystal clear everywhere I go. Better yet, each person occupying the house can have their own multiroom audio configuration operating at the same time with no interference. I listen to music, podcasts, radio stations, whatever, and can even take the whole experience with me when I travel.
Man, they should have invented this DECADES ago.
$50 at radio shack. If you already have phone lines you can use them. Replace the rj11s with rca. Voila! Then just get some amplified computer speakers and plug them in.
Headphones and an Ipod. It'll work anywhere in the house and automatically roams with you.
Seriously though I've got a friend who put Cat-6 cables and network ports in his house. He has made an audio to network cable and uses it to run audio through the network cables in his house...
if you don't use land lines, already existing telephone lines can be used to send audio to almost any room in your house and since most houses are wired for two phones you generally can get stereo sound.
An issue with using these lines is noise, mostly from AC so a really nasty 60 hz hum. So how do the phone company and power companies share?
they use differentially encoded signals of course. Voltage spikes in the positive side of the signal are also negative in the negative side (overly simplified but you get the point). So when you put both sides of the signal into an op amp or transformer (almost all amplifiers perform this operation on the input signal) you get a nice clean signal. My brother and I used this technique to put audio throughout his house, for about $50 for 5 rooms. The end server was just a computer connected to the net running an audio server or something similar to control what is played. The remotes were then really opened. it could be a psp, nintendo wii, ps3, laptop, smart phone, or pda.
http://www.thatcorp.com/1570_Low-Noise_Differential_Audio_Preamplifier_IC.html
You can't have a delay of even a few milliseconds without screwing up the phase. Simplified, when the speaker cone goes "out" in one room, you need the speaker cone to go "out" in the other room - pressure up everywhere - if you screw up and one is delayed, then one will push, the other will pull, cancelling out between them, massively screwing up the sound in any area where you are exposed to more than one speaker...
If you think anything involving a network and a sound card is going to have sub millisecond latency, you are more optimistic than I would be...
Simple solution: Amplifiers, like a 4 channel (A speakers B speakers) for each 2 rooms. Line level wires from the source. Control it at the source. Copper. RCA plugs. Cheap, easy.
I guess turning up the volume is out of the question? :)
Running multi-room audio can be challenging. Some things to consider... a typical amplifier will only work at 8 or 4 ohms per channel. This means you can only run 1 or 2 speakers on each channel before you run into trouble and put too much load on your amplifier. That being said, consider a 70v amplifier and speakers. A 70v system allows you to run multiple speakers from one amplifier and select the speaker wattage at the speaker. you still need to do the math to make sure you don't go over the amplifiers rating, but this is how restaurants and grocery stores do it. Since the feed signal is always at 70v, the speakers can be run in series. The speakers have a small transformer on them to select the wattage for each one. You can also get a volume control that does the same thing. One thing to note, Audio quality can suffer with a 70v system, but the trade off is long speaker runs in series and wattage selectable speakers. TOA makes a good 70v amplifier as does Peavey. Here is a site to get you started... http://www.allprosound.com/catalog/viewproducts~m~Amplifiers~s~70-Volt-Power-Amplifiers~fsubcatid~9.htm
I had a similar situation in my basement. I had one amp and multiple speakers of the same impedance. But they were different sizes and wattages. What did not help me was that all my rooms varied in size. I was streaming my audio from my PC upstairs using a Linksys media adapter and car head rest display that I rigged up on my rack. (actually looks pretty sweet)
But the problem was trying to get all rooms to be the right volume; the bigger rooms needed to be louder and the smaller rooms needed to be lower. So what I ended up doing was daisy chaining my pre-amps together using the tape deck input / outputs So that I could have all the pre-amps play a single source and then used each individual volume knob to adjust the sound in each area. Works really well and the great part is that I only have a need for one big stack of equipment which hides inside a computer rack in the corner with a nice plexi-glass front door. Just and idea if you need a way to hide things. Also the vented shelves help with removing the heat from the cabinet.
If you are not looking for full sound quality and more of like a back ground music; you could just purchase a few sets of small indoor /outdoor speakers and chain them all together and just run speaker wire through out the house. Just make sure that you don't go under the minimum impedance. If you receiver is 8 ohms as you are wiring in series the ohm load will continue to increase. But at some point your amp will not be able to put out enough sound as the resistance goes up. What ever you do; do not wire in parallel because this would drops the ohm load down below the minimum tolerance and this is when you can blow up the amplifier. You may be able to do a combination of series and parallel but you would need to do some serious homework.
http://www.termpro.com/articles/spkrz.html
That link will explain further. I however like the idea of separate amps and different size speakers based on the size of the room I am filling. But everyone has different ideas of what they want.
Good luck!
Ed
Get Sonos.
There are amped and un-amped versions. Use their branded remote or the Desktop/iPhone/iPod app. 100% recommend.
Here is a light info PDF http://hometheater4you.com/sonos.pdf -- or go to the website.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
So, honestly, why not just use a Mac Mini or an inexpensive Mac laptop with iTunes? The audio quality is excellent, it's easy-to-use, and you have a more appliance-like experience with the remote control. The new versions of iTunes support some form of magic synchronization, so you can effectively have a distributed backup system as well.
No, I will not work for your startup
It definitely is a luxury system (and probably not within the OP's budget), but it has some refinements that really make a difference:
1. When you have multiple units, the entire network acts as a single, seamless system. You can play different music on each unit, or a tie group of units into a "zone" that plays the same music (with centrally controlled volume level), with the music perfectly in sync between units (this is technically quite difficult to do). I'm not aware of any other system that does this...
2. The Sonos units form a wireless mesh network, so you don't have to have perfect wireless coverage everywhere you put a unit, as long as each unit is within range of another. This is very helpful in the large houses of the people who can afford these things. One unit does need to be hardwired.
3. The remote is very well done. Having an iPhone remote is great if everyone in the house carries one, but that's rarely the case.
4. It plays very well with NASs. It can read your iTunes playlists, and because there's no local storage it's one less music repository to sync and maintain.
5. Sound quality is very good. They handle lossless formats, and the internal amps are decent.
Anyway, it's a fantastic system if you've got the money to burn.
Plug the base to your sound system, move around your home as needed, the wife will not even know you are listetning to your favourite music, unless she wants to talk to you, but you can now ignore her as usual having a perfectly acceptable excuse over your ears.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My Method:
1) Get an ipod.
2) Get an iPod-capable "boom box" for each room. There are some out there with excellent sound that don't cost much.
3) Bring your ipod from room to room.
Cheap, no frills, no high tech, no wires, no headaches, no hassle.