rrweather wrote: > Our house appears to be a WiFi nightmare. This happens more than people think, streaming media is intolerant of problems that just using WiFi to your notebook never sees.
> The SB touch looks promising. I don't know much about the antennas or > its ability to operate wireless without problems. Well, its still in beta, but the hardware design is finished. My beta unit works great wirelessly. > I am not trying to turn this into a SB vs. Sonos debate. That is the > last thing I want. I don't have a Sonos, and have lots of squeezeboxen, so I can't even enter such a debate. I can say that for my serious stereo, which cost low five figures, I ran CAT5 to my Transporter, because when I'm seriously listening, I don't want to be distracted. In my house, the microwave oven destroys all WiFi when ever it is on. I've got a Duet, and I really like the Controller. I don't consider the Touch to be a competitor to the Duet, because you have to go over and touch the Touch to directly control it (I also use my laptop to control everything), so for me, the spacial separation of the Receiver and Controller is a winner. I keep the Controller next to my favorite listening chair, within easy hand reach. There is no stereo next to my favorite chair, its over on the other side of the room. A major question is what file formats do you use. I use FLAC nearly exclusively, and they are big and stress the network. All modern Squeezebox have buffers and can tolerate small outages, but the buffers are not infinite. If you play a lot of highly compressed MP3s, the buffers can hold a long period of music, and that lets the network be a lot less important. In any discussion on streaming media and wireless networking, the state of the wireless network is important. Folk have posted in the forums that when neighbors get WiFi, their networks can stomp all over a previously nicely working WiFi setup, where nothing has changed inside your house. Sometimes you can just change WiFi channels and it gets better. But if you live, say, in an apartment of college kids, each of which has their own WiFi setup, you may find that there is just too much usage of the limited bandwidth in the 500 meters around you, and it just isn't going to work. -- Pat Farrell http://www.pfarrell.com/ _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
