In alt.home.repair on 01 Feb 2005 18:11:54 GMT
(Greg) posted:

Does anyone sell wireless
speaker kits so that I can avoid running wire to the dining room speakers?

Ron
Hi,
Radio shack.

They sell the RCA. I have some and they sound OK, not "audiophile OK" but OK.
One problem is you have to turn them off when you turn the stereo off.
Otherwise they will hum, crackle and pop searching for a signal.

That's what I have. I'm sure they are not audiophile quality (But I
don't have a good ear, I don't pay attention, and I listen mostly to
news and talk radio, where I don't even need stereo.)

I bought two pair at some sort of discount store. One of the first
pair and one of the second pair worked fine, so I re-paired them and
took two back. The seller said he knew about the problem and gave me,
no exchange needed, a 3rd transmitter (from a different brand). That
works with all 4 speakers (and makes me think I should have tested the
second original transmitter. I had assumed the problem was the 2
speakers.)

I intended the speakers for listening to web-radio**. I have the
computer in my office/spare bedroom, and one speaker in my bathroom,
one in my personal bedroom, one in the kitchen, and one in the
basement. I plan to move one outside in the summer. I can go from one
room to the other, hearing the same station everywhere (I don't even
have the computer on cable, but often it works even with a 24K dial-up
connection. OTOH sometimes it won't work with a 53K connection.
Apparently it is more complicated than just connection speed.)

This also has the added advantage that when I'm expecting someone to
Instant Message me, I can go downstairs and it beeps out of the remote
speaker. Also when Buzme rings, I hear it from the remote speaker.

If I had it to do over, when I ran my coax to almost every room for
the cable tv, and also phone lines to the bathrooms and attic and some
other places, and burglar alarm wires -- I ran all those -- I would
have also run speaker wires, TV audio and video cables, s-video wires
(which didn't exist then), and I think there are now a couple other
kinds of wires I don't even know about that I would run if I could do
it over.

It's hard, especially going from the basement straight to the attic,
to add more later. I started with one wire twice as long as needed,
and used it to pull the others through. Now that wire is all in place
and attached to something at the end. It was very hard to drill the
hole through the 2nd floor within the "stack". I had to put in a
partial attic floor, lie face down and use the 2 feet of my arm, the 6
foot drill bit (which was getting dull by now, and my attmepts to
sharpen were not successful) and I still needed a one foot extension
to reach the floor and start drilling. In this case the flexibility
of the bit was not an advantage. Maybe I should have bought 6 more
one foot extensions. They would have been stiff.

But it was well worth all the effort to do this.

And the flat paintable tape someone suggested would also be better
than wireless.

**Weren't they supposed to sell dedicated web-radios by now or a year
ago? I haven't seen any.

If you have a one story house, you chould consider hard-wiring the
speakers through the attic. When you're in the attic, if it has no or
a movable floor, you can see the tops of your walls downstairs.
That's what I did for speakers in my bedroom. (The major problem there
was not wiring the speakers, which was easy, but it was that the
stereo was next to the outside wall (The odds are this doesn't apply
to you but I mention it in case, and the roof was only 6 inches high
at that point in the attic. I tried for hours to get it, drilled
through the outside wall once (fortunately brown caulk exactly matches
the color of my house (and hasn't shrunk or come loose from the
half-inch hole in 15 years!) and I ended up drilling on purpose
through the ceiling right by the wall and then going into the wall. I
still have to cut a notch and then spackle so the wires can't be
seen.)

The small problem of going from the attic to holesin the wall was
that in one case (a phone jack) I needed a second person to fish out
the wire while I was in the attic moving it. But usually I was able to
look down the hole in the top plate of the wall, and see the light
coming in the hole in the wall sheetrock.

Get an electronic studfinder. They are great!!! About 100 times as
good as a pivoting magnet studfinder.

If you have a multi-story house and your dining room is on the first
floor, they sell (at burglar alarm stores, and maybe now at Home
Depot) 6-foot flexible drill bits. You cut a hole in the wall and
insert the drill bit down to the floor and drill into the basement.
(Well, that might be hard to do only a foot or so below the ceiling.
The bit bends but still takes a foot or two to make a 90 degree turn.
Also, there is probably a fire stop half-way down the wall that you'd
have to go through. When I drilled down from wall switch boxes, I
never bumped into a fire stop.

Meirman
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