Streaming audio wirelessly around the home

My Sonos wireless music system is one of the best gadgety things I've bought in recent years.
Now I have 4 rooms around the house where I can stream my choons.

As I listen to a lot of radio — like TV programmes, I can't always be there to listen to it at the time. As a soul music nut, it's a great source of getting new choons to stream over Spotify, Last FM or iTunes on the Sonos.

First off, I got curious around Airplay over Sonos.  I thought this would  be good to throw audio from my iOS device to the Sonos rooms without the needs for buying extra Sonos gear.  The Airport Express wired to a Sonos Play:5 solution works pretty well.  It is prone to irregular sound drops from time to time.  I think this is related to the number of hops the connection has to make over the main home wifi and the Sonos mesh.  Tip of the day — Connect the Airport Express to the Sonos zone you will mainly use for more consistent connected performance.

Going back to the radio thing.  I use some cool software on my Mac by Rogue Ameoba. I use Radioshift for Mac to schedule recordings of shows I like to playback later. Mainly Solar Radio. (Note that Radioshift is no longer available).  I then use the Fission app to open the MP4 file of the show I recorded and edit out tracks I want to keep. Then export to iTunes to sync with the iOS device or be part of the Sonos connected music iTunes library (which is all stored on my NAS drive anyway).

An article appeared on Ars Technica, extolling the virtues of Rogue Ameoba's other product for streaming audio wirelessly around the home - Airfoil.  This was the piece I was looking for (instead of wiring in a 3.5mm stereo between the Mac and my Sonos Play:5). When playing back the audio from Radioshift, Fission or any other audio touting app on the Mac, Airfoil connects it to the Sonos Zones via the Airplay connected Apple Express.

Again, reliability is not 100% as any wireless activity on the home network seems to cause problems with the quality of the streaming. Probably a clash of packets. I do get tempted by the wired connection from time to time.

So in essence, if you have a Sonos system:

• Airplay is worth exploring via a connected Airport Express to a Sonos Play:5. It's great to throw audio  from any iOS connected device to the one or more Sonos zones. Nice for parties :)
• If you have audio stuck on your Mac (or Windows if you have to), Airfoil is a nice complement to getting Mac audio streamed around the home.

Worth it?  IMO yes, each of the products mentioned are relatively inexpensive and are well designed and easy to use.  And I'm sure I'll find other useful ways of using this as I tinker with it.

Of course you can see that Airfoil is a temporary solution, as Apple are likely to be baking in this functionality in a future release of OSX.

Dangers with buying tech on a whim

I've had a Sony LED TV for a number of months now.  One of their Smart TVs.  Have been very happy with it and works very well.  Sound is much weaker and "tinny" compared to my Panasonic Plasma of a few years back, but good lord, the Sony is a lot cheaper to run.

So while out with the missus one weekend, I ended up buying a soundbar for the TV.  I got the recently announced Bose Cinemate 1SR model.  

The Bose Cinemate 1 SR - good package, let down by some feature shortcomings and the price

Nice unit, minimalist design, has wireless sub and they got me in the store 'cos they played a scene from the last Star Trek movie which demo'd to me how much of a better soundstage I would have at home using one of these.  The unit had a clunky learning remote which I could deal with, but I quickly latched on to turning the sound bar into a Sonos zone as I could connect a ZP90 to either the optical or coax digital inputs.

Mind you, the damn thing was expensive.  But off I went home, hooked it up and was reasonably satisfied with the sound via Sky, Apple TV (v1), and Blu-Ray discs.  The fun started, when I tried to connect to it to my Sonos system.

Cut a long story short. It turns out that the Bose inputs are a bit different to what you would expect.  While it has analog, optical and coax TV inputs, alongside Auxillary optical and coax, it only uses the one with the best quality signal.  Therefore, to hook up the Sonos to play music through it, either a) the TV is off and therefore not feeding an optical signal to the soundbar or b) you add an optical switcher like this one to direct one signal to the soundbar.  Bit of a pfaff, but I got it working.  

Most of all, very miffed to spend more than a grand only to add a workaround afterwards.

My fellow geeky mate in the office had been suggesting the Yamaha YSP-220 while I was doing all of this.  

Yamaha DSP-220 - the affordable sound-bar for the cinephile

I was resistant at first, but given the Bose was on a 30-day trial, I decided to give the Yammy a go. It's a full AV switching unit and unlike the Bose, it does all the signal processing inside the box. Therefore, the Sonos integration worked straight away. 

Even better, it adds the widely regarded Yammy Cinema DSP modes, a host of other features and uses such as automatically turning off the TV speakers and routing sound via the Yammy instead.  This means no need for a separate remote as the family uses the one Sky+ remote to work the TV and satellite.  And most of all, it cost £500 less and sounds as good, if not better.  Yes, you read that right.  Only downside was the wired sub, but that is now behind the TV and cabinet.

You know what happened next right?

So morale of the story, if you do buy stuff on a whim, make sure you have a no quibble return period agreed up front.  Otherwise, do your research first when buying stuff:)