For long time my dream was to be able to listen music in any room of my flat. In the living room, in my room, in the kitchen and so on... You got the idea ;-)

There some high end HI-FI solutions from people like Bose but the price of this is just insane.

As I sold my soul to Apple several year ago, I build a similar system using Apple devices only. Even if the price is not cheap we are far from dedicated system price.

Here is the solution I put in place:

The main piece of the system is first an Apple TV. This device is able to play music, photos, videos on you TV, but no real need of the TV here.

First you have to put all your music files on the Apple TV thanks to the very popular iTunes (this is a joke, iTunes is not popular)

Then for each room you have to purchase one Airport Express plug and a stereo speaker system like this:

http://www.materiel.net/ctl/Hautparleurs/42942-XPS_2_0_60.html

The Airport Express is in fact a Wifi access point able to plug a computer to access WiFi netwrok or share a printer. There is also an audio jack plug where you plug the Stereo speaker system.

You do this for each room. The cost is around 150 euros between speakers and Airport Express.

When this is done in each room you want to listen music, you go to a computer to configure the Airport Express plugs. Is quite easy and you mainly have to give a name to each device like "Kitchen" or "Living Room".

But what interest of this system if you have to go back to you living room and use the Apple TV remote to change music.

It's where the magic happen with your ipod or iphone. You have to download Apple Remote application. This application will allow you to browse all music on your Apple TV and control everything: choose artist, album, control volume, launch genius playlist, pause music AND choose the speakers/rooms you want to activate.

So with the app you can enable kitchen and disable other rooms. You can activate all the rooms if you want. You do what you want. The only limitation is that you have to listen the same thing in all rooms if you selected several rooms. There is only one stream of music managed.

When several rooms are selected the music in synchronized perfectly between the different locations. I explain this because I tested in the past very expensive systems that where not able to synchronize music what is really bad. Imagine moving from one room to another and have a delay of 1 or 2 second in your music. Just useless and painful.

This is the full story.

It works really fine and I really enjoy this system. If you have questions let me know.

Cheers

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