Wireless Turntable Setup
2Over the years I have amassed quite a large collection of vinyl. I currently have an Audio-Tehnica turntable hooked up to a Bose Wave Radio (not sure which one, but I believe it is from the Crestaceous Period). I love the sound it produces, but my music is limited to one part of my house. I was looking into Sonos, but it looks almost like I will have to take out a second mortgage in order to afford the whole setup. Does anyone have a wireless setup that they recommend?
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Does the music have to be perfectly in sync or are the rooms far enough apart that you wouldn’t notice a slight delay?
@medz I would like for it to be in sync, if possible. What would cause it to be out of sync?
@wmbarr If you’re using a hodgepodge of multiple bluetooth transmitters/receivers, using cable splitters, and/or using a combination of wired and wireless speakers.
One scenario I used to have was I had an Amazon Echo connected to a speaker inside the house and I was using a 3.5 mm splitter to RCA adapter to also connect it to a receiver that played on outdoor speakers. Even though the sound was coming from the same source, the two devices weren’t exactly in sync. Being that the speakers were outside, you couldn’t really notice.
Another scenario I used to have was 1 Echo device was hard-wired to the in-home sound while another was connected to a bluetooth speaker. when I played music to the “everywhere” group (both Echos), the sound coming from the bluetooth speaker was delayed. I’ve since resolved this by just getting more Echo devices to where I don’t need to use Bluetooth.
@medz how noticeable was the delay? If I used splitters with a couple of the same transmitters, do you think there would be a large delay?
@wmbarr Are you wanting to use any existing speakers or looking for a brand-new setup? If you have a bunch of radios lying around, you might be able to use an FM transmitter to send audio from the record player to the radios. Good transmitters, however, may be around $50. My bro used this one (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CM2VPMQ) in a drive-in movie type of setup so that high school kids could listen to the movie on the outdoor projector while in their cars. Some birthday party or something, I don’t recall… It worked well, though.
@wmbarr The wired + bluetooth setup was annoyingly noticeable because the rooms were adjacent. If you have a splitter going to 2 identical bluetooth transmitters and those connected to two identical bluetooth speakers, it might be ok. I haven’t tried that. There may also be products out there that allow you to bluetooth to multiple speakers. Keep in mind bluetooth doesn’t have great range.
@medz how were you able to use an echo for an audio input. As far as I am aware, it only has output abilities.
@wmbarr Input wise, you can send bluetooth audio to an echo dot. Output can be bluetooth, 3.5 mm cable, or internal speaker.
It’s also possible I’m getting confused with how I used to have things set up. I used to only have 1 echo dot and and 1 big echo. It may have been set up to play over the big echo’s internal speaker and the echo dot was sending audio via bluetooth to a receiver.
@wmbarr If you like the Rolling Stones, there is a documentary called “Live On Copacabana Beach” which has a short segment on why there is a delay when there are multiple speakers at various distances from the source of the sound.
The explanation starts around nine minutes in.
/youtube live on copacabana beach
I would strongly suggest going with Sonos. For sure it’s expensive, but if you build your system slowly, maybe you can put together what you want over a few years.
Having tried a few different ways to do this, I can tell you that Sonos just works. It’s one of my only electronics endeavors that my luddite wife actually uses, enjoys, and appreciates.
@shahnm I figured that would be the case. Everyone who has Sonos seems to love it for the simplicity it offers.
Alternatively, you could get a small FM transmitter & use radios/receivers wherever you want the audio. Since there’s no conversion to digital and potential buffering, there’d be negligible difference in the audio. Banggood has small, legal transmitters. Also ebay.
I use Google Chromecast Audio (CCA) devices in three rooms at the moment… I’m not aware of a good “live source” streaming solution for that, but you might look into it, as each CCA is only $35, and you can group them in any way you want to play and can add in a delay for any of the rooms so they sync up when playing the same audio.
The CCAs only play streams from a server, so something would have to be that server - either the cloud or there may be an app that could turn a laptop, old phone etc into a live-streaming server (?), but I’m not sure where to look for that.
If you’ve got enough time on your hands and you’re not looking to always handle the vinyl, etc, you could use a Vinyl-to-mp3 turntable to build up a collection of digital recordings of your vinyl, and put them in the cloud, like Google Play Music, or a local MP3 server, like Plex. You’d then be able to cast any of your recordings anywhere, including other houses, on supported TVs, etc…
If only there was some sort of invisible medium that could propagate sound waves. Maybe like a breathable gas mixture with which you could flood your house. Nah… that’s just crazy.
Just bite the bullet and get a couple Sonos play 1 speakers. They’re not too bad if you’re used to Bose prices