Brian's Brain

Several weeks ago, I asked you all for recommendations on wireless transmitter and receiver (the latter also with a two-channel amplifier) setups that'd enable me to broadcast high-fidelity audio sans wires to a set of rear surround speakers. Based on a recommendation in the comments, I went ahead and tracked down a Rocketfish wireless speaker kit (Rocketfish appears to be a Best Buy 'house' brand, as the setup seems to be only available for purchase there and the press relations contact information is identical to that for Best Buy).

Good news first; the Rocketfish gear is brain-dead easy to set up. You wire the rear surround channels' line level signals into the diminutive transmitter, which also requires a tiny AC-to-DC 'wall wart'. The larger receiver contains its own AC cord and offers volume control; you connect the rear channel speakers to it. In my setup, the transmitter and receiver are about 8 feet apart, but in-between them is a slipcloth-covered leather couch which blocks line-of-sight proximity. Nevertheless, they powered up and found each other almost immediately; they come pre-paired from the factory. Any front-to-rear channel delay caused by the wireless intermediary was undetectable by either my wife or I, although I should clarify that so far we've only watched one movie (which made sparing use of the rear surrounds for effects) on the setup; I haven't yet done any critical listening tests of surround music, for example.

Now the bad news. As soon as I powered up the Rocketfish transmitter, I noticed significant impairment of the 2.4 GHz 802.11g link connecting my laptop and router, as another prior commenter had suggested (and as I'd suspected) might occur. The degradation is of a form that I've never seen before; my laptop indicates no decrease in Wi-Fi signal strength coming from the router, yet significant packet loss still occurs. Rocketfish's documentation doesn't indicate which portion of the 2.4 GHz band its product uses; when I've encountered situations like this in the past (cordless phones, etc), I've assumed that the offending device's signal is strongest at the center of the band (i.e. at channel 6). Indeed, by reconfiguring my router from channel 6 to channel 11, I've been able to restore reasonably solid Wi-Fi connectivity....except when I'm sitting on the couch, directly in front of the Rocketfish transmitter, where it appears to corrupt the entire 2.4 GHz band.

Since I don't normally surf the 'net while watching movies ;-), I can get around the problem by turning off the Rocketfish gear when I'm not using it. However, I've also got an Amphony model 1520 wireless transmitter/receiver set on the way. Since it employs the 5.8 GHz band which nothing else in this house is using (my cordless phones are 900 Mhz models, for perhaps obvious reasons!), and given my positive past-published experience with the company's 5.8 GHz wireless headphones, I suspect Amphony may be the preferable long-term solution. I'll report back after I've had a chance to hook 'em up.

Back in 2002, I grumbled about spectrum interference, a problem compounded by consumers' understandable ignorance of the issue and of the available options for fixing it. Some things, I guess, never change.