Anyone stumbling into a Best Buy looking for some sort of wireless speaker solution has probably been ushered over to the
Rocketfish section, but up until now, only a few devices have been available. Now, the Best Buy staple is introducing an all-encompassing system that aims to cut the (speaker) cable to all of your speakers. The wireless whole home audio system, which is obviously only available at the yellow-tagged retailer, is comprised of a Wireless Amplified Audio Receiver, a Wireless Sender / Receiver, a Wireless Outdoor Speaker and a Wireless HD Audio Starter Kit, which includes both a sender and receiver. The whole rig is designed to work with standard connections for speaker line and line level inputs, so most any speaker assortment should play nice. All told, the devices combined can send up to five sources to nine receivers throughout the home, but not surprisingly, there's no mention made of the presumably lofty price tag.
posted Oct 23rd 2009 12:53PM
Clicking through the links you actually get sent to the BestBuy.com site for this - and amazingly this system looks pretty inexpensive (under $200 for the basic package). I may have to go check this out in the store, and hopefully they'll have something setup so I can hear the audio quality.
This is the link on the businesswire.com story that you should look for: www.bestbuy.com/rocketboost
I'm pretty excited about this, especially considering that they've manage a decent price on these products. Obviously, copper wire is cheaper (but, you'll still need to spend $$ on an amp), but
Am I missing something? You seem to need speaker wires for all of these products? How exactly is this cutting the speaker wire then Engadget?
Good question -- yes, you are missing something.
What good is cutting the cord the signal is on if you still have to supply POWER by cord? Oops, I guess cowsumers (see Mark and Marshall above) will find this useful, but since a cord, or two, is already being run then I must be missing something.
You're missing the whole point of wireless speakers. People want everything to be wireless but it's simply not viable yet. You still have to power the speakers somehow, whether it be using batteries, plugging into an outlet, or in this case, powering the two speakers via one wireless amplifying/reciever, which is the most cost effective. On top of that, the whole point of this device is so that you don't have to hack holes in your home to have audio zones you can listen to from your multizone amplifier.
Hardly cowsumers there GhostDoggy. Your ignorance is showing.
I've been using the RocketFish wireless surround setup for two years and it works well. Occasionally I will find that the wireless connection gets dropped between the base and the connector, but rarely. It handles the fully uncompressed PCM/DD True HD/DTS-MA audio tracks of Blu-ray without issue.
The format of the audio source doesn't matter --- it's analog to the device.
I have one of their products to wirelessly transmit audio to my rear surround speakers and it works pretty well. As some have mentioned, in the end you have more cables than if I had run them straight from the receiver, but at least this way they don't go across my living room (a no go with the wife). Since the rear speakers are mainly just for filling in with the sfx this solution works fine. I wouldn't use it for primary speakers though since the little receiver/amp would'nt have enough power to run them well.
These cable/sat and phone companies need to stop including premium and VOD channels in there HD count.
Tell everyone how much HD channels you get that you DON'T HAVE TO PAY EXTRA FOR...