Over the last several weeks, we’ve done some renovation of our house and I needed a stereo solution. Here is a quick rundown of the situation.
The family room stereo runs a set of speakers for the kitchen and it is hard wired to the speakers on the back deck. Easy enough. The renovation however, added a new set of speakers in a room with no wiring. It was close enough to the kitchen that it needed to be “in-sync” with those speakers but enough of an individual room that simply cranking up the volume was acceptable. So that was the problem.
For the last few years I had my music on iTunes and I’ve had an AirPort for an upstairs TV room. It has worked great and so after some research, I set out to expand the network. I looked at various ways to try and get sound into that room without having to run wires through the house and I ended falling back to AirPorts to ship the music around the house.
The good news is I timed this move about right! I think Apple added support to play music through multiple AirPorts around January of this year. So, now the solution is I have 3 AirPorts scattered throughout the house attached to various sets of speakers. I can now either use my “main” computer to play songs OR use a laptop that has access to the song lists via “Shared Music”.
Last night we had a little party and I must say, it worked very nicely so all in all – a success. Laptop down in the kitchen area to control the music for the party. Everything wirelessly connected with no actual music on the laptop running the show.
I didn’t say it was absolutely simple, but it is very doable. Here are some of the issues:
- - Needed to update firmware on the older AirPort. New ones are good out of the box. This allowed the multi-speaker send functionality support.
- - Configuring AirPorts, in general, to work with my PC router was not super easy. Maybe not super hard, but I was pretty router ignorant and that fact had to be addressed to get things up and running.
- - Still had to wire the new speakers in room to the amplifier to avoid “wireless” speakers – which I just don’t trust yet to do a decent job.
- - Not cheap – each new AirPort is $99 and speakers and amplifiers aren’t free either, but relative to having to pay to get the rooms all hardwired into a main stereo system for the house; I came out way ahead.
If you have questions or need help, post a comment. I’ve done this and learned quite a bit and might be able to offer some quick pointers.
