Multiroom Audio

Squeezeboxes were covered here several times. But they are worth another story, as I have just installed a second one. And it is a fantastic synchronized experience. Multiroom audio distribution has been my favorite hobby for years. But it has never been fully solved, until recently. My first multiroom system was set up in 1993. It was all about the idea of having one centralized music source and being able to play it in every room in a house and being able to control it from every room in a house. So I gathered a couple of Sony 300-CD carousel changers (fortunately it was possible to cascade a couple of them), a good multi-input / multi-output sound processing preamplifier (TA-E200oESD, a masterpiece at that time, with full digital signal path inside) and a bunch of power amplifiers, one for each room. Then the house was wired with long (and very expensive) high quality speaker cables. With this setup I was able to have speakers in (almost) every room playing the music stored on several hundred CDs. The Sony changers had TV output, so actually I could see on a TV screen the GUI interface used to navigate the CD library. Then was the control problem, solved by placing a number of wireless infrared extenders (a bunch IR sensors / transmitters and one receiver / beamer controlling the audio center). It worked. But the amount of work required to set the whole thing up was enormous and still navigating the CD library from other rooms was difficult. And the system had one compulsory feature - it was virtually impossible to play different music in separate rooms, as the entire content path, from a CD via the preamplifier was single - lane. The player could not play two CDs simultaneously.

Now back to the Squeezeboxes. A Squeezebox is a digital network player. This means it gets the music content over IP network (wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11b/g). It is operated by a standard remote controller and has a couple of audio outputs (standard line out, headphones, digital coax, digital optical). So all you need is an amplifier and a pair of speakers and you are all set. The music source can be an Internet radio station (like the Pandora). Or it can be a local server, a PC or a Mac running the Slimserver software. The Slimserver even used to run on a network attached storage devices like the NSLU2 (a "slug"). Slimserver has many nice features working in tandem with Squeezeboxes. Normally each Squeezebox works independently. This means you turn each and every of them individually and you control them individually. Is is perfectly natural when you have just one Squeezebox. But when you get a second one, sometimes you miss the feature of having them both "in sync", playing exactly the same synchronized music, when moving from one room to another. Actually this is one nice feature of the Slimserver software. It enables you to group together a couple of players. Once done, the music can be controlled from each player (the other players react in sync), the only feature that works independently is volume control. And of course you can group / ungroup / regroup the players on the fly (from a Web interface or using a remote controller). That is really how multiroom system should work.

So instead of having a complicated and limited system, there finally is a clean architecture to handle multiroom sound systems. Instead of miles of cables there is a WiFi cloud covering the music library server (in a basement) and all players (in rooms). Rooms can be synchronized or independent, setup and especially using the system is very simple and intuitive.

And finally, although the Squeezebox itself is a very nice looking gadget, I have been able to mod it a little to match my rustic house :) (see the photo).