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Topic Starter Topic: Wireless speakers..?

Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 05:30 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


So then, years ago i purchased an above average quality sound system, something i've never regretted. Alas, when we moved house my faithful old amp died, as aging devices sometimes do. I do miss my quality sound terribly and have been looking into what's the deal these days. Apparently they invented wireless speakers, which seems great because the missus will give me shit if i use too much cables.

But is this tech any good? Or should i be looking at something else entirely? There's this brand called Sonos that gets great reviews for their wireless speakers but they're a bit expensive (my ideal setup would be something like 1500 euros, which is too much)... anyone know of alternatives? Or is building a system like this up by just getting the basics and then purchasing additional speakers over time worth it?



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Risen From The Ashes
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 06:04 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I hear (no pun intended, as I've never heard them) they're very good especially if you have them in all the rooms of the house. I'd probably rather save the money and use wires. Can't you bury them behind plaster, under the carpet/floorboards etc so they're invisible?

Presumably if your amp has died you still have your speakers so you can just plug another amp in? You can pick-up very good deals on amps on eBay; there's where my last two ones came from :shrug:.




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Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 06:31 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Good to hear the tech is solid (also no pun) :) Aside from the pretty significant costs i worry mostly about ease of use and possible static, but google says that last thing is pretty much a non issue.

Simply getting a new amp seemed like a good idea yes, but unfortunately hiding cables properly is no longer an option, the room is finished plaster wise and there's no carpet or floorboards. And yeah i still have my more than decent speakers, but it was a stereo setup that i think worked well mostly because my previous house was square shaped, whereas my new house is more the shape of a matchbox on it's side, so to speak. Longer and less wide basically, so soundwaves will bounce off walls more easily - i figured setting up 2 sets of speakers in 2 rooms would possibly help that issue...



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Risen From The Ashes
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 06:36 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Someone I know who has them did say he had a nightmare of a time setting then up with a wireless repeater though; something about having issues getting all the speakers to sync when playing music. Might just be how he did it though.

If there's no carpet or floorboards what do you have, a big hole in the ground? :p




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Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 06:48 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Hmm, shit, that's actually something to take into account - the concrete walls are an absolute bastard with wireless signals i've found.

We have a thing called marmoleum on the floor, it's a sort of semi natural concoction of cork, glue, tree resin and something else i forgot. It's not extremely expensive but it looks like it does, several people have already confused it with a casted floor (not entirely sure about the translation there) - and it works very well with the floor heating :) :up:



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Risen From The Ashes
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 06:56 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Heh I share your pain - my house has ~45cm solid standstone external walls. I'm sure it'll work fine but might be worth Googling first.

Ah is it a sort of vinyl sheet on top of a solid floor? Mind, if you have floor heating I'm assuming you've got an air space for the pipework. Could you not drill down through your floor and feed the speaker wire under the floor where the heating goes?




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Karot!
Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 07:03 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Yeah, it's sort of vinyl but more expensive and better looking. Vinyl doesn't click with me, this stuff does :D

And good idea but no dice i'm afraid; the floor heating pipes have been cast in a layer of anhydrite that has been poured on top of the concrete floor. Which means i've no idea where the pipes are exactly, and there's no air space either unfortunately.



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Risen From The Ashes
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 08:12 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Sounds like a challenge :/.

Would it be easier to ditch your girlfriend/wife? :p




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Kempston Joy
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 11:30 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Dude I shit you not, check out the Bose sound link 2 mini. Portable, but the sound is unreal.




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Kempston Joy
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 11:33 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


In fact you could say HE TURNED HIS NEW SPEAKER, WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS INSANE.




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Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 12:01 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Will check out that Bose unit, cheers :)



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Immortal
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 05:31 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Just get the little box types man, daisy chain em, I recommend anker. You'll be surprised by the eXP.



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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 07:08 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Wouldn't there be fairly obvious compression issues with wireless music? Not sure... never looked into it too much. Although I guess if you are already playing MP3s, then the difference would be negligible. I'm one of those assholes that clamours for 24-bit/96kHz .WAV files of my records. Should have laid audio cable before you did the walls, mang :owned:




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Long and Strong
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 07:30 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I would give the Sonos a try, they are expensive but worth it if you want easy to control zone or joined audio throughout your house and outside. The setup is not a pain, just network one of them, they create their own mesh network using each speaker to repeat the signal. For dead zones they sell a $40.00 (often free with speaker purchase) bridge you can connect to extend or simply run cat 5 to the speaker itself. I tried a few random substitutes and even the raspberry Pi "fake sonos" they were fun, but too much work to maintain and too many failures when entertaining.



Aside from my Paybar and sub... The cheapest of the bunch Sonos Play 1 is my favorite speaker. it sounds so good for such a tiny package. Give them a listen and have a show show you the phone \ table app and how easy it is to group and un group speakers.




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Internet is serious business
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PostPosted: 01-25-2016 08:58 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


another option is you use a regular system and use a bluetooth audio basestation. You can use aux or digi out cables with them. I've got one that only cost me like 30 usd and it does the job without much loss in audio.



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Who's that man, Mommy?
Who's that man, Mommy?
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PostPosted: 01-26-2016 01:00 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


PhoeniX wrote:
I hear (no pun intended, [...]


:down:




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Messatsu Ko Jy-ouu
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PostPosted: 01-26-2016 02:55 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


feedback wrote:
another option is you use a regular system and use a bluetooth audio basestation. You can use aux or digi out cables with them. I've got one that only cost me like 30 usd and it does the job without much loss in audio.

yuep.
too much BT in your house is prone to interference though.




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Risen From The Ashes
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PostPosted: 01-26-2016 05:47 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
Wouldn't there be fairly obvious compression issues with wireless music? Not sure... never looked into it too much. Although I guess if you are already playing MP3s, then the difference would be negligible. I'm one of those assholes that clamours for 24-bit/96kHz .WAV files of my records. Should have laid audio cable before you did the walls, mang :owned:


Unless Sonus compress the audio quality to save bandwidth I highly doubt it.

It's a bit like saying if you stream a 1080p over wifi will it look worse? No, but it just might have to buffer a couple of times if your signal drops out a bit.




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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-26-2016 06:16 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


PhoeniX wrote:
mrd wrote:
Wouldn't there be fairly obvious compression issues with wireless music? Not sure... never looked into it too much. Although I guess if you are already playing MP3s, then the difference would be negligible. I'm one of those assholes that clamours for 24-bit/96kHz .WAV files of my records. Should have laid audio cable before you did the walls, mang :owned:


Unless Sonus compress the audio quality to save bandwidth I highly doubt it.

It's a bit like saying if you stream a 1080p over wifi will it look worse? No, but it just might have to buffer a couple of times if your signal drops out a bit.


They may just. They could also use a lossless compression scheme. Even 24-bit/96kHz stereo stuff is only something like 5 or 5.5mbps which isn't really much compared to 24FPS or 30FPS 1080p video. Somehow I still feel like you might lose out on the high-end fidelity with a wireless signal, even if there is zero compression. Wireless is inherently more lossy than a physical connection. I don't know about you but the prospect of having buffer time in my music just sounds like a huge annoyance. I'm fine with that for watching crap on Youtube or w/e. But if I'm puttering around the house and listening to music, or just sitting and listening to music purely for enjoyment, if it starts going all start/stop on me, I'm liable to throw my amp out the fucking window. Then again I spend a lot of time listening to music. :shrug:




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Cool #9
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 01:38 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
Somehow I still feel like you might lose out on the high-end fidelity with a wireless signal, even if there is zero compression. Wireless is inherently more lossy than a physical connection.


Oh no, you didn't just really say that, did you?




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Cool #9
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 01:40 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
[Even 24-bit/96kHz stereo stuff is only something like 5 or 5.5mbps


Also, no no no. 24bit stereo audio at 96KHz without any compression is about 560kbps. That's no where near the range of 5mbps




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Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 02:01 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Wait hang on, i'm confused - does a wifi only connection lead to loss of quality? From what i've been reading this should not be the case... but this mrd guy sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about :paranoid:

My decisions for now are as follows: Definitely going for the Sonos kit, they get great reviews and i'm not a fan of bluetooth. Also i'm going to postpone this for a little bit (unsure if i want to keep my old speakers or replace them, which affects what i should buy), and i'm going to do this in phases (shit is fucking expensive, doing the livingroom first, kitchen in a later stage).

Cheers for the input anyways guys :up:



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Cool #9
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 02:02 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Ryoki wrote:
Wait guys, i'm confused - does a wifi only connection lead to loss of quality? From what i've been reading this should not be the case... but this mrd guy sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about :paranoid:


No it does not.
And no, mrd doesn't know what he's talking about.




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Karot!
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 02:33 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Excellent then! :)



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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 07:01 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Eraser wrote:
mrd wrote:
[Even 24-bit/96kHz stereo stuff is only something like 5 or 5.5mbps


Also, no no no. 24bit stereo audio at 96KHz without any compression is about 560kbps. That's no where near the range of 5mbps


560kbps? hahaha what the fuck.

I could do a screen grab from foobar, which shows it is admittedly actually closer to about 4.5mbps for 24/96, but that is far closer to my original statement (which was a guess based on knowledge that 16/44 is 1411kbps) than 560kbps is. But I think math is more fun!

24bits @ 96kHz means 96,000 samples per second, with 24 bits of resolution for each sample, for a mono signal. That is 2,304,000 bits per second for a mono signal at 24/96. Since we're talking stereo, you wanna double that. (Stereo = two mono signals). That gets you 4,608,000 bits for one second of 24/96 stereo sound. Divide by a thousand, you get kbps (4608kbps), divide by a thousand again, you get mbps (4.608mbps).

Image

Where in the fuck did 560kbps come from? Most FLAC files are twice that and they are lossless compression. 560kbps is barely above an MP3.

You realize that kbps is BITS (lower-case 'b') and kBps is BYTES (upper-case 'B'), right?




Last edited by mrd on 01-28-2016 07:03 PM, edited 1 time in total.

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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 07:02 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


As for wifi signal quality -- I never actually said you will lose quality, only that I feel like you might. Wireless signals are inherently compressed, and music is a very rich signal, so it probably gets compressed. I don't really feel like digging out what the radio chipsets do to a signal upon broadcasting it but I would not be surprised if it involves compression.




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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 07:06 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I am actually very surprised you think this Eraser. Aren't you a programmer? Working out the bit-rate of an audio stream is elementary stuff. Sample bit depth X sample rate = bit rate... I am seriously curious where you got 560kbps from?




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plained
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 08:23 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:


560 lol i know right?

when he asked about atainging feedback i said boost boost boost mids and press the headstock into the cab, he ignored it and explained how to digiback or something lol , i give up on reasoning, i guess the distance between is to great ey



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redline
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 09:12 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


24/96 is pointless anyway.

By the way, Eraser is right about WiFi having zero impact on quality. The disadvantage is that you're using the speaker's low(er) quality DAC.




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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 11:09 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Higher bit rates lower the noise floor, nothing else. Higher sample rates are a toss up. You can get aliasing distortion at 44.1 so 88.2 or 96 are easy alternatives that have effectively no chance of this. xiph.org has a few good videos about this and about discrete sampling of audio in general. I'm mobile so I can't be arsed to find the link at the moment.




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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-28-2016 11:11 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Haha that link is to xiph.org. Touche :p




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Cool #9
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PostPosted: 01-29-2016 01:48 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
560kbps? hahaha what the fuck.


Yeah I made a bit vs byte error. I thought you were saying 5 megabyte while you meant megabit. I then proceeded to say kilobit while I meant kilobyte. 560 kilobyte is 4480 kilobit, which is 4.375 megabit. So not quite 5.5 megabit either but small enough of a difference to not be significant in this discussion.
That's why I removed the post but it seems you were quick to pick up on it.




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Cool #9
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PostPosted: 01-29-2016 01:55 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
As for wifi signal quality -- I never actually said you will lose quality, only that I feel like you might. Wireless signals are inherently compressed


Wireless signals aren't "inherently compressed", at least not in a lossy way.
If I send a sequence of bytes through a WiFi signal from my computer to your computer, you're going to end up receiving the exact same sequence of bytes on your end.
What I did hear from a colleague though, is that the BlueTooth does have built-in audio compression, so it'll (probably with a lossy algorithm) compress audio before sending it. So if you have bluetooth protocol speakers, you might suffer from quality loss due to compression. Don't quote me on this though, I haven't cross checked this information.

With WiFi, however, this is not the case.




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redline
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PostPosted: 01-29-2016 07:08 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


mrd wrote:
Haha that link is to xiph.org. Touche :p


Yeah, I read about it on head-fi.org prior.

I was actually convinced that 24/96 music downloads sound better. In fact, they do, but only because they're usually using better masters :)




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Elite
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PostPosted: 01-29-2016 07:37 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


@Eraser - wireless compression is generally not lossy, no. At least it endeavours not to be. Bluetooth is no good. I'm also pretty sure it's lossy. But it's low power, fueled by mobile devices with batteries. And those devices often already have a radio receiver for talking to satellite towers so adding a second transceiver with lossless signal quality in a different protocol is a huge current draw on the battery. Bluetooth is compressed, lossy, as a design feature, as far as I'm aware. As for wifi, it's lossless but you can also have packet drops which could be considered a lossy form of signal transfer. Wifi would of course have checksums on the packets and so re-request the data if shit doesn't add up. We're splitting hairs at this point. I still feel like a solid connection is better but I also don't care about wires running along the floor.

@Toxicbug - Agreed, a good master and a high quality DAC are a lot more impactful than a high data rate. I'll take 24/96 if it's there and the only other option is MP3 but I don't think it 'sounds better'. I have studio monitors so mp3 artefacts annoy me. I just like lossless audio. All the dudes who work on recording music spend so much time on it... Why would you then take that and clamp down on it?




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