grw110

Great idea! Based on what I saw, I bet that will do the trick. Does anyone have experience with Airfoil - or Audacity - or, similar software? I'd love to get an opinion on the quality of a solution like this - or what alternatives out there may be worth checking out also.

Hi, I'm looking for an inexpensive solution to 'bridge' or tunnel analog audio over an in-home IP connection. The audio originates from the line-out of one device, to the line-in of my outdoor speakers/amp setup. It can be transported over TCP or UDP is fine - basically, transport can be any packets supported by consumer switches/WiFi AP's. For the scenario, think: being able to follow the action of a sports broadcast when I go from home-theater room, to outside my house, where my outdoor speakers are. I always want the outdoor speakers to be a 'slave' to the indoor 'master' - and not control them independently. I'm not aware of any 'bridge' device pairs that will tunnel audio over IP from a 'transmitter' to a 'receiver.' Devices like this exist for Bluetooth... but, I need to span a large distance, and figure I should be able to leverage the my wired/WiFi home network to achieve this, and not worry about audio quality, or bluetooth profiles, etc. Bridge pairs like this also exist for extending HDMI - but these are typically not IP; they just use a Cat5/6 cable for transport. Also - the intent is to not break the bank - I'm hoping for decent audio quality (does a reasonable job with uncompressed FLACs of CD audio) for at or less than $200. Thoughts? Does such a device exist? I have a spare laptop - I'm wondering if a reasonable solution would be to set the laptop up to stream the audio coming into a mic port, over the home network to an Airplay receiver (i.e. the $50-ish Airport Express variety). I'm not versed in AirPlay, but an AirPort Express seems like a pretty reliable and well-tested piece of gear for this.

Hi, I'm a reasonably capable Sonos user and sufficiently technical overall, and wanted to be sure I'm thinking the right away about the capabilities of gear I want to buy to extend my Sonos setup. Basically, I want to try something like a pair of Apple Airport Expresses, to tunnel music from one 'master' Sonos zone, and create a slave' zone. The 'slave' zone will just mirror the first, and won't operate independently in any way. I've noticed that a Sonos Connect outputs audio on the optical/SPDIF port at the same time it's outputting on the RCA analog output (somewhat obvious, but I verified just to be sure). I think this should let me use a pair of Apple Airport Expresses configured as pure 'audio bridges' - i.e. just tunneling the audio input from one Express, over regular home-network IP, to the other bridge, where it re-emerges via line-out as regular audio out. Can those devices operate that way? I'm fairly sure they can be enabled to just 'tunnel' audio this way - but wonder if I'm missing something. The only real downside to this setup (vs. buying another Sonos Connect) is I'll control volume at the 'slave' zone via the amplifier - which is fine. (same with turning it on or off). The basic idea is that I'd like to avoid or delay paying the $400/$500 for each outdoor area I want to enable, for each Connect or Connect:Amp that Sonos would prefer I buy. I have some existing old amplifiers that are unused and will drive my speakers just fine. And, I'm fine if all the outdoor areas are considered one zone: I don't have a need to play music separately in the 'slave' zone(s), and if I drive speakers with a discrete amp, I can turn those amps on or off to enable or disable them. Anything I'm missing? Can Airport Expresses, or some other analog-audio-to-ethernet bridge pair, meet the need? I presume there's no conflicts using them this way on the same network -- I'll never control them in 'AirPlay' mode, I believe. Airport Expresses seem best for this since they're pretty well-tested and debugged at this point. D-Link has something similar, but looks dodgy and may be UK-only. thoughts?