wireless speakers on a Mac

December 2, 2007 1:54 PM

I'm wanting to send sound to and from a remote room in a house to a Macintosh sound in and out ports. I'm thinking wireless mic and wireless speakers. This is inside a standard ranch style house that spreads horizontally and would cross several walls.

Okay, so the long story. I'd like to flood my house in different places with the same audio stream. So, it seems like a wireless speaker system would be the way to do that.

If would be even better if I could select which sets of speakers are active from a Macintosh computer running OS X.

I want to couple that with a sound in wireless pickup that is also wireless. It doesn't have to be part of the same speaker setup but that would be ideal. At least, the two systems should be compatible in proximity. It would be great if the Mac could turn individuals mics on or off but that's not as critical.

So, speakers first, then mics.

posted by D-ten to technology (5 comments total)

Apple's AirPort Express routers have 1/8" outs. You can attach speakers to those. Depending on how many sets of speakers you have, though, that could get prohibitively expensive. You'll probably also want Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil, which lets you do fancy things like stream audio to multiple AirPort Express routers at once.

I'm not sure how to do the wireless mic setup.
posted by danb at 2:08 PM on December 2, 2007

Also, FYI, iTunes + Airport will give you a little dropdown in itunes that allows you to pick any given audio-out on the network, given that the device is visible to iTunes (other macs with iTunes running, Airport Express). I am skeptical that you would be able to direct itunes to multiple audio outs via this method, however.
posted by mwhybark at 6:05 PM on December 2, 2007

You can stream to multiple airport expresses now. At least, that's what the internet says. I only have one airport express. I can at least play music on the computer and the airport at the same time.
posted by low affect at 8:07 PM on December 2, 2007

Fourthing the airport express for playback; I've got three of them, simultaneous playback to all at once is flawless (and as a bonus you get a wifi network throughout the house thrown into the deal.) The signal is quite strong, though some wireless phones interfere with it. (Which I choose to view as a positive: when I answer the phone, the music automatically shuts off until I hang up.)

No idea how you'd get the audio streaming from each room back to the mac, though.
posted by ook at 12:16 PM on December 3, 2007

(And, yes, you can choose which speakers are active; itunes just gives you a list of checkboxes for each speaker, you can turn each one on or off as needed. The only thing you can't do easily is send different audio to different speakers at the same time.)
posted by ook at 12:18 PM on December 3, 2007