Mike Cockburn's Home Audio Page

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Last updated 6-Sep-2006 - This is a new page, subject to revision in the next while.

Introduction

This page is devoted to a discussion of my experiments and the resulting sound system for my home. It's not particularly and audiophile system but it sounds ok for the most part. My main interests are:
  • managing/cataloging my music collection
  • automatically playing music suited for a given situtation
  • distribution of sound in other parts of the house
  • learning to play guitar etc along with various music
It's taken a while to get my system to it's current state. In the end it's not particularily expensive and is working well. Maybe this will be of interest to others looking for some of the same things I was seeking.

Status

  • This system has been running now since 2005!
  • In summer 2008 i recieved a 'smart meter' from Hydro Ottawa. Since then i get bursts of noise on my speakers. These come randomly, sometimes several within a 1 minute period, sometimes quiet for 10 min or so. Given that I live in a row of town homes, there are smart meters for each of my neighbours nearby, some not much further away than mine. I have learned that these use the 900 Mhz band to communicate.

Hardware setup

    PC To Stereo connection

    One of the key issues I worked on is how to get sound from my PC to the stereo system which is across the room, about 30 feet. In the end I found some this surprisingly easy to do, but information about it hard to find.

    Home Distribution

    This is the configuration I am currently using...

    1. Digital coaxial audio (S/PDIF) This is what i'm using currently. I'm pleased with the sound and the ease with which this was set up. I've found some information on the internet relating to this. Generally electronics sales people I talked to have no idea and spread more mis-information than correct.

    2. Wireless 900mhz audio speakers - I've got 2 pairs of Audiovox/Advent AW870 wireless speakers. This has worked very well for distrubtion to other parts of the house. Each package includes a transmitter and two speakers. Each speaker has it's own receiver. They can be used as a mono speaker or as either left or right side of a stereo pair. There can be interferance noise on occasion. Using it in stereo mode was more subject to noise. So now I have the 4 speakers in various part of the house (basement, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom), all set to mono mode.

    3. Wireless 900mhz audio headphones - I also have a set of RCA wireless headphones which are compatible with the Advent transmitter above. These have enough range i can sit in front of the house with them.

    Other approaches considered / investigated

    Here are some ideas I tried:

    1. Simple analog audio cables (RCA connectors) - tried this once, got too much humm in the sound. Perhaps with high end shielded cables it would be better but i'm not sure. This is real easy to do and test out. If the distance between the PC and stereo was less it might have been satisfactory.

    2. Wireless 900mhz transmission - while this works ok for the remote speakers i didn't think the quality would be suitable for my main stereo system in the living room. See notes in Home Distribution section related to this. There are various products, sometimes described as 'wireless audio video sender' that could transfer the signal to a receiver which would in turn connect to the stereo system.

    3. Wired ethernet to basic Linux slave box. Of course this could be done wireless just as well. I have a very old Pentium 133 on which i have loaded Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (a.k.a sarge). I then installed Media Player Daemon (MPD) (v0.11.5-3). I've adapted my own music playing software to support rudimentary operation as an MPD client application. In this form I can use my main music player program and then hear the sound on the main speakers via the linux box. One issue is that the PC speakers and the sound coming from the Linux box are not exactly sychronized. Typically there is less than 1 second delay but enough to sound bad. I found it best to turn off the PC speakers when using the MPD client.

    4. Wireless 802.11g to GoVideo D2740 Networked DVD player. This did work. There are many media players out there now which are in some ways similar. In general they depend on a host PC running some sort of server software to stream audio to them. I found two things about this that I wanted to avoid:
      • It does not work easily with all the various software which might play music on my PC.
      • Control is assumed to be at the client device. In my case the client is really the stereo on the other side of the room. I prefer to control from the host PC.


    Here are other ideas I considered:
    1. Optical digital audio - cables expensive, long ones (30 feet) not commonly found on shelf, maybe subject to mechanical damage. My PC does not currently have this kind of output.

    2. USB sound card with extender - This one looked interesting. An external sound card with a USB interface. I presume it would appear to the PC like any other sound card. Use USB extension cables, active ones if necessary to run the required distance. One possible issue would be that I might need to switch back and forth between my internal sound card on the PC and this one somehow. Note also that most of these sound cards seem to be only USB 1.1, I did not find any USB 2.0 cards yet.

    3. speaker driver to 802.11 wireless - Linksys WMB54G/WRTSL54GS. This one also sounds interesting. It's new so not sure if the bugs are all worked out yet. It would be nice in that it should work with any music program on the host PC.

    4. Various products which stream data from the host PC. They require some server software to run on the host. Some include: DLINK DSM-120/DSM-320, Roku, Slim Devices Squeezebox/SlimServer, SMC SMCWAA-G, Netgear MP101, Noxon, Creative, Linksys WMA11B, GoVideo D2740/D2730, Apple Airport, ADS MXL-581, Escient, mediagate, Sonos, etc. In some cases there is compatibility between server software and client devices, particularily those using uPnP.

    5. bluetooth - 33ft - Logitech Wireless Music System for iPod. I see also there is talk in the industry of beefing up the speed of this in the next few years to better support multimedia.

Software setup

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