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?"

Comments

Sonos

[eggman9713]

I haven't tried it myself, but this looks like a very interesting product. http://sonos.com/

Re:Sonos

[parishboy]

I have installed many of these systems, and I second Sonos - could not be easier to set up and use. No need for separate amp/speakers/PC in every room, as they now have a product that is an all-in-one player/speaker. Many of the solutions mentioned here are great ways to go, but I can't think of one that's got a better/easier interface for your wife or similarly tech-challenged household members. Only real caveat is that it won't play DRM-protected audio files - but all the unprotected file formats and internet radio that you can shake a stick at. This beats most of the other solutions because there really is no need for separate audio equipment, including amplifiers.

Re:Sonos

[cbreaker]

I'm sure the Sonos system is nice, and from the enthusiasm here it sounds like it works. However, it's also very expensive. The starter bundle with speakers (one controller, one zone) is $1200.

The original poster was looking for something low cost.

squeezebox family

[rolfpal]

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

Re:squeezebox family

[dschuetz]

I second this. I'm using squeeze server on a linux box with all my mp3s on it, slaved to a bunch of old Dell Rio Receivers that aren't fantastic, but work good enough for squeeze. They're all in the basement (I've actually got in-ceiling speakers throughout the house wired to the server room) and controlled through browsers and an iPhone app.

In most cases, though, just stick those in different rooms (find 'em on eBay, maybe) or a bunch of Squeezebox players (slimp3, etc.), hook them up with ethernet, and you're good. Use the browser, or an iPhone or iPod touch for controlling them, or you can even buy a fairly cool gui controller from Logitech that works with the whole thing. (though I'd probably recommend the iPod Touch route, 'cause you can do a lot more with it and it costs about the same as the controller does).

Anyway, it's cool, and reasonably open too (their hardware information is even available on a wiki, with block diagrams and software source code).

Good and cheap don't come hand in hand

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

iTunes + Airport Express

[bmfs]

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.

Re:iTunes + Airport Express

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, DVD Jon has broken it for you:

http://nanocrew.net/software/justeport/

Re:iTunes + Airport Express

[slarrg]

I can't answer what issues you created by using the Airport Express outside in you Halloween scenario maybe you had a weak signal or other obstacles. It's not really an outdoor device. However, your other assertions are completely wrong. You can stream to as many AirTunes devices (Airport Express or Apple TV) as you like with no problem. In addition, you can stream to them while also playing the same source on the computer's local speakers.

In my household, we have multiple Airport Expresses and Apple TVs and we have a central server with several terabytes of music, movies and TV shows and we love being able to stream our content to wherever we like. It's very simple and allows you to reconfigure how you use everything with ease. For example, you can have internet radio streaming to my desktop computer and two other rooms while my wife is listening to her playlists in two other rooms and someone else is watching a ripped DVD in yet another room. In addition, we can select music from our laptops and a shared library or from our iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

As for the Halloween party you were speaking about, I also enjoy throwing Halloween parties and have found this setup ideal for my needs. I usually have creepy music playlists playing in the front yard graveyard while I have other music streaming throughout the house and a theme specific playlist playing in the backyard, too. (I tend to keep the devices inside the house and run cables to the external speakers, though.) As the night progresses, I usually clear out a dance floor area and begin playing dance music in that area while the other streams continue. Now that Apple has added video playlists, I can also keep sufficiently spooky video going on the TVs all night. Also, with the Apple Remote App, I can turn on the DJ services and allow users to vote from their own iPhones on what songs will play on the dance floor. It's really fun and everyone really enjoys it.

I've been using this setup for years and each year Apple keeps adding new, well-considered features that keep making the system better. To me, that's one of the coolest features; I sit back and do nothing new while Apple keeps creating new features that enhance my entire system and make my friends think I keep adding new stuff. What could be better?

C.C.Crane

[doctechniqal]

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.

Re:Use your phone lines

[BitZtream]

No, do NOT do that.

The result is going to be a bunch of speakers wired in parallel, reducing the load across the amp down to less than an ohm, just go ahead and short your amp output now and save yourself the time of getting it all hooked up before you burn it up.

The reason the sound quality won't be good is because you're amp will be overdriven, carrying far more current than it expects to carry for a given output voltage. The result will be an amp that overheats and fails. You'll have to turn the volume up to 15 to hear it, really over driving the amp. If you're lucky and the amp is smart, it'll clamp itself down to an acceptable current level, resulting in it turning a nice audio signal into a clipped, distorted mess. You're more likely to just end up with a burnt out amp since obviously neither of you are aware of how this stuff works.

This is modded interesting, but ignorant is more appropriate, dangerous would be better yet.

Amps are designed for a specific load, generally 8 or 4 ohms per channel although you can find others, and some allow bridging of channels for different loads and output levels but you obviously have no clue.

Please don't ever give anyone advice on wiring ever again, it is clear you don't understand the basics of electricity. While unlikely in this case, this sort of ignorance results in houses getting burned down and people dying on a regular basis.

Squeezebox family FTW!

[notanatheist]

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?

Re:Obligatory audiophile post

[earlymon]

It's not 45 million, it's 41,100 for CD audio. And ALL samples are instantaneous...

No, the sampling is not instantaneous - by definition.

Anyway, I only suggested it as a way to visualize how straightforward PCM audio is on CDs. earlymon just wants to sound like he's smarter than the average Wikipedia editor.

Close, but no cigar. In this case, I may be better at attempting to explain what's going on than was done for that particular article.

Smart does not equal an ability to explain. But given that I've lectured on digital signal processing at the post-graduate level, I'm not without some qualification in the area.

As I said earlier, if you find me wrong or harsh, that's your right.

But my bottom line stands - it's a wonder that CDs work.

From an earlier post - perhaps yours, it's impossible to tell with an AC -

mean, you get a piece of graph paper with 65,535 blocks vertically and 41,100 blocks horizontally, and plot the samples, and you literally have a picture of the waveform. It doesn't get much simpler than that, so where's the misunderstanding?

The expanded form for the Fourier transform of a single impulse is a circle scaled to voltage in the S plane. Phase response - the angular progression from point to point is constant - so we describe that as having minimum phase. Plotted as phase vs. frequency, it's a straight line with a nonzero slope. Magnitude however, is that constant distance from the origin. Plotted as magnitude vs. frequency, it's a straight line with a slope of 0 - it's literally a flat line from DC to infinity.

That particular point is called the Dirac delta function - after the physicist of whom you may have heard.

And if one point cannot be band-limited, then no number of additional points can be band-limited.

A sine wave - ok, I'm being specific and sine waves are, in fact, imaginary - so a cosine wave, then, analytically, has but one frequency. The very fact of sampling that one wave - and then calculating it's frequency components - leads to an unlimited number of frequency components out to infinity - not just one. And only by the most ideal case possible will one particular frequency ever be sampled such that it appears as a single frequency point within the Nyquist criteria - 1/2 of the delta-time sampling rate. Under that condition, it will appear at (K*Nyquist_criteria) + actual_frequency - and in our case, the next occurrence won't happen until past 22.05 kHz.

Under ideal circumstances - controlled by fate, totally uncontrollable by electronics or design. And for any given sampling - it's incredibly rare. In the real world what really happens is that any given frequency component - any single frequency, in other words - is smeared to a peak at or only near that frequency, with additional frequencies at plus or minus a (hopefully small) margin about that frequency.

Engineers have poorly chosen the word aliasing for this - the frequency aliases as other frequencies. And they window it, they anti-alias filter it - but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so it's a battle that cannot be won.

Again - what could be simpler than that picture of a waveform on your graph paper?

Well - steps are much simpler than curves.

So for each quantization value of the signal, the voltage is held constant for 1/44100 second, then changed to the next step level for the next 1/44100 second and so on. However - amplifier circuits have something called a slew rate - the rated ability to change voltage over time. If a circuit can slew quickly, it may have a tendency for overshoot - partial solutions for that exist, but again - TANSTAAFL.

Both of those critical points, I covered in my original post - but evidently, I didn't explain them there any better than laughably, because you were left with the impression that you can get a picture of a waveform by sampling it - and you simply cannot.

It's entirely possible that the only reason that CDs can work in first place is all of the slop in transitioning voltages in the amplifiers in the first place.

Again - hope this helps.