Expanding Your Home Entertainment Center with Wireless Adapters

Expanding Your Home Entertainment
Center with Wireless Adapters
Nothing is worse than having a great piece of entertainment gear that you
want to get onto your home network, but the nearest outlet is yards away,
and you don’t have a cable long enough to plug it in. So you can forgive
Danny when he had his brand new, networking-capable ReQuest, Inc.
AudioReQuest system (www.request.com) with no Ethernet connection near
it to plug it into. The AudioReQuest — a digital music server; see Figure 13-2
to see how the server sends music throughout the house — is a great example
of the type of network-enabled audio gear coming down the pike. Capable
of storing as many CDs as you have (you can add additional storage by their
swappable hard drives or getting higher capacity units), this is the ultimate
in CD listening pleasure.
And with a device like the AudioReQuest TV Navigator Interface, you can use
your TV screen as the interface to your music collection. A bright, TV screenbased
user interface enables you to select and play your music, create
playlists from albums and artists stored in the system, and enjoy pulsating
music-driven graphics on the TV set’s display. That’s a lot better than a twoline
liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. And it’s easy to use — loading (ripping)
a new CD into the system is as easy as opening the CD tray and closing
it. The AudioReQuest determines whether the CD is already loaded in your
system and then looks up the name of the album and artist in its internal
database of 650,000 albums; if the system can’t find the CD, it checks a
master database on the Internet.
The AudioReQuest has an onboard internal Web server that allows access to
this music from wherever you want, be it in the house or over the Internet.
You can also add other units to the system and network them. Danny has one
unit in his house in Maine and another in his house in Connecticut, and they
stay synchronized. What’s more, multiple units enable you to have a backup
of your collection in case your hard drive crashes.
Higher-end ReQuest units also support WAV and FLAK (lossless compression —
meaning you’ll get higher fidelity audio quality) protocols for those who want
audio fidelity. (These protocols take up more space on the hard drive but preserve
the nuances of the music.)
It’s truly the future of music in the entertainment center. An entry-level Audio-
ReQuest Nitro system costs about $2,500 and scales up from there depending
on storage capacity and extra features. This is the box that you put in your
home if you’re serious about music!
The AudioReQuest also has onboard networking installed, just like your PC,
with an Ethernet outlet for interconnecting with your home network. The
only problem? No wireless connectivity, as we mention above. But because
the AudioReQuest has an Ethernet outlet, it’s easy to use a wireless bridge
(which we discuss in Chapter 12) to bring it onboard to your wireless home
network. Danny’s using a D-Link (www.d-link.com) DWL-810 Wireless
Ethernet Bridge (802.11b) to link it into his wireless network.
(As soon as he finishes this book, Danny’s going to extend his AudioReQuest
to syncing with his car stereos, too — over wireless computer network
connections.)
Entertainment devices such as the Microsoft Xbox (www.xbox.com) and
ReplayTV (www.replaytv.com) can also connect to a network with the DLink
Wireless Ethernet Bridge via their built-in Ethernet ports. The Ethernet
bridge works because Danny has an Ethernet port on his audio server. But
what about situations where there is no networking outlet option at all (no
USB, no Ethernet, no onboard wireless)?
Not a problem. A new slew of wireless networking gear sports RCA jacks —
the same jacks used to connect your sources into your receiver. These make
it easy to connect non-audio gear into the home entertainment network.
These wireless audio transmitters will transmit audio from your PC to your
stereo without the use of cables.
Right now, most of this gear is using proprietary signaling — not Bluetooth or
802.11 — to transmit their signals. As a result, the signals are mostly point-topoint,
linking a PC, say, with your entertainment center. As we write, 802.11b
products are coming on the market that enable any compatible device in
range to pick up the signals, making your entertainment center more accessible
by lots of devices, from your PC to your audio server in your car. Get an
802.11-based product if you have the choice.
For instance, the RCA Model RD 900W Lyra Wireless (www.rca.com; $99)
device sends crystal-clear digital audio from your PC to your stereo, as
depicted in Figure 13-3. Just plug it into your PC’s USB jack on the one end
and the entertainment center’s RCA jacks on the other, and you’re ready to
go. Unfortunately, as of this printing, the Lyra uses 900 MHz technology, not
standardized 802.11 chips, to accomplish this. Jensen’s Matrix Internet Audio
Transmitter (www.jensen.com) Model JW901 works the same way: a 900 MHz
connection between the PC and stereo. X10’s Entertainment Anywhere
(www.x10.com) uses a proprietary 2.4 MHz signal.
The Linksys (www.linksys.com; $120) Wireless Digital Media Adapter is an
802.11b-based transmitter. It resides in home entertainment centers next to
the television and stereo. The device resembles the Linksys access point,
with two 802.11b antennas. Instead of connecting to an Ethernet port like a
normal AP, the device is equipped with audio/video connectors. To process
JPEG, MP3, and WMA digital content from a networked PC, the adapter uses
Intel’s XScale architecture PXA250 application processor. By using Universal
Plug and Play (UPnP) technology, the adapter can be easily set up to work
with other UPnP devices on the network such as a Linksys wireless router or
its car networking technology (under development in early 2003). The
bottom line on these adapters: Look for wireless adapters that enable you to
take ordinary devices and get them on your home wireless backbone.