Wi-Fi Hi-Fi

[Righ]

At my previous apartment, I had my Mac connected to my my stereo using a Linksys WRT54G router and Airport Express. The Airport Express was simply wired to the Linksys, and apart from providing a means to stream music wirelessly, also provided a second network on another channel for robustness.

I've since moved to a large town house, and my server with all its music lives upstairs in my office. The cable modem and Linksys are next door in the upstairs hall. My hi-fi is in the living room downstairs. So, I plugged the Airport Express into my hi-fi, reconfigured it to be a WDS slave router on the same network as the Linksys, and told the Linksys that it is a WDS slave. Despite my best efforts, while it would serve the hi-fi to the Linksys network in this mode and even allow local clients to connect, the local clients were not DHCP configured properly, either in local configuration or from the Linksys. So, WDS the music, and join the upstairs network, not ideal, but should be workable.

What I want to do is sit with my new MacBook downstairs, mount the server disk and play the music via the Linksys/Airport to my component stereo. I was getting lots of audio dropouts during play with this. I decided to simplify things and just play from the laptop without mounting the server music. I figured that the best thing to do was to create a more robust WDS network between two routers on different floors, and connect the Airport Express back with ethernet, which is seems to be happier with. I bought a new Linksys for $50 at Best Buy, but discovered that Cisco have downgraded the device in versions 5 & 6, and it now runs VXworks rather than Linux, has a fraction of the memory, and is as stable as a three legged table.

So...

I'm going to find another Wireless router that ideally does WDS natively, or that can be flashed with DD-WRT to upgrade it to one that can. If wiring the Airport Express using ethernet doesn't give me back stability, I'm going to look for another network audio product, although I don't see any that use WDS, which would be ideal (though putting a wireless router in the hi-fi rack and next to the network audio device isn't out of the question).

Does anybody have experiences with network audio products, WDS bridging, etc to share?

[Sky]

Use an airport :) WDS is easy-cheesy. I've got two bridged here. Wired router > Airport base router > Airport remote router.

[Hanzii]

While the Airport is nice, I like to have a display and don'y use the printer server functionality.

I use the Squeezebox V3 with a Netgear g router - it's brilliant (and offers better hi-fi than the little Mac thingie)
If I had the money I might consider the Sonos Music System. It looks way better, offers better sound quality but not as much functionality as the Squeezebox - but the remote is kickass. I've tried both as well as the Airport and a number of other music streamers - those two are the best money can buy.

Most of the new MIMO routers have built in QoS and great coverage - again Netgear is the best we have tested.

[Righ]

Okay, I updated the old Linksys WRT54G from Sveasoft firmware to a current version of DD-WRT, which has a better WDS implementation. I'm happier with the Sveasoft gone - the way they danced around the GPL by only making old, buggy versions of their software public was atrocious. DD-WRT is a solid implementation of the Linux wireless code and I wish I had discovered it sooner.

I bought a $50 Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S, which hasn't had its memory stripped down (unlike the Linksys products) and will also run DD-WRT (and other open source firmware). Since the Buffalo firmware includes WDS, I decided to see if their implementation would play ball with DD-WRT first. It does, so I haven't flashed the firmware on this one yet. I may not - we'll see how it goes. So now I have upstairs and downstairs access points connected by wireless.

I connected the Airport Express to the Buffalo box by ethernet, since next to the stereo was a good enough place for the downstairs wireless router anyhow. I have streaming audio in my living room again. File server is upstairs with the music on it, laptop, with controller is downstairs on the other access point, and it all works fine.

Of course, if it hadn't worked, I would have had to have found something other than Airport Express, so I had to check the market. There are some much nicer toys out there with better DACs, and hence better sound. Cheap solution found, I can add one of these to my wish list:

Slim Devices Transporter.

Below that, there's a wealth of devices...

Sonos Zoneplayer.
Slim Devices Squeezebox.
TerraTec Noxon 2.
Roku Soundbridge.

And a bunch of stuff from SMC, Philips, Linksys and Creative that's basically on par with the Apple product.

Anyhow, since I'm putting a WDS router downstairs near the hi-fi, I don't need wireless in the network audio device any more. You'd think that would increase the options dramatically, but it doesn't. I can see myself getting one of the less expensive improvements over the Airport Express some time reasonably soon. Doubt I'll go for a Transporter - one of my friends in Britain is making something truly audiophile and networked (and under NDA), so I'll wait for that. Maybe he'll give me one at cost.