Wireless Speakers?

giftgrub

Just wondering here if anyone knows anything about wireless speakers.

I have my amp, cd player turntable and main speakers in one room, but i'd like to get some sounds into the kitchen, which is right beside it.

Dont want the hassle of wires, so i was thinking about a pair of wireless speakers, are they expensive? and more importantly are they any use?

Slaphead07

giftgrub wrote: »

Just wondering here if anyone knows anything about wireless speakers.

I have my amp, cd player turntable and main speakers in one room, but i'd like to get some sounds into the kitchen, which is right beside it.

Dont want the hassle of wires, so i was thinking about a pair of wireless speakers, are they expensive? and more importantly are they any use?

They are generally rubbish. Actually thery are always rubbish.

cnocbui

http://www.amphony.com/products/l1550.htm

Slaphead07

Colour me unconvinced.

M00lers

Surely a bit of speaker cable is less hassle and expense than some dodgy "wireless" monstrosity that needs to be plugged in to a power source.:rolleyes:

Slaphead07

moolers2000 wrote: »

Surely a bit of speaker cable is less hassle and expense than some dodgy "wireless" monstrosity that needs to be plugged in to a power source.:rolleyes:

particularly if this is going to be a permanant kitchen setup. Kitchens are the easiest to wire up, loads of presses/cupboards to hide wires on.

cnocbui

moolers2000 wrote: »

Surely a bit of speaker cable is less hassle and expense than some dodgy "wireless" monstrosity that needs to be plugged in to a power source.:rolleyes:

So you'd be willing to bet some money on WiFi just being a passing fad that will soon die off, when people realise the error of their ways, and we'll all soon get back to good old ethernet cables ? :rolleyes:

M00lers

Huh?
What are you on about?

Slaphead07

cnocbui wrote: »

So you'd be willing to bet some money on WiFi just being a passing fad that will soon die off, when people realise the error of their ways, and we'll all soon get back to good old ethernet cables ? :rolleyes:

it doesn't work for speakers or headphones... not with any degree of quality anyway.

giftgrub

Heres a rough plan of the room layout.

The problem is we only have new floorboards down about a year...don't think the missus would be too impressed if i started pulling them up.

Suggestions are welcome!!

cnocbui

Slaphead07 wrote: »

it doesn't work for speakers or headphones... not with any degree of quality anyway.

You can stream audio to active speakers and headphones using lossless digital streaming. That constitutes an adequate degree of quality.

cnocbui

giftgrub wrote: »

Heres a rough plan of the room layout.

The problem is we only have new floorboards down about a year...don't think the missus would be too impressed if i started pulling them up.

Suggestions are welcome!!

Do you have a roof space you can run wires through?

Slaphead07

cnocbui wrote: »

That constitutes an adequate degree of quality.

That would be an opinion, and not one I share.

Idleater

giftgrub wrote: »

Suggestions are welcome!!

Open the door to the kitchen and turn up the volume?

andy1249

The problem with wireless speakers ....

The vast majority of speakers take an analog signal.
Amps are designed to get the best possible reproduction of that analog signal to the speakers given the design budget.

Good amps do this extremely well.

What wireless speakers then do , is take this "best effort" signal , modulate it onto a carrier , send it through the air , possibly picking up all sorts of noise on the way depending what else you have in the house that works at that frequency , de-modulate it , and feed it to the speakers.

There is simply no way to do this without affecting the quality.
This is why most quality speaker manufacturers dont do them , high end equipment makes dont go near them , and probably never will.

Wireless speakers that you see on all in one boxes are almost always confined to the rear speakers , where the content is mostly sound effects and not as critical , and even in those systems the results are poor at best.

Wires are always better.

Streaming units such as Squeezbox and Sonos use wireless , but this is for Data prior to processing with a D/A converter.
Data can be sent over the air with no loss at all , then the unit uses either its own dac or an external one to convert the material to analog before feeding it to speakers.
Using a lossless codec like Flac can deliver a bit for bit "identical to the CD" data file to the unit.
While this could be a very good solution , they are far from cheap, especially if you go the quality route and have an external DAC , a decent amp , and something better than the dreadful Bose like speakers that usually come with such units.

TheRedDevil10

sorry for this, but have wireless speakers improved since this thread was last used and How much would they cost ?