July 17, 2009 – There are a lot of products out there that promise to rid your life of pesky wires. Wires for your headphones, wire for your media server, wires for your speakers; the magic of radio waves eliminates the need for a rat’s nest of audio cable. Personally, I do not use wireless methods to listen to my music as I’m not crazy about signals flying all over the place and causing interference when I’m recording music.
However, when I’m visiting sites like Lifehacker and Gizmodo, both editors and commenting visitors extol the virtues of products like Apple’s Airport Express. In fact, people all over the internet seem to use wireless ways to listen to music. However, I don’t know anyone personally who does. It seems to me that interference and squished bandwidth would cause a degradation in signal. Do any of you listen to music through wireless speakers or headphones? Do you use a product like the Airport Express? How does it sound?
7 Comments, Comment or Ping
Sebastien Orban
Same as you – heck, I don’t even have wifi activated on my modem. To be honest it’s maybe because I use an old fashion hifi amplifier to listen to music and to do music for now. All those wireless solution are not up to my need for now.
But it can be of some interest – I’m thinking especially about those surround system – the cabling can be problematic, and most of the time proprietary. But it’s an exception, at least for me !
Jul 18th, 2009
DJSDive
Heh, I am in the same situation. I am pondering looking into using the Airfoil app. Would be nifty if someone would combine this app with a MIDI controller app like the iTouchmidi line, to also be able to properly cue up songs wirelessly without any additional hardware. Pacemaker iPhone app
Jul 20th, 2009
Sean
@ DJSDIVE : Hmm…I’ve seen videos on DJTechTools where they’re triggering Traktor with an iPhone over WiFi…so I’m sure it can be done.
Jul 20th, 2009
matt
It doesn’t need to degrade the music at all — a wireless G signal can send several megabytes per second, and an uncompressed WAV file is less than a megabyte per second (roughly 10 MB per minute) … no problem sending that over a wireless network. And wireless music solutions can intelligently (and losslessly) compress the audio file further, so that it’s less of a bandwidth hog.
Personally, I’ve used a Squeezebox and several Airport Expresses, and love them both. I take them completely for granted now — walking from one room and having the same music playing in sync in both (if we want it to), and viewing and changing songs with my phone… it’s really nice. And the Airport Express connects to the stereo via optical S/PDIF, and is a bit-perfect representation of what is being sent from iTunes (which is another matter entirely — I’m not a big iTunes fan, but the wireless distribution is mighty nice).
I didn’t think I was all that cutting-edge or high-tech, though. I have three Airport Express gadgets, all bought refurbished and cheap (two are Wireless G, bought after the Wireless N models were released, on clearance).
Jul 27th, 2009
Sean
@Matt: I stand corrected. I did not know that the compression algorithms were lossless.
Jul 27th, 2009
matt
Important to note that Bluetooth wireless systems have much less bandwidth, so Bluetooth speakers and headsets do have to use lossy algorithms. And they generally sound crappy.
The Airport Express and Squeezebox, though, are worth checking out.
Jul 28th, 2009
DJSDive
@Sean: yeah .. the problem is the lack of multi tasking on the iphone. in order to run both airfoil and the iphone midi app, you need two iphone/ipod touch .. in other words one per app you want to run
Aug 2nd, 2009
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