The new super-duper stuff out there is wireless speakers using Bluetooth or AirPlay. Fine. Here’s my situation:
I have a rather large room with with a great video monitor, great side speakers, a nice center speaker and a very good sub-woofer. All 5 speakers are wired to my A/V receiver at the front of the room. The receiver is capable of providing surround sound to 7 speakers. I’m missing the two rear speakers that will give true surround sound.
My problem is that, due to the design of the room, it is impractical to run wires to the rear speakers. I would like to set them up to be wireless and still part of the sound system. Maybe I’m not reading things right but I don’t seem to be able to find the hardware that would let me do this. I don’t want to set all the speakers up to be wireless, just the rear speakers.
Unfortunately there are really no good solutions to this. Running wires is your best bet.
You can buy a kit to send the rear channel info wirelessly to the back of the room, but you still need to plug in the receiver at the back of the room for power and run wires from the receiver to the rear speakers. This may or may not be better than just running wires from the AVR.
Reviews for units that do this (Rocketfish, for example) are mixed at best.
ETA: Yeah, the Polk unit is really the only other one I know of. It’s more expensive, but includes the speaker not just the transmitter. Certainly an option to consider.
MVHO, based on 10+ years of screwing around with it, is that wireless for audio and video sucks.
I mean, for dorm/20something apartment use, if you’re a techie who likes to screw around with the fiddly bits and thinks a tech problem is an interesting alternative to the next scene of a movie… great. Lose the wires.
The rest of us… I just spent several messy and inconvenient hours drilling and pulling wire to put in a proper 5.1 speaker setup, and will never, ever have to put up with interference, loss of signal, batteries, pairing, addressing or the slightest interruption of anything I choose to sit and watch. (I also run ALL my video gear from wired networking, bypassing the wifi.)
You’d have to be sure that your A/V reciever has the discrete audio outputs for the rear channels and that they can be used in conjunction with the built-in amplification for the fronts. Those discrete audio outs used to be standard but a lot of recievers are dropping them as it’s somewhat pointless and most people do not use them.
Assuming you do have the discrete audio out for the rear and can use them in conjunction with the powered LCR you have to decide what level of quality the rear speakers are to be. That will determine if you have to get a seperate amp for them or get powered speakers. Two, how to bridge them to the front: dumb wireless (900 or 2.4), WiFi, or IR.
A quick search looks like you are locked into proprietary solutions. They’ll take in your audio, put it over your WiFi, and then your same or approved brancd of speaker will be able to stream the audio. Hmm.
Got the Rocketfish - works just fine for a basement set up - I wouldn’t compare it to seeing Gravity on IMAX, but to simply create that 3D soundspace designed by the sound editors for a given movie, they work great.
I have this Polk Wireless setup in my living room. Amazon sells is it for about $100 less and you can probably buy one cheaper than that if you search around.
The system uses a unit that plugs into the receiver’s rear channel outputs and then sends that wirelessly to a separate back unit. Note that this setup uses a single back speaker unit that throws the back left and right channels horizontally. It works best if you can position the unit in the back where it has equidistant side walls to hit. Since most home theater seating has a couch or chairs in the back of the room the back unit hides real well behind them. The back unit needs to plug into a power outlet. It turns itself on and off by listening to the sending unit at the AV receiver.
There are other setups out there and I’m not endorsing the Polk so much as explaining how the system works. The Polk, while being a decent fix, also has occasional issues with popping and the single unit setup won’t work if you’d rather position two speakers in the corners instead of one in the middle back.