Full home sound?

May 21, 2009 6:47 PM

Four Airport Expresses to full listening environment?

I've noticed that the Airport Express gives you a jack to plug speakers into, and that there is a program called AirFoil that allows you to sync to many Airports at once to play out sound.

Has anyone tried this already, and is there any delay or echo effects between speakers from different Airport Expresses? Are there any downsides to this that one can think of? It seems to be a pretty cheap and fun way to get full home sound.

posted by fantasticninety to technology (12 comments total)

Four streams just so you can have more speakers seems ridiculously overkill and inefficient.
posted by floam at 7:08 PM on May 21

I think the idea is to put them in different rooms so you don't have to run wires.
posted by smackfu at 7:14 PM on May 21

I understand his point.

My point was streaming music four times just so you can hear it in four places within one house seems like inefficient overkill.

The devices cost $100 a piece, you could get enough wire for far less. That, combined with the wifi pollution, plus the general overkill roundaboutness makes it something I would never consider. I would look into cheaper alternatives, including wires, and more "passive" wireless solutions.
posted by floam at 7:25 PM on May 21

I use 4 at my house, 1 for garage, 1 for living room, 1 for bedroom, 1 for office and they work great. I have synced them with mixed results, but generally it's worked out fine if you have standalone systems in different rooms, and the biggest bonus, the wife isn't looking at me sideways wondering why I have wires run all over the place and asking why I'm punching holes in the walls to run more wires.

Itunes can actually broadcast to multiple destinations.
posted by iamabot at 7:31 PM on May 21

It's a great solution. If you combine it with an iPod touch or iPhone and install the free Remote app, you can also work the music from whatever room you're in. The only drawback is you can't have different streams running to different rooms simultaneously: every room either listens to the same stuff, or doesn't listen at all.
posted by fightorflight at 8:06 PM on May 21

I use one express downstairs as a wireless access point and streaming speaker-system tie-in for iTunes. My fiance also uses her ipod touch, as previously mentioned, to control the system. Everything works great, except...

the Airport Express claims to support WPA, and yes, it does, unless you want to use the bridge feature. Then you have to use WEP. Thanks loads, Apple.

Just FYI, if you ever intend to use that feature too.
posted by Phineas Rhyne at 10:04 PM on May 21

Yes, multizone works. I've tested it with an AE, ATV and the Airfoil speakers (essentially turning a computer/laptop into a streamable device). YMMV though as all my devices are wired, and I'm not sure how latency will affect synchronization on wireless.

It isn't a great solution, but it works. If you can afford it, the Sonos system has the best simultaneous multizone solution.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:17 PM on May 21

I have two in two rooms of my 3 room apartment, and they are sync'd just fine. I'm very sensitive to things being off sync (house DJ) and I don't notice it at all when walking between rooms while I can hear both. I don't know if the same would be true in the SAME room.

Airfoil added multiple destination support before iTunes, but iTunes does it just fine now.
posted by flaterik at 1:02 AM on May 22 [1 favorite]

Phineas Rhyne: You don't have to drop back to WEP to use bridging; "WPA/WPA2 Personal" works fine, but "WPA2 Personal" doesn't.

At least, it does with an old G-only AEx (firmware 6.3) I have hanging off a network of N/G AEx's (firmware 7.3.2). I suspect when configured in bridge or WDS modes, Airports will only talk WPA between themselves (but, in WDS mode, will talk WPA2 to client devices).

But, as others have said, the cheapest way to get full-home sound is to forget the AEx's - the $100 you'd spend on each will buy you 300m of speaker cable and a cheap electric drill...
posted by Pinback at 1:30 AM on May 22

To everyone that just keeps saying "run wire": what exactly are you proposing?

Running speaker wire requires powering all of the speakers from one location. Most receivers have, at most, two zones, and the second is likely to be stereo only. So for four location that means two receivers in one place. That means you can only control volume or settings from the single location.

If you're going to run signal level out from a source, you run into different problems. One is that you're likely running unbalanced RCA cables, which are very sensitive to interference and noise over long runs. If you're going 200', it's GOING to be noticeable. The other is that you likely don't have four master outputs, and you can't just indefinitely split RCA without another level of signal degradation.

And of course there's the fun of running cables like that. It's a fair amount of effort to do in a way that's not unsightly. If you have carpet, you can run along the baseboards, but it's difficult to get the carpet back in place. If you don't have carpet, then either you've got bare wires running along the floor or you're going to spend a lot of time and money installing wiremold type things.

Don't try to tell me you can run it inside of the walls. Anything that a straight pass-through is effectively impossible.

The airport express solution is actually pretty damn elegant and fairly cost effective, especially if you're already using iTunes and other apple products. Adding an iPhone and the remote app is about the only time I feel like I'm living in the future. And it's not like I'm afraid of running cabling or setting up complex sound solutions - I run a 5000 watt professional sound system for FUN.
posted by flaterik at 12:52 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

Thanks for some great answers from everyone. The last one really takes the cake. If have hardwood floors, wiring everywhere is not a great option. Also, the amount of power it takes to power speakers everywhere is considerable.

I'm surprised Mac doesn't advertise this product for this very purpose. It's like someone's invented a bike and tries to sell it as a coat hanger.
posted by fantasticninety at 1:56 PM on May 22

While iTunes will let you do multi-room audio w/ the same audio stream going to all zones at once, airfoil will let you serve different streams to different zones. But the streams have to be from different audio sources. So you could have one from iTunes going to one or more zones, and then one from something like MJ Jukebox or a second iTunes instance.
posted by reddot at 8:01 PM on May 25