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Comments: 438 +- Hardware: Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom Audio? on Saturday November 07, @06:00PM
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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?"
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The obvious solution (Score:5, Funny)
Just set numrooms = 1 (or even better, 0). Makes the problem much easier.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes ... but ... At least two problems. First, the AC power frequency -- 50 or 60Hz in most countries is in the audio range. Second, the US (and Canada?) wire houses with a sort of split 220 volt system where the house has two sets of circuits with the hot wire on one circuit set at 220 volts wrt the hot wire on the other set and ground half way in between. That allows stoves, driers, heaters to operate at 220 volts while most appliances and devices see 110 volts. The problem is that without some sort of
Re:The obvious solution (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, from man(1) wife:
NOTES:
While you can execute rm -f wife, it can take a very long time to complete and an inevitable side effect of this is that the wife process, prior to termination, will execute mv money wife and this cannot be avoided.
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Re:The obvious solution (Score:4, Funny)
Im using ReiserFS. Do I have to remove a seat from my car for 'rm -f wife' to work?
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Sonos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sonos (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, this is pretty pricy. You could put an AppleTV in every room for much less money; they don't need a TV attached to them, you can control it from iTunes or an iPhone with the Remote application. Or you can use an Apple AirPort for each room, and control it in a similar fashion.
Re:Sonos (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get why all you people are suggesting computer-based solutions.
Running wires to each room in the house would be both cheaper and have sound quality independent of network quality.
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Re:Sonos (Score:5, Informative)
The original poster was looking for something low cost.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And it definitely has that audiophile look to it.
It looks like it does absolutely nothing usefull but is made of overly expensive materials?
squeezebox family (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:squeezebox family (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yup, the Squeezebox family of products is your best bet. It integrates fine with your existing setup (you just need a free aux input on your amp) and can be standalone (Standalone boom box). All of them support WiFi or Ethernet. You can operate each station completely independently or you can synchronize them (same music everywhere). If you have your musick already ripped to mp3 and your tags are clean then most of the work is done. The product family is about a decade old, so it has some history and the bu
Squeezebox family FTW! (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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Logitech Squeezebox (Score:3, Informative)
Good and cheap don't come hand in hand (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Obligatory audiophile post (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:4, Informative)
Enjoy your 44.1 KHz on your CONSUMER GRADE gear you PEASANT.
So much is bandied about regarding time and frequency domains, but so little of it is valid.
An impulse is not band-limited - it contains an infinite number of frequency components.
Any digital sampling of even a simple sine wave - absolutely regardless of sampling rate - is going to present to the electronics as nothing less than a series of impulses. Regardless of the optical illusion that the sampled points look like the sine wave sampled (dots on an x-y graph) - that's not how it's going to work out.
An impulse is not band-limited; a series of them certainly won't be. The resulting frequency components in error (aliased frequencies - not solved by any amount of oversampling) can - and do - have measurable deleterious effects.
This is the basis for some people preferring higher sampled digital signals and for some people to prefer analog to digital.
It's not there are expected to be frequencies above 16 kHz - the second harmonic of a struck triangle - in most music sources. And it's not that any harmonic distortion of signals above 10 kHz even matter - because those second and higher harmonics are above 20 kHz, the accepted upper limit for the norm of hearing.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength. Chances of getting reduced sampling error - to even hit the peaks and zero crossings in time of that frequency or higher is absolutely laughable. That's 8 points at 5 to 6 kHz, and 16 sampled data points in the critical voice range.
Given the reality of the math, it's a wonder that CDs - uncompressed from their 44.1 kHz standard - manage to sound as good as they do.
(Wikipedia laughably multiplies this by 16 bits / sample in an insane misunderstanding of digital signal processing and pulse-code modulation, so I'm foregoing that as a reference.)
The tighter spaced in time the sampling, the less chance of a high delta V per sample, and therefore, the less chance for overshoot on the drive electronics being given a piecewise continuous function to deal with.
But sampling error is like the infinite energy requirement when trying to get to the speed of light - it's just a fact.
By the way - I'm one of those peasants that owns electrostatics and a class A amp. Missed the hand-made valves, though.
Hope this helps.
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Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:4, Informative)
That's a triangle wave.
You wish. :-)
That's the first point at 0 volts for 1/44100 sec, the peak held for 1/44100 sec, 0 volts for 1/44100 of a second, and then the negative peak at 1/44100 second - it looks like a triangle if you connect the dots like in school - but that's a control function for electronics, so it ends up as 4 steps representing that particular frequency.
So, you see - it only gets worse, the better you understand what's going on.
As for 16 bits vertical, I've asked whether any electronics can accurately measure line voltage divided by 65535. That's like, serious millivolts. Lot of bits are being thrown away in both directions. Don't believe me? Stand back, and turn up the volume.
16 analog-to-digital converters are well within our tech. If we model amplitude vertically and time horizontally, it's cool that they've attempted to mitigate vertical error with such high sampling - and then counterpointing that with amplifier response time for each quantization level - pretty cool, actually. But the time sampling, well - as I keep repeating, it's a wonder than CDs work as well as they do.
I think you'll be interested in my parallel response, so in case you've missed it - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1435342&cid=30020106 [slashdot.org]
Now, while I've railed a bit against the Red Book wikipedia entry - perhaps too harshly - I find this one particularly delicious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3 [wikipedia.org]
The authors make no bones about it - the entire MP3 approach is to exploit psychoacoustics. The algorithms for this, and other codes, are quite fascinating - and all in all, they do a pretty good job.
But the bottom line for MP3 audio - 1) psychoacoustics, 2) not all MP3 encoder algorithms are equal, irrespective of bit rates, 3) the algorithms are adaptive to the input waveform because they know that it's lossy and they try to limit that.
Why do I call that delicious? Because that's what Vincent Price would call this insanely scary reality:
All you have to do in any of these articles to be modded as 5, funny, or 5, insightful, is to bray like a jackass that MP3 after a certain point is just so good that humans simply can't hear any better - and anyone who thinks differently is some kind of audiophile - you know - a psycho .
The irony can't get much thicker than that.
But psychoacoutics may be a perfect science - ask Bose. Those products are perfect too, aren't they?
Oh - and not any mods are paying attention - but just in case - Bose radios wired with Airport Express using AirTunes is one way to go for the guy that started this thread with his question. Now I can laugh some more if I'm modded off-topic - which I am. :-P
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Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:4, Informative)
At what bitrate? As far as I know, a double-blind study has never shown that anyone can hear the difference between 256kbit MP3s and the uncompressed original.
FLAC is useful for a different reason: it allows you to re-encode the original into a different format without experiencing quality degradation. It's useful to keep FLAC files archived somewhere, but for listening, using lossy compression at a decent bitrate is fine.
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Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you misunderstood my post, which I might have phrased differently. I said:
The positive claim here is that there is an audible difference. The lack of evidence for this claim, coupled with numerous studies, would be evidence of absence.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry - my bad. Guilty as charged.
And there is also the issue - was the hypothetical 256 kilosample/second MP3 made from the analog original or resampling the sampled source.
If interested, my other post in this thread may be useful - http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1435342&cid=30018812 [slashdot.org]
I tried a number of sampling schemes with a number of program sources on my system. Then had the sources switched for me (electronics are in another room from my speakers, so it was blind). On some material,
Re:Obligatory audiophile post (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I believe all you're hearing is your own confirmation bias. Wine tasters have the same problem [sciencedirect.com]. Your experiments were not controlled and couldn't tell you anything other than that you liked to think your expensive equipment was somehow worth it.
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Memory (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Memory (Score:5, Funny)
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You're Guilty! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Memory (Score:4, Funny)
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Deliver the audio via FM-radio (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
iTunes + Airport Express (Score:5, Informative)
Re:iTunes + Airport Express (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:iTunes + Airport Express (Score:4, Informative)
does not matter if the AE is out of warranty or not.
(note: above link is a PDF)
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I live by this setup (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:iTunes + Airport Express (Score:4, Informative)
It's even more impressive when everyone comes over and they can request songs from their own iPhones (or yours, if you pass it around).
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Re:iTunes + Airport Express (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, DVD Jon has broken it for you:
http://nanocrew.net/software/justeport/ [nanocrew.net]
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Re:iTunes + Airport Express (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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FM Broadcaster - simple, cheap, expandable, in syn (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My preferred solution (Score:5, Funny)
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.
C.C.Crane (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Low Power FM radio (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Rocketboost from Best Buy (Score:4, Interesting)
The Rocketboost system at best buy is a wireless solution that will work for you: http://www.bestbuy.com/rocketboost [bestbuy.com] 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.
The "right" answer, rather than the geeky one... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The "right" answer, rather than the geeky one.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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The Bulldozer Approach (Score:5, Funny)
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.
UPnP AV / DLNA to the rescue... soon... maybe (Score:3, Informative)
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.
requirements? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Use your phone lines (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He is not going to get down to 1 ohm with telephone wire, 24 gauge (typical phone) wire has a resistance of .03 ohm/foot so as long as these rooms are at least 50 feet of wiring away, it would be 1.5 ohms to the first speaker + 1.5 ohms back. so even if all 6 of his proposed max were at this distance (4 wires, 2 for each loop) it would still be 8/3+3 thus roughly 5.5 ohms to the amplifier. Amplifier efficiency will suck, but I doubt you could come up with a very damaging configuration using phone wire and
Re: (Score:3, Informative)