I’ve been in the market for wireless audio-visual transmission equipment for about a month, since my good speakers are now living next to the TV so we can listen to Wii, DVD and TV sound through them. The computer with music on it is tied to another part of the house by the modem location and I’m well over the era of running cables all over my house.
For the benefit of people thinking of suggesting a product, what I’m looking for is not anything that requires software to run on the computer itself. Instead, I’m looking for something that takes the soundcard output — ie probably just RCA plugs — transmits it over radio and which has a receiver that I can sit near the speakers which will feed out sound via RCA. That way I have fairly good future-proofness: the wireless sound is entirely independent of the operating system I’m running and the origin of the sound it’s transmitting, it just transmits to the speakers anything I can feed to my soundcard.
However, we found such a thing today, and I must say: DO NOT BUY the Cocoon Wireless AV systems being widely sold in Dick Smith Electronics. The diagram on the back may well have a brick wall between sender and receiver, but we managed to get significant interference just by putting me between the sender and receiver. In addition, 802.11 wireless networks interfere quite strongly, to the point where Andrew started sending pings over the network and could hear the related interference. (They’re listed as interfering in the troubleshooting guide too, without a solution, just a mention that you might want to consider turning your network off to eliminate possible interference.)
Unfortunately, well, in a way, Dick Smith was very ready to do a full refund of something I’d only owned for an hour, because I was all ready to tell them this story, but they cut me off when the hand gestures started, and wrote down ‘DOES NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED’.