Anyone know how to transmit audio wirelessly from hifi to speakers?

The problem: my better half has decided it would be nice to listen to the radio or cd in the bathroom whilst she has a shower or soak**. The plan: to install a single, but stereo, speaker in the bathroom ceiling which would be connected to existing stereo system. No controls or high quality required, just a stereo speaker. That's where the problems start.

18c house with solid walls. Bathroom and stereo are both ground floor, separated by 2 single skin brick walls and a hallway, total distance about 5m.

Possible solutions: battery powered portable radio/cd. Herself not impressed.

Hardwire from hifi to speaker. Very difficult without going vertically to loft, across loft and then down to bathroom. There is no way of running cables via any route from stereo to bathroom otherwise, the way the hall and stairs are built prohibits this. Cable run from hifi to speaker would be about 25M and would cause problems in bedroom above stereo. It would be possible to wire externally but this would not be easy given the layout of the house etc and is hardly ideal.

Another hifi in bedroom above operated by remote from bathroom. A good possibility but I have tried a couple of hifi's in this way and the remote won't work through the ceiling.

Transmit audio wirelessly to speaker. I have googled this for hours and cannot find a solution. Plenty of ways to transmit from pc to stereo system but I can find anything to do what I want. We don't have ipods or similar, just want a speaker (not Bercow) in the bathroom. Aside from the physical difficulties of laying wiring, the bathroom has just been totally rebuilt and the entire upstairs was recarpetted within the last

6 months. Any access for wiring etc.to the bathroom has to come from the airing cupboard in the bedroom above.

Many thanks, Nick.

** before anyone say it, bad planning on my part
Reply to
Nick
Loading thread data ...

There are *loads* of wireless audio senders about...

formatting link
these will send line level audio and not something you could drive a speaker directly with.

There is the fundamental limitation that you need an amplifier to drive the speaker. This could be an active speaker (which means it needs power), or a separate amp of some sort, or a direct connection to the main amp on the hifi.

How about a small media player and active speakers? You could use homeplug ethernet adaptors or WiFi to get data to the media player. That is small enough to mount above the ceiling with a tiny window to allow the IR remote control to illuminate it. You would still need power up their obviously, and then a computer or a NAS box to act as a media server.

Reply to
John Rumm

No Controls. Check.

OK, not such a good plan.

I thought you said no controls? This is by far the best solution. If you

*do* want to use a remote then you should use a hard-wired remote control sender, such as Dinky Link.

formatting link
formatting link
for a receiver

formatting link
for an emitter

You will also need cable and a power supply. Give them a call and they'll help you to get a compatible set of parts.

===

You could also use a radio/wireless remote control extender, but I don't recommend this for a bathroom as it will be steamy and you will have to run the power in from outside the bathroom anyway.

===

This is perfect for ceiling mount but they're £86.95 each and I'm not sure they're water resistant. Better get the cheaper one and replace it if necessary.

formatting link
Finally, you can get them on Ebay as well, but the usual arrangement is that the gubbins are in the receiver which needs to be powered. Simply automate will give you a system that can be powered from the emitter end in the bedroom adjacent to the hifi. Don't buy one for a Sky box as these use the satellite downlead to transmit the signal.

Reply to
Dave Osborne

Just got these wireless speakers last week and they're brilliant

formatting link
(link goes to dabs.com).

Reply to
John

I can't see how this is going to work. It's one thing to transmit signal wirelessly, power is another thing altogether.

From your computer to a stereo system you're only talking about milliwatts of RF power, if that. Any audio speaker is driven by whole watts (look up the power output of your stereo system). If you want your speaker to receive (say) a watt of RF power, you're gonna have to broadcast some hundreds of watts, I would have thought, since the speaker is only going to receive a small fraction of what is broadcast.

You'll need a substantial transmitter and a transmitting licence.

Reply to
Tim Streater

reminds me of a tale I heard years ago about some "inventor" who took some microwave powered cordless speakers in to try and sell the idea I think to KEF or Marshall ...anyway allegedly they were powered by microwave transmissions along which the audio was somehow encoded too

- apparently he was the only one who would stay in the room when they were turned on.....

JimK

Reply to
JimK

As has been explained, the receiver needs either its own power or wired connection to the audio signal. Can't get round the basic laws of physics there.

I havent seen the exact layout, but it sounds like a typical ideal appliaction for enamelled copper wire. This wire is - or can be - so thin that it can be run all sorts of places without being noticed, even in plain sight.

formatting link

Reply to
NT

Not really practical. Your hifi consists of a sound source (tuner / MP3 / CD), power amplifier and then speakers. As the amplifier uses a moderate amout of power, then you either have to supply mains to it, or feed it batteries. There's no way to drive the speakers alone by wireless, as they need that amplified signal and that's too much power to send by wireless, unless you're Nikola Tesla. "Speakers that don't need amplifiers" still have an amp, it's just hidden in the same box (and thus needs a power supply to it).

You can broadcast the low power signal wirelessly, but there's not much point as it doesn't solve the problem of the high power connection.

On the whole, I'd go for a radio / MP3 player in the bathroom with battery powered speakers. These cost tuppence ha'penny these days and work pretty well. So long as it uses D cells, not AA, and you get some NiMH rechargeables, then it's workable and has a good battery life. It's not as if you need much volume in a bathroom.

If you want media streaming from a home media server, then a Nokia 770 is a simple cheap client device for this. Ours have survived bathroom use.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

interesting - but what's the sound quality like?

Cheers JimK

Reply to
JimK

Depends on the speakers - I was doing this with some cheap battery- boosted active speakers fed a signal from the headphone jack, so bass would be pathetic (speaker size) but the Nokia's sound quality is generally reasonable. As a handheld client for media streaming over domestic WiFi, it's fine.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

I find the periodic time-checks on radio very helpful to stop me spending an hour in the bath when really I should be out to work in 20 mins.

If both rooms are ground floor can you go below the floor, or is it solid?

Not stereo, but you could inject the audio signal into the mains wiring, and retrieve it with a small receiver/amplifier mounted in, near or above the bathroom, which will almost certainly have a mains light or shaver point or possibly both.

Cordless headphones (not the infra-red ones, they won't work through walls)?

Owain

Reply to
Owain

Including Ohm's law, which hasn't been considered in the following :-)

requires cables that are somewhat thicker than "thin" enamelled copper wire, especially over a long distance. The voltage drop across even a moderate length would kill any power appearing at the low resistance speaker coil. Additionally, bare enamelled copper wire is not suitable for applications where there is likely to be any mechanical rubbing of the wires

The OP could look at installing a 100v line speaker system, but that will require a suitable amplifier output to drive the 100v signal

Reply to
John Weston

0.35mm^2 copper wire is apx 0.14 ohm per metre. 20m of that is under 3 ohms, which is fine for an 8 ohm bathroom speaker.

its fine for this app. The amount of rubbing it encounters in such use is minimal. I've used enamelled copper like this for years.

any audio amplifier can drive a 100v line transformer. But there's not much point in this case.

NT

Reply to
NT

If you dont mind a fairly nasty bass resonance I suppose it is, yes.

Far better to run '100V line' systems.

Gawd save us!

Well the fact that you don't understand that, says it all, really.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I had a feeling the old bass myths would be wheeled out. In practice the effect on bass response is small.

works perfectly satisfactorily

There are cases for going 100v line, but this isnt one of them.

NT

Reply to
NT

The aonly adjustment I have ever made to a HiFi that made any real difference was swapping speaker cable from "72 strand" of probably less than 1mm^2 to "1024 strand" of 2.5mm^2. There was a noticeable improvement to the bass end. Mind you this was proper HiFi, 12" paper cone bass drivers and 100W RMS per channel turned up to "a decent level". B-)

I doubt that "thin wire" would be particuarly noticeable with a tiny speaker and low power.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Yes, quite. There is a myth that modern speakers are heavily damped by amplifiers, but in fact moving coil speakers have a coil resistance that's in the ballpark of half their impedance, so only a little electrical damping is possible when being driven by a voltage source, as virtually all modern amps are. In reality what damping is present in modern speakers comes mainly from air resistance, speaker suspension and their being stuck in small boxes. And finally, complete damping is undesirable, hence all consumer amps are voltage source amps, not current source ones. These are why adding 3 ohms to a modern

8 ohm speaker makes minimal difference. With a small speaker in a bathroom its just not an issue.

NT

Reply to
NT

Yes but 4mm twin and earth is even better for speakers if you can bend it to fit. I had some 10mm multi strand stuff as used in power distribution for exchanges and that was even better.

Reply to
dennis

How about a lightspeaker?

formatting link

Reply to
Andy Burns

NT

Reply to
NT

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.