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In setting up a system to play music in multiple rooms throughout a house, start by answering the following questions:
Problems with this approach include the following: (1) might not be able to control the volume of the rooms independently, (2) cannot control the volume from the second room, and (3) cannot control the source, pause, or move forward a track from the second room.
The classical solution to the volume control problem is to place an "LPAD" resistive voltage divider in the second room, which tends to look like a volume control knob on the wall. The LPAD converts a selectable amount of unwanted power amplifier energy into heat. LPADs compromise sound quality to some extent.
On the assumption that the legacy stereo is controlled via infrared (IR) remote controls there are various techniques for getting IR signals back into the room where the CD player and receiver reside. One technique is the wall keypad connected (more wiring) to an IR transmitter near the legacy stereo. This has to be programmed so that pressing the "track forward" key on the wall keypad will send out a "Pioneer CD player track forward" IR signal. If you're willing to carry remotes physically around the house you can get wireless IR repeaters or "extenders" that listen for IR signals in one room and rebroadcast them in the room with the legacy stereo.
Now you're set up but what if you want to add a third or fourth room? This will probably be beyond the capabilities of the legacy stereo power amp.
These systems represent the state-of-the-art circa 1990 and work pretty well if the legacy stereo is where your content lives. In a McMansion the sound quality might be compromised to some extent by the long speaker wire runs. In a rental apartment you might not want to pay for all the hard-wiring that is entailed. Without a good interface among the components it would generally be impossible to see, on a keypad, the name of the CD being played or the freqency of the tuned-in radio station. Otherwise this is a reasonable way to go.
The best example of this kind of system ever designed is the B&W CASA system. They run a single CAT5 wire (computer Ethernet cable) from the central brain to each in-wall loudspeaker. The CAT5 wire carries a balanced analog signal, low-voltage DC power, and digital control signals back to the brain. Each speaker has its own low-voltage DC power amplifier, like the amps found in car stereos (it would be against electrical code to mount a mains-voltage AC amplifier in the wall). Each speaker has an IR diode watching for remote control signals, which it will repeat back to the brain, which is presumably adjacent to the legacy stereo. Thus you can walk around the house with your, say, Pioneer remote control and point it at any in-wall speaker and have it work just as though you were in your living room. I said to myself "this system seems just about perfect, though it would sure be ugly if B&W decided to discontinue it and left you with a house full of orphaned in-wall components that only understand this proprietary CAT5 interface." Back in the early 2000s, while I was debating whether or not to install one, B&W discontinued CASA. As of late 2008, however, they are still supporting the system.
One you place the home computer at the center of the house, the whole-house music system looks completely different. Any computer or computerized device that can talk to the home computer can play any music file in your collection. The design challenge becomes one of user interface and software. How do you let someone who is not at the computer browse through a huge collection of files? How do you make sure that the digitally networked machines throughout the house are playing the same song?
The rest of this article will be about building a modern computer-centric whole-house music system.
You could get a small PC with no monitor to function as the file server and control it remotely from your desktop PC. A better solution, however, is network-attached storage (NAS). The NAS box is a compact little machine that has enough electronics to talk to hard drives and the network. The NAS box has no audio, video, or keyboard interfaces. The NAS box has no CD or DVD drives. The NAS box may have a sophisticated RAID ("redundant array of independent disks") controller so that the failure of a single disk drive will not result in any loss of data or interruption in service.
The best current NAS for the home is the HP MediaSmart. Make sure to get something like a Netgear Gigabit Ethernet switch so that computer-to-computer file transfers are fast.
How big a disk subsystem do you need? One hour of music on an uncompressed CD occupies 635 MB of space and therefore you could fit 1000 hours onto a 1 TB RAID 5. With a lossless compression format such as FLAC you could double this to 2000 hours. Most people receive and/or store their music CD in formats such as MP3 that are much more space-efficient. An hour of music at 192 Kbps takes up only 86 MB, which means that a 1 TB NAS box could store nearly 7300 hours. Except for CDs that you rip yourself, most music comes in at a lower sampling rate. Until 2009, Apple managed to get consumers to shell out $1 each for tracks that were recorded at a middling 128 Kbps and wouldn't play on most devices due to Apple's refusal license its digital rights management scheme (in 2009, Apple finally decided to improve the quality to 256 Kbps and remove the DRM from some tracks). The FCC's new improved version of terrestrial radio is 96 Kbps. XM and Sirius satellite radio deliver music at 64 Kbps.
As of early 2009, the 750 GB size is probably the best choice for most people. It is large enough to store all the music within a household, several years worth of digital photography, and also hold backups for files on the various PCs in the house. If you are serious about archiving video, you will need substantially more disk space. A good solution is to purchase a four-slot disk array populated with only two disks. After a year or two, you'll have filled up the first two drives and can add two more. Two years from now, much larger disk drives will be available and therefore you will probably quadruple your storage capacity by adding two more disks.
As far as I can tell, Windows MCE has no facilities for synchronizing the sound in multiple rooms. More problematic, Microsoft believes that all of its best customers are those who sit in front of a television 24/7. Windows MCE seems to think that every room where music is to be selected will have a TV for displaying options. Finally there is the problem that Windows PCs are noisy, generate a lot of heat, and are missing many of the components that you want for whole-house music. A Windows machine will not have a power amplifier, for example, to drive in-wall speakers or other non-powered speakers.
Problems with Apple's approach include the following:
Limitations of the Squeezebox:
You can buy the Squeezebox at amazon.
The basic setup for a 3BR apartment would be as follows. You would have one Zone Player next to the legacy stereo, connected via the line inputs, so that you could play MP3s from your computer on the big speakers and so that you could play your LP records and SACDs through the rest of the house. This Zone Player would not have its loudspeaker outlets connected to anything. You would have another Zone Player in your master bedroom closet, driving two sets of speakers in parallel. The first set of speakers would be conventionally wired to the Zone Player. The second pair of speakers would be in the ceiling of the master bathroom, connected by wires that terminate in a wall-mounted jack inside the closet. You would have a third Zone Player in your home office, next to your computer, because although the Sonos Desktop software runs on a Windows machine or Macintosh, the computer itself won't play what the Zone Players are playing. You might have a fourth Zone player in your kitchen.
I set up a system as described in the previous paragraph in approximately 15 minutes, including informing the Sonos software the location of my music library, which it indexed in a background process.
Its basic capabilities put the Sonos system far ahead of the alternatives in terms of compatibility with legacy stereos and TVs but the details make the system even more impressive.
Network Connectivity. Sonos wants at least one of the Zone Players plugged into a hard-wired Internet connection. Unlike almost any other product on the market, Sonos refrains from hogging the "drop". The back of the Zone Player sports four RJ45 jacks. If you previously had a computer plugged into a network drop, simply run a cable from any of the Zone Player's four ports to the wall and connect the computer to one of the remaining three ports on the Zone Player. A single Zone Player will find other Zone Players on the wired network and also any that are within range of its 802.11n Mbit wireless network transceiver. The Zone Players cooperatively set up an encrypted wireless network that requires no configuration by the consumer and is independent of any wireless network that might have been set up in the same apartment for laptop computers. The encryption ensures that your tech-savvy neighbors can't sniff packets and figure out that, while you've been crusading against rap music at PTA meetings, at home you enjoy Ice Cube's Death Certificate. An unadvertised features of the Sonos system is that it forwards packets it sees on the wired network. Suppose that, for example, you have a McMansion, where a single WiFi base station won't cover the whole house. If you have six or eight Sonos boxes they establish a mesh network where wireless packets need never travel more through one or two walls. You can then plug a laptop or desktop computer into the back of a functioning wirelessly connected Sonos box and it will provide connectivity for the computer.
Legacy Sources. The Sonos's analog line input digitizes signals from a legacy stereo or television at the standard Compact Disk sampling rate of 44.1Khz, 16 bits per sample. If you are only going to play one of these sources at a time in the house, go to "File -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Line-in Encoding Uncompressed" in the Sonos Desktop Controller software to make sure that you don't have compression enabled. The line output level is a bit lower than standard audio components so crank up the volume on any Sonos box that is feeding a legacy stereo.
Party Mode. For those of us who don't have $2-3 million to spare for a single-family home and are forced to live in cramped squalid condo apartments, Sonos offers "party mode" in which changing the source or the song for one Zone Player changes it for all. If you are sensible enough to live in a part of the country where you can afford a house large enough to support different music in different rooms, the Sonos will let you play 32 different streams in 32 different zones. You can switch between "party mode" and ad hoc linking of zones either from the Sonos Desktop Controller on a PC or from the Sonos remote control.
Remote Control. Sonos gives you a hand-sized remote control unit that talks to whichever Zone Player is closest. The controller shows you album cover art, if available, what track is playing, and what track is next. Volume control gets dedicated up, down, and mute keys on the left. The controller has a wheel-style control like an iPod plus a huge display with soft keys. The wheel is used for navigation through the music library. One thing that the remote control does better than the iPod, however, is offering a "power scroll" mode in which you can scroll through the alphabet and then start at "M", for example, rather than having to scroll through every album starting at the beginning. The rechargeable remote control has a motion sensor and wakes up if you pick it up, or if you touch any key. Sonos makes a charging cradle that you can mount on a wall and the remote is splash-resistant if you want to change tracks while sitting in the bathtub.
Subscription Music. Sonos works nicely with Rhapsody, one of the better commercial music services. With Rhapsody you pay $13 per month and get unlimited access to an enormous library of music. The Sonos system can find a PC (Windows-only) running Rhapsody on the network and play tracks that you've added to your library as well as Rhapsody playlists and radio stations. Rhapsody radio stations are virtual and personal; if you don't like a song you just skip ahead to the next one using the Sonos remote control. Rhapsody songs are 128 Kbps when streamed and 160 kbps after you've downloaded them to your local library. Sonos also works with Pandora and Sirius.
Music Purchased Online. The iPod/iTunes world opened up in 2009 and Sonos can play newly purchased DRM-free iTunes tracks. If you got suckered into buying DRM-crippled tracks, the only way to play them on a Sonos is to strip out the DRM with the free JHymn program. Note that using this program in the United States, even to play music that you paid Apple for, may be a criminal act in violation of Bill Clinton's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA; 1998). The Zone Players can deal with files in any of the popular formats, e.g., MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV, so barring a DRM issue you should be able to play any music obtained from any source.
All is not perfect with the Sonos system. The line input introduces about a 100 millisecond delay. If you hook up one Zone Player to your legacy stereo, for example, and play an LP record or SACD that is then broadcast to other zones, the music will come out of the speakers on those other zones just a little bit later than it came out of the main stereo speakers. This is very evident with percussion. If your legacy source is a preamp or receiver with a tape monitor loop, the solution is to connect the Zone Player via the tape monitor loop. When you want to play a legacy source throughout the house, set the legacy stereo on "monitor" so that you are actually playing from the analog line output of the Zone Player. Now everything is in sync but you've compromised the sound quality of the legacy stereo to some extent. Whereas before you had your $1,000 phono cartridge and $5,000 turntable feeding your $5,000 preamp or your high bitrate Super Audio CD, now everything must go through the Zone Player's CD-quality analog-digital and digital-analog converters.
My only other criticism of the Sonos System is that the PC running Sonos Desktop Controller cannot itself function as a zone. This means that you buy a Zone Player and an extra pair of speakers for whatever room in your house already has a computer with attached speakers. This might not be all bad, however, because using a PC for background music has the bad property that application sounds, such as beeps or MIDI music in Web pages, will get piled on top of the music that you're trying to enjoy.
Random Factoids: As of late 2005, Sonos employs about 80 people. John MacFarlane, the CEO, used to fly a Hughes 500 helicopter complete with autopilot (said helicopter subsequently was flown all the way around the world). Engineering is done in Santa Barbara and Cambridge, Massachusetts, with manufacturing in Malaysia.
Where to buy? amazon.com
Traditionally in-wall speakers are rectangular and in-ceiling speakers are circular. Functionally they are very similar, but most listeners find it more natural to face a pair of speakers and therefore in-wall speakers are preferred except for surround or background music. Visit the B&W Web site and click on "custom series" to see a sampling.
For a small to mid-sized room, the CWM 500 will provide excellent sound quality at $500 per pair. B&W's larger and more expensive speakers will deliver more bass response. I have the CWM 500s in my house.