For some time now, I’ve had an issue with music around the house. I’ve never really found a decent way to enjoy my networked music. Here’s the situation..
- Cat5 network around the house
- Wireless available around the house
- NAS drive with music (UPNP enabled)
So – how to be in any room and listen to the music. I’ve looked at several options, but all require fairly significant investment. The response to all these is, “for the next house…”. So for this house, we need a temporary / cheapish solution.
Netgear MP101
I had one of these for a while and it worked nicely. It’s wireless, but way too slow for my liking and (as I remember) you had to have some media server running on a PC for it to work. Even when on the wired network it wasn’t terribly fast.
Browsing for artists and albums wasn’t great either. It was clunky and the response time from the remote was too slow.
So it was ebayed. Pretty sure I got a good price for it! 
The current solution
I bought a few Veho wireless speakers. These are truly brilliant and are reasonably cheap (around £45 for a speaker with transmitter and £30 per speaker thereafter).
You plug the USB transmitter in to the PC/Mac you want to broadcast the music from (in my case it’s running my jukebox), then simply turn on as many speakers as you want. They connect and play the music. Each speaker has it’s own power source (rechargeable batter) and volume control.
The only downside is the actual quality of the sound. They are fine for background sound, but they have no life when turned right up, producing a rather tinny sound.
It got me thinking…. surely the internal parts can be ripped out and I can hook up to bigger speakers? The simple answer is YES. It does work. I wrote it up on my other site: http://www.touchscreenjukeboxes.co.uk/modified-veho-wireless-speakers
The future
I’d love to have speakers wired to the Cat5 sockets which can be controlled BY room. Ideally controlled by iPhone or iPad. I’d like click on a room then select which music I want to listen to in that room. I know there are solutions out there which do this…. I just need to save the cash!!
