So with the newest and final configuration of our family room nearly complete I want to set up a surround sound home theatre, but I don’t want to snake Monster cable all over the floor. Is there a home theatre package that is totally wireless, at least as far as the speaker units are concerned? My Google Fu is weak and beset by adverts, none of which actually say if the product is wireless or not.
I don’t think so. I have a system that is considered ‘wireless,’ but in fact only the rear two speakers are - the left, right, and center channels are all wired. There are adapters you can get to make speakers wireless, though, so I suppose you could have more if you wanted to.
I don’t think I’d want a completely wireless system. The sound would not be very good.
These Guys seem to have it together regarding wireless, still if you’re extra finicky about your sound, just do the cables.
If you’re looking for cheap though, these ain’t.
If you have the bucks, take a look at some of the “virtual surround” devices. They resemble a center channel speaker, and are positioned similarly, but typically have dozens of tiny speakers that mate up with some digital sound processing to produce the efect of a normal wired setup.
Oh, and don’t waste your money on Monster.
Wouldn’t it imply that all wireless speakers are either self-powered, or the wireless reciever is an amplifier. In other words you’d still need to plug an AC cord into the wall for every speaker.
Yes, that’s the sneaky little* GOTCHA!* for wireless speakers. They still have wires, so unless you have electric outlets where you want to hang the speakers, there will still be wires coming off of them.
Unless you’re living where you can run the wires behind the wall (or under the carpet, along the moulding), you’ll have some kind of wires.
We’ve had (for years) a Sony surround sound system that used IR to talk to the back of the room. The end result was:
“Hmmph, wonder how long the back speakers haven’t been working?”
And it’s a cop-out, not only deid we have an AC plug to power the back channel, there was a wire going from one back speaker to the other.
(Non monster) wire is cheap, you’re replacing a cheap, good thing (wire can carry a lot of power and signal), with an expensive, not so good thing(Wireless radio/IR)
So, tell us about your environment…is it a home you’ll be living in, or a rental appt?
It’s my townhouse, so we own it. Here’s the deal. Currently we have a monster sized rear projection big screen, and while it works just fine, it squats in the room and just inhales floor space, which is at a premium. One of the walls has the fireplace/“nook” thing going on, nook meaning that enclosed space that’s meant for a television, but really can’t hold a flat screen. We removed one of the walls of the nook so that it’s a much larger open space and we’ll be putting a flat screen in there so that we can have as much floor space as possible. The home is not wired for surround sound, so that’s why I was hoping for a wireless solution so as to minimize the amount of wire snaking around the room.
I looked at one of these. Neat, but pricey.
How do you like it? That might be just the thing. How tall is it? If a flatscreen was mounted on a stand as opposed to the wall, would this fit underneath it?
I just looked at it, didn’t buy it - too pricey. And it may be too tall to put in front of a stand-mounted flat screen - it would be for ours, which was another drawback, though of course that can be changed. YMMV. Here’s the specs.
I see Amazonhas that speaker set for $845.
Why don’t you look at running Invisible Wire? I saw this at CES a couple of years ago, and since you can paint and spakle over it, it really does blend totally into the wall. Sure it costs a lot more than regular speaker wire, but I’m betting it cost less than trying to get a set of wireless rear speakers that are actually worth a damn.
Hey now, flat speaker wire looks like a good option too. I’m not worried about the cash, I just want to be happy with the solution. That opens up a whole new world of options.
Do you have a basement? I ran wires down into the basement, same hole as the cable, along the heating ducts, up past the ducts then under the couch. Didn’t see any wires at all until the speakers. I also did this in another house except I ran the wires out of an electrical outlet.
Then I took everything down because the baby started playing with the wires. But she would have done that no matter how I ran the wires.
No, no real basement to speak of. The house sits on top of the garage, and while there is a storage space where the furnace etc. are it’s not in the right area to use.
I have had two systems with “wireless” rear speakers (the speakers still had a wire from the reciever/amp to the speakers themselves, and the reciever amp had to plug in)
A Samsung home-theatre-in-a-box that used radio frequency to transmit the sound to the rear speakers. This worked ok but was fairly unreliable as it tended to lose contact with the rear speakers every so often (and would shut off all the sound and display REAR CHK until the connection was re-estabilshed) for a second or two, and sometimes the rear speakers got way out of sync and would have an echo effect. My cordless phones didn’t interfere with it, but it seemed like the 802.11b/g network did on occasion.
A lightning storm destroyed that system, so I replaced it with a Sony HTIB that uses the infrared. This works great and has better sound than the radio version did, but it can be tricky setting the transmitter and receiver up for line-of-sight. Luckily, we can set the transmitter up fairly high, and it transmits in a decently wide arc, so it works ok as long as no one is standing right in front of it. If the beam is interfered with, we just get no sound from the rear channel, but the front channels chug along contentedly.