Wireless speakers..?

[mrd]

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.

[mrd]

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?

[plained]

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

[ToxicBug]

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.

[mrd]

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.

[mrd]

Haha that link is to xiph.org. Touche

[Eraser]

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.

[Eraser]

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.

[ToxicBug]

Haha that link is to xiph.org. Touche

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

[mrd]

@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?

[plained]

i am not a fan of mp3 and compressed a la cart music .

my hope is one day super quality high end audio will make a big comeback.

i think the big problem high quality masters stay locked of in the vaults if piracy fear and no understanding of how to monetize it.

even new so- called new high quality stuff is mixed into oblivion of ear pain.

i would like to see all the old masters build right in to the hardware in such a way that it is unremovable and the only way to access it is to hear it threw speakers-thus no way to pirate it in ultra high masters quality., high quality hardware can be made cheap now and tech is better than before(in a way) so all the money could go to the owners of the masters and the publishing rights owners.

and we would win because the beautiful sound and quality.

people are willing to pay for such quality imo

[MKJ]

all the money could go to the owners of the masters and the publishing rights owners.

so none for the artists then.

[plained]

[Doombrain]

[Doombrain]

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

Sonos is awesome, I think you also get a free year of music Access? Be warned though, it's a fucking money pit. Just one more speaker, then I'll stop.

[plained]

i am not a fan of mp3 and compressed a la cart music .

my hope is one day super quality high end audio will make a big comeback.

i think the big problem high quality masters stay locked of in the vaults if piracy fear and no understanding of how to monetize it.

even new so- called new high quality stuff is mixed into oblivion of ear pain.

i would like to see all the old masters build right in to the hardware in such a way that it is unremovable and the only way to access it is to hear it threw speakers-thus no way to pirate it in ultra high masters quality., high quality hardware can be made cheap now and tech is better than before(in a way) so all the money could go to the owners of the masters and the publishing rights owners.

and we would win because the beautiful sound and quality.

people are willing to pay for such quality imo

the day after i wrote this i started getting sony.com high resolution gear offers emails!

geez i know the gear is there its the source material that is lacking ey!

[Doombrain]

Lol Sony.

[plained]

lol sony up 17.5% on friday!

[John^Rocker]

Just dont buy any of that shit at best buy. If best buy sells a speaker, dont buy it.

[Ryoki]

Sonos is awesome, I think you also get a free year of music Access? Be warned though, it's a fucking money pit. Just one more speaker, then I'll stop.

God, i caved and bought a Play 5 to start with - it's absolutely great. And you're right, i'm already thinking about the next one... damn, this might have been a mistake after all

[PhoeniX]

[lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/ARxabJl.jpg[/lvlshot]

Should've just bought one of these and take it with you when you walk around .

[Doombrain]

Sonos is awesome, I think you also get a free year of music Access? Be warned though, it's a fucking money pit. Just one more speaker, then I'll stop.

God, i caved and bought a Play 5 to start with - it's absolutely great. And you're right, i'm already thinking about the next one... damn, this might have been a mistake after all

Did you get the free music service?

[ToxicBug]

Sonos is awesome, I think you also get a free year of music Access? Be warned though, it's a fucking money pit. Just one more speaker, then I'll stop.

God, i caved and bought a Play 5 to start with - it's absolutely great. And you're right, i'm already thinking about the next one... damn, this might have been a mistake after all

Pics?

I just watched a review. It looks nice, but $500 USD is a lot of money for a single speaker IMO.

If you're getting two, that's $1000 USD. At that point why not start looking for a real sound system?

[Doombrain]

They sound awesome, all of them. Not sure how they stack up for the audiophile but they are good enough for me, only I haven't bought one

[Ryoki]

I just watched a review. It looks nice, but $500 USD is a lot of money for a single speaker IMO.

If you're getting two, that's $1000 USD. At that point why not start looking for a real sound system?

From the viewpoint of an audiophile you're absolutely correct i think, you could probably get a better sounding kit for less. I'm not an audiophile though, and things like 'must have no cables' and 'ease of use' were important factors.

It fills the room with a rich wall of sound and it's honestly a bit hard to tell it's just one speaker, weirdly enough. So i'm quite happy really! Getting another one of these seems like overkill, though at some stage i might add some Play 3's to it. Or something. I'm not sure what the next step will be really, getting this one also gave me the luxury to postpone any such decisions for a while.