Quake3World

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?

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 .

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...

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?

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

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?

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

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.

Sounds like a challenge :/.

Would it be easier to ditch your girlfriend/wife?

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

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

Will check out that Bose unit, cheers

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent then!

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).



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?