Wireless Music the Way It Should Be: Easy

The Case
Kelly has a technology dilemma: her music system is a mess. She doesn't know how to use most of it, and she's intimidated by its complexity. She owns a ton of older audio equipment: tape player, record player, receiver/amplifier, CD player, and she has wired speakers running through her home. Some of the speakers hook up to her audio equipment, and some don't. 

To make matters worse, her system setup is complicated. Speakers are switched using a manual box in the living room. Some can play at the same time, but for others it's an either/or situation: either the speakers in the kitchen play or the speakers in the garden play. She didn't install the system, and now she's lost trying to manage such an unruly beast.

Finally, Kelly has a huge collection of CDs that she plays on her stereo, but she's also started to experiment with iTunes and is amassing a large collection of songs on her computer and iPod.

Kelly wants to integrate all her music, make it easily accessible from any location in the house, and be able to completely control where it's playing.

The Technician
For this case I am dispatching a rookie Hook Me Up technician: me.

Kelly lives in the San Francisco Bay area, so I head down from the city to see if I can help. My background is pretty broad: technology contributor for Good Morning America, former reporter/host for TechTV/ZDTV, and tech support for  all my relatives and friends.

The Proposed Solution
The goal is to centralize Kelly's music on her computer. She will use iTunes to digitize all of her CDs so they are available on a hard drive. Once she has all her music in one digital location, we will install a wireless music system. That system will stream music from the computer to various rooms around the house, and it will manage all of her disparate speaker systems from one controller.  She'll be able to get rid of most of the audio components that run her complicated setup, streamlining her music in one simple system.

The Hardware
Our goal was to spend less than $4,000 on a streaming music solution. The Sonos Digital Music System fit our budget and seemed like an exciting and elegant way to do the job. This is a relatively new product, here's how it works: you set up a base station at your computer, and in a separate room you connect speakers to a Sonos transceiver/amplifier. Using one remote control, you can manage the entire system. Each transceiver/amplifier costs about $500 and each controller is about $400.

One of the benefits of the Sonos system is that it can run off a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive. This is a self-powered external hard drive. It is usually a backup device, but if you store your music on the NAS drive, your Sonos system can access your music even when the computer is turned off. 

The Sonos system does not work off of a traditional 802.11 wireless network.  It creates its own wireless mesh network (with no setup on your part).  A mesh network is much more dependable than a centrally located Wi-Fi network.  Each receiver is also a transmitter (receiver + transmitter = transceiver), so the range of the network is much greater and more consistent than if it were using a Wi-Fi base station.  Sonos says the range of each tranceiver is about 100 feet, but in Kelly's house our maximum distance per transceiver was 60 feet. We had no problems with latency or dropped signals.

If you want more info on the Sonos device, read this:
http://playlistmag.com/reviews/2005/02/sonos/index.php

In the next post, I explain the installation process, what went wrong, and more details on the Sonos device, including some incompatibility issues with music purchased on iTunes.

Here's a complete list of what we bought for this installation:
Sonos Music system                           
Iomega Hard Drive                                          
7-foot CAT6 Cable                                     
6-foot Y Adaptor/3.5 to RCA                    
Dual MINI Coupler                             
3-foot 1/8SPLG-2RCA                   
6-foot RCA cables         
3-foot RCA cables