Falling in Love with your Music All Over Again

My family and I have recently realized that our multi-room system has made us fall in love with our music and movies all over again. CDs that I haven’t heard in 5-10 years, because they were in a box somewhere in the garage, now appear on my list of hundred of CDs and I am rediscovering them all over again. You name the genre, and we probably have it.

The same is happening with our movies. One point of caution though… once you go High Definition (my preference is Blu-ray… more on this in another post), you’ll never want to watch anything else. Well….never is probably too strong of a word. But I will say this, “When we watch DVDs that are in SD (Standard Definition) now, the different between them and HD is obvious to us; even our 10 year old daughter recently said “Daddy, that’s not Blu-ray® right?”, the last time we watched an standard definition DVD movie, and she was right. But…I’ll talk about video and our video distribution in my next post.

The audio distribution in our IP home was accomplished though a NetStreams®’ IP-Based DigiLinX™ system which offers an amazing and very satisfying performance. Instead of brute forcing analog audio signals through long runs of big cables around our home, which causes the audio to degrade over distance, picking up noise and distortion along the way, DigiLinX uses our home’s network to distribute a virtually unlimited number of digital IP streams from our audio sources, to any room(s) or groups of rooms, of choice. The quality of the audio is very impressive and it is largely due to the fact that NetStreams’ StreamNet™ technology reproduced the audio, bit-for-bit, exactly how it comes out of the source component; so the better the source and source content, the better the audio will sound. I should mention that the side other of great audio is having great speakers. In my case, I am using Polk Audio speakers.

Sources:
I used to think that our XM Radio source, which receives compressed audio, sounded pretty good, and even better than our MP-3 music files, but now that we have compared it to the music content that we have stored in WAV (uncompressed audio format), on our NAS (Networked Attached Storage), the difference is amazing. Our WAV files sound great and equal to the quality of music that comes out of our high-end CD player, directly. The reason this is that WAV is the format that music is natively stored in, on all CDs. We still listen to our XM Radio stations, for songs and artists that we don’t have music for in our NAS, but our best sounding source is now our NAS, which delivers WAV audio streams.

To organize all of the MP-3 and WAV music found in our PCs and network attached storage, we installed another NetStreams product called “Streaming Music Manager”, which simply plugs into the home network. This product then locates all of our music stored on PCs, MACs, networked attached storage, and other computing devices around our home, and aggregates the music into one list of Songs, Artists, Album, Genre, and Playlists, for easy playback. Now we don’t have to remember where the music is stored. It doesn’t matter. We can also choose any of the individual computing device where some of our music is stored, for playback.

Another cool source that we have is our iPod®. To select, control and listen to the music stored in our iPods, we use an in-wall docking station called iPort, made by a company called iPort™ – a Sonance® company. Our friends like to bring their iPods over, dock them in our iPort, and play their music around the house. People find this way cool!

For local only radio stations and sporting events, we also have a Parasound® FM tuner, whose audio is also distributed and controlled from any room in our house.

And finally, we also distribute the audio from our (3) satellite boxes, located in our equipment rack in the theater.

How our NetStreams DigiLinX system works:
There are two methods to accomplish multi-room audio distribution. The first and more traditional method is to distribute the audio from centrally located amplifiers. The downside to this method is that the audio is pushed up to its destination through copper cables that allow the audio to pick up noise and distortion along the way, and also losing a significant amount of the power produced by the amplifier(s). This results in a lower performance. The other method is distributed amplification. In a distributed amplification system, the amplifiers are placed in each audio zone or at the speaker. The closer the amplifiers are to the speaker, the less power will be lost and the less audio noise and distortion will be developed. This is the method that that NetStreams DigiLinX system uses.

In our home we have about 20 distributed audio zones; each capable of playing music from any of the audio sources that we have configured to play in that room. The wiring from each zone where we have installed a SpeakerLinX IP-Based amplifier, to the ’head-end’ (the place/rack where our equipment is centrally located), is CAT 5e + 14-4 (4-conductors of #14 gauge), which is the industry standard for distributed audio – CEA 2030.

In my home I used two types of SpeakerLinX IP-Based amplifiers, available from NetStreams. The SL220 is a 20 watt per channel amplifier and I used these in our smaller audio zones. In the larger audio zones I used the SL250 amplifiers, which are 50 watts per channel.

Each SpeakerLinX amplifier, typically installed in a closet or behind furniture in the audio zones, fits in a backless 2-gang electrical box (installed at electrical outlet height) and is covered with a ribbed plastic plate (available in various colors). Like all amplifiers, they do get a little warm, but are designed and UL approved for installation in walls, but can also be mounted on walls with an optional mounting plate. The small footprint makes it an easy and convenient installation. The CAT 5e cable digitally deliverers the IP streams to the amplifiers and the 4-conductor cable is used to power the amplifiers from a central power supply located at the rack. Where a central power supply is not possible, local power supplies can be used instead. In addition to the latter connections, the audio zone’s speakers are also connected to the SpeakerLinX IP amplifier and after software configuration, the zone is ready to play audio.

I saved the best for last. NetStreams is very proud to be the pioneer of IP speaker technology and to have partnered up with Polk Audio to produce the world’s first IP speakers. Of course you know that as a ‘Toywizard’, I had to have a few pairs of these IP speakers. I had one pair installed in our living room, one pair in my home office, a pair in the Master Suite, and (6) pair in my home theater. All I am say about the audio that comes out of these speakers is “awesome”! You have to experience these for yourself; simply incredible.

Aside from the incredible audio performance that NetStreams technology and products offers, the thing that my family and I enjoy the most is the simplicity of the DigiLinX’s intuitive interface, and the rich experience that that it delivers. As I complete this Blog post, I am sitting in my backyard, listening to some great music, and I am selecting and controlling that music from my laptop.


Cheers!

Herman Cardenas


If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com