Whole house A/V entertainment systems

In addition to designing and supporting computer data networks, I design and implement whole house entertainment systems. Many people do not understand what this is. Essentially, I utilize a combination of networking technologies to allow entertainment content stored somewhere in the house, to be available anywhere in the household. Whole house audio is the simplest form of this. Video can also be implemented.

Today, computer technology is driving the audio/video (A/V) world. A consequence of this shift in technology is that all media is becoming on-demand. Until the early 1980s, the A/V world was separate from the world of computers. Starting with Edison’s phonograph all home A/V was analog. The signal was continuous in both time and amplitude. In 1981, CDs became the first digital mass US consumer audio product using discrete bytes of information to recreate sound waves. CDs were followed by DVDs, which also use digital signals to reproduce sound and video. The development of the MP3 format for compressing analog or digital audio signals freed audio content from the optical disc and allowed easy copying and transportation of files. Additional digital audio and video codecs were also developed. For example, iTunes uses the AAC codec in its audio. Portable digital media players, such as the iPod, make these files transportable and can make them shareable. This is an on-demand model.

We are moving from a mixed published and on-demand entertainment model to predominately on-demand. Listening or watching content requires three items—content such as music, a player, and a terminal device to reproduce sound and/or video. Content can be stored locally either on media such as a CD, DVD or on a computer. It can be stored remotely, such as on the iTunes store server, the Amazon Unbox server or at a television network. Amazon and iTunes allow you to listen or watch on demand. Most television is still aired on the networks schedule, which I refer to as a published model.

Traditional home entertainment equipment, whether audio-only, video-only or mixed audio/video, are standalone systems. They may communicate with the outside world such as a television connected to a cable or satellite company or a radio grabbing broadcast signals. However, they do not communicate with other systems in the house. This means that if the music you want to listen to is stored on the office computer you have a hard time listening to it in the family room on the good speakers. There are many ways to solve this problem. You can burn the music files to a CD and then play them on the family room’s CD player. Alternatively, some people hook up their portable media players, such as an iPod, to their family room A/V receiver. These methods work but they are inelegant and require skills with which many people are uncomfortable.

A more modern and effective way to do this is to setup one computer in the house as a media server. It is connected to the various speakers and televisions in the household via a data network. This can be a wired Ethernet network or using any of the 802.11b, 802.11g, or 802.11n wireless protocols. This type of network requires an inexpensive router, which many households already own. It also requires devices connected to the speakers and televisions that access the content from the server and play it. One of the easiest ways to do this today is using computer gaming consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. Some digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo can also do this. Additionally, there are special purpose devices such as the Apple TV, media extenders sold by network gear manufacturers or the Sonos media system that also aid in implementing whole house entertainment.